Like the woman of Samaria the mother from Canaan whose story Matthew and Mark have preserved for us was a foreigner. Tradition calls her Justa and names her daughter Bernice. One scholar describes her as "by language a Greek, by nationality a Canaanite, and by residence a Syro-Phoenician." So, too, she was probably Greek by religion. Coming from the Phoenician coast as she did she was very likely a member of a seafaring family.

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More to the point, however, the woman belonged to a race the Jews held accursed. And well they might have been. To be sure, the prophet Zechariah had foretold the day the Canaanites would become "like a clan in Judah." (Zechariah 9:7) But up until Jesus' time there had been no such lifting of the barriers between the two peoples.

Nor was there likely to be. For…