Nearly 40 years ago, if you asked a Hebrew Bible scholar to define the word “parable,” he or she would have most likely replied that it is a genre designation for a type of short story and that it comes from the biblical Hebrew word mashal (plural form: meshalim). He or she would have cited the story Nathan tells to David in 2 Sam 12:1–4 or Isaiah's song of the vineyard in Isa 5:1–7 as typical examples of this parable genre. For instance, in his influential 1967 article on the so-called juridical parable genre, Uriel Simon includes these texts among his examples (he also cites 2 Sam 14:5–7; 1 Kgs 20:39–42; Jer 3:1–5). Yet, in 1981, George W. Coats responds to Simon by correctly asking, “How can the story in II Samuel 12:1–4 and the song in Isaiah 5:1–7 belong to the same genre?” Coats’ question suggests that between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, a number of scholars had begun reconsidering how we should use the term parable (mashal).