La maldición de la higuera

La maldición de la higuera is the pivotal episode in Judas’s account of Jesus’s journey toward Jerusalem: when Jesus curses a tree for having no fruit before Passover, Judas sees not proof of divine power but evidence of human anger and vulnerability. He understands that he might have challenged Jesus’s course and led the group back to Galilee, yet he does not. The cursed tree becomes inseparable from his decision to continue toward Jerusalem and from the remorse that ends with his hanging himself from one of its branches.

The incident on the road

In Judas’s recollection, Jesus and his companions are travelling toward Jerusalem when Jesus becomes hungry and stops at a fig tree. He searches among its leaves for fruit, finds none, and curses it. The leaves immediately wither and fall, leaving the trunk and branches bare. The episode hinges on the season: Judas points out that no fig tree can bear fruit before Passover. The tree has not failed to meet a reasonable expectation; it has been condemned for something it could not yet provide.

The curse therefore troubles Judas less as a display of power than as a breach in the message he associates with Jesus. He asks what the tree did to deserve it and why Jesus did not instead use a miracle to make fruit appear, as he had turned stones into bread and water into wine. In Judas’s reading, the scene exposes an unexpected cruelty and a lapse from the compassion Jesus teaches. Its force comes from the contrast between the harmless, seasonally barren tree and the severity of the response.

The choice not to turn back

Judas understands the moment as an opportunity for recognition. He thinks that at the foot of the tree he should have grasped that Jesus, however extraordinary, was flesh and blood. He imagines taking hold of Jesus’s clothes and insisting that the group abandon the road to Jerusalem and return to Galilee. There, he reasons, Jesus could continue helping the unfortunate and spreading love and charity, while his followers stayed with him until their own time came.

But Judas does not make that appeal. He says that he persisted in leading Jesus to Jerusalem, despite recognizing what the journey meant: Jesus would be killed there. The episode thus joins an act of judgment to a failed intervention. The curse itself does not force the journey onward; Judas’s account places responsibility on his own decision not to oppose it. His later remorse grows from the possibility that he saw a way back and did not take it.

The tree and Judas’s ending

By the time Judas recalls the incident, night is falling and the Sabbath and Passover are beginning. He imagines that he might still turn back, return to an inn, and remain there to protect a pregnant servant and care for her child; he even considers adopting a stray dog. But the inn is already dark and empty. Instead, he addresses a star, then finds the dead fig tree at a bend in the road, inspects its branches, chooses one, and ties his rope to it. The account makes the tree the immediate setting of Judas’s suicide and the last point in a sequence running from Jesus’s curse to Judas’s uncompleted wish to turn back.

Recurrence and interpretation

The image returns after Judas’s story in Shmuel’s journey south. In Beersheba, having missed the last bus to Mitzpe Ramon, Shmuel wanders through rows of worn apartment blocks and comes upon a sickly fig tree in a courtyard. Because it is early spring, there are no early figs to find; Shmuel plucks a leaf and continues down the street. The episode recalls the seasonal barrenness at the center of Judas’s memory, but Shmuel does not repeat Jesus’s curse or Judas’s suicide. The echo instead lets the tree recur as an ordinary, limited thing: it cannot produce fruit before its time.

That recurrence connects the novel’s historical and religious inquiry to Shmuel’s present without making the two scenes identical. Judas treats the fig tree as the place where he recognized Jesus’s humanity too late and his own responsibility too clearly. Shmuel encounters a similar tree during a journey whose destination remains uncertain. Across the two accounts, the unfruitful tree marks a limit—what cannot be demanded of it, what might have been changed on the road, and what cannot be undone afterward.