Verse 13: Not long after that, the younger son packed up everything he owned and left for a foreign country, where he wasted all his money in wild living.

The younger son makes the insult worse.  It was bad enough that the younger son wanted to make use of his inheritance.  The expectation was that he might take the fields that were given to him and work them and use the income from them for his own purposes.  But now he inflicts a worse insult on the family.  His actions in packing up and leaving indicate that he sold whatever property he was given (he can't move land), converting it into cash.  The land that has probably been in the family for generations, land with which the family has formed a deep bond is now sold off to some other family.  These people are tied to the land, it is part of their identity.  The father (and mother) had plans for their children, and now it looks like an irreparable breach has been created.  But there is more.

The younger son now leaves the land of his ancestors to emigrate.  He turns his back not only on his family's past, but also its future.  He doesn't want to be in the place where his ancestors are buried.  He will not raise up a family to take over the land after he is gone.  But there is more.

In leaving for a foreign country, he is going outside of the land of the Jews.  This is made more likely by the fact that we'll discover there are pig farmers there.  He is now cut off from not only his own family, but his own people.  If the younger son has acted like his father was dead, he now makes himself dead to his own family - and we'll see the father make reference to that later.

Where is the elder son?  This is a story where the absence of a character can often mean as much as the actions of those who are present.  A scholar named Baily (see the reference center for his work) has pointed out that in a family dispute in this (and other) cultures we expect the elder son to act as mediator.  He should engage in some "shuttle diplomacy" going back and forth between his father and his brother.  He would be telling the father, "just say calm, don't do anything rash, I know he's being outrageous, I'll get my brother to see reason, just give me some time" and telling the brother, "come on, think about what you are doing, if you've got problems, we can talk about it."  He would negotiate the terms of a truce allowing both to climb down from their positions without more loss of face than necessary. 

We might think that they should all be together in a room, and probably shouting at each other, but that isn't the way it should be done in this culture.  The absence of the elder brother speaks loudly: there is already a breach in the family.  The elder son is lost also.  As the parable unfolds, we will see just how lost he is.

Digging deeper

·        Greek text of the verse

ai. metV ouv polla.j h`me,raj sunagagw.n pa,nta o` new,teroj ui`o.j avpedh,mhsen eivj cw,ran makra,n kai. evkei/ diesko,rpisen th.n ouvsi,an auvtou/ zw/n avsw,twjÅ

In Greek, there is a nice twist.  In the first part of the verse, the younger son "gathered" (unagagw.n ) his things.  Then, he literally "scatters" (diesko,rpisen) his possessions in dissolute living.  In both he has done the reverse of what is proper.  He should have gathered by building up the family's estate, and then scattered in investing in the future.

·        What exactly did the younger son do?  Popular treatments of this verse show him with prostitutes, or often imply he was living in a sexually immoral way.  This may because that is what his elder brother accuses him of doing (in verse 30).  But how would the elder son have known?  The word in Greek is only used this one time in the Bible, just here and no place else.  From looking at how authors outside the Bible use it, it appears that it simply means "dissolute" or "wild" without implying anything specifically sexual (not that it is ruled out either).

·        Collective honor.  Consider Proverbs 28.7.  While we still feel some shame if a member of our family causes a problem, we don't have a collective sense of shame as strongly in the United States as do some other cultures and this culture of the Ancient Near East.  To have the son do this, shames the entire family in the eyes of all in the village.  More on honor and shame is found in the overview section.