Judas hanged himself on the mulberry tree

Judas Iscariot’s suicide at the dead fig tree closes his account of having led Jesus to Jerusalem. Looking back on the curse Jesus pronounced on an otherwise ordinary tree, Judas understands it as a warning he failed to heed; when he returns to the tree, he chooses a branch and hangs himself, ending with the recognition that his decision helped bring about Jesus’s death.

The warning of the fig tree

Judas recalls that the fig tree had done nothing wrong: it was not the season for figs, and Jesus could have made fruit appear by a miracle. The curse therefore unsettles Judas’s understanding of Jesus. Rather than treating the moment as proof of cruelty or rejecting it, he reads it as a revelation that Jesus, however extraordinary, was human. In retrospect, Judas imagines that he should have recognized this and turned Jesus and the disciples back toward Galilee.

In the alternative course he pictures, Jesus would remain among the villages, helping the unfortunate and spreading a message of love and charity, while his followers continued with him. The imagined return makes the consequence of Judas’s actual choice plain: he did not heed the sign or prevent the journey to Jerusalem. His regret is inseparable from his belief that he himself insisted on taking Jesus there.

The road back that is no longer open

As evening comes and the Sabbath and Passover begin, Judas describes the world as empty. He briefly imagines going back to the inn, protecting its pregnant servant, becoming a father to her child, and staying with them. He also imagines adopting a stray dog. These possibilities turn his remorse toward a modest life of care and companionship, in sharp contrast to the catastrophe he associates with Jerusalem.

But the inn is shut and dark, and no one is there. The imagined future cannot be recovered. Judas tells a star not to believe, then reaches the bend in the road where the dead fig tree waits. His careful inspection of its branches and selection of one suitable for the rope give the ending a deliberate, final quality: he returns to the place whose meaning he now understands, but too late to undo what he has done.

Consequence and narrative significance

The hanging is the culmination of Judas’s retrospective confession that he led Jesus toward death despite having imagined a way to turn back. The fig tree binds that confession to a specific, repeated image: first the occasion for Judas’s recognition of Jesus’s humanity, then the place where Judas ends his own life. Its death and his are joined in the final scene, without making the tree’s curse itself the cause of his suicide.

The ending also sets the scale of Judas’s loss against ordinary acts of protection and belonging. The life he can still imagine consists not of religious or political triumph, but of caring for a woman and child and adopting a stray animal. With those alternatives closed, his return to the tree completes the account as an act of responsibility and despair, rather than a vindication of his earlier decision.