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"WHEN THE SON OF MAN COMES in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left" (Matt 25:31-33).
In discussions of the grand judgment scene of Matt 25:31-46, much attention has been focused on the question of the identity of panta ta ethne gathered for judgment before the Son of Man (v 32) and of those whom the king calls hoi adelphoi mou hoi elachistoi whose treatment is the criterion by which judgment is rendered (v 40).1 By comparison, there have been few attempts to elucidate the force of the image of sheep and goats in w 32-33. This neglect is justified if one accords the image only a limited role in the scene, that, namely, of underscoring the unerring accuracy and certainty of the eschatological judge's division, with no further significance for the balance of the pericope.2 However, a larger role for the image is suggested by two factors: (I) the reification of the defendants as sheep and goats in v 33, intensifying their identification beyond the simple simile of v 32 when more neutral expressions are readily available (e.g., kai stesei tinas men ek dexion autou, tinas de ex euonymon), and (2) the existence of possible correlations between the image of sheep and goats and the broader Matthean literary context. Significantly, there are two contrasting candidates for such a correlation.
The first candidate is a series of improper mixtures that appear in some earlier Matthean references to eschatological judgment. These mixtures clearly cry out for the remedy of separation: wheat and chaff (3:12), wheat and weeds (13:24-30), and good and useless fish (13:47-50).3 Even a late twentiethcentury North American audience can easily understand the negative connotation ancient audiences might be expected to find in chaff, weeds, and useless fish. The challenge is to discover something similarly negative about goats that would make their eschatological condemnation seem proper, and even inevitable, to the Gospel's anticipated audience. This challenge has been taken up in this century by such scholars...