John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) takes its title from the second line of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, itself a paraphrase of Revelation. The title points to judgment. Most readers, on the strength of the title alone, expect a book about anger. The novel is angry. But the long middle of the book is something else. It is a careful, almost liturgical attention to a small group of people who have been moved against their will from one part of the country to another and who keep meeting other people on the road who have been moved the same way.
The Joads are not the agents of wrath. They are the recipients of welcome. The verse the road keeps quoting, even when no character speaks it, is from a different part of the New Testament — Jesus' last public teaching, his account of how the Son of Man will sort the nations at the end of history.
"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in."
A Verse the Novel Walks Through
Matthew 25 is structured as a list. Six conditions are named: hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned. Whoever serves a person in any of these states is told, at the end of the passage, that they have served Christ in disguise. The verse is not theoretical. It is a check-list of the road.
The Joads experience every item on the list during the novel. They are hungry. They are thirsty in the desert crossing. They are strangers from one state arriving in another. They are inadequately clothed. They are sick — Grandpa, Grandma, Rose of Sharon, the children. Tom Joad has been imprisoned and is, again, in flight from the law. Steinbeck did not need to invent any of these conditions. He copied them out of contemporary photographs and his own travels among the camps.
What the novel adds to the verse is the second half of the test: who gave them meat, who gave them drink, who took them in. The book is full of strangers feeding strangers. The Wilsons. The trucker. The man at the diner who undercharges for bread. The migrant camp where the people share what little they have. The verse, in this novel, is being lived without being quoted.
Casy as the Verse's Voice
Jim Casy, the former preacher who travels with the Joads, carries the book's theological argument. He has stopped believing the doctrines he used to preach but has not stopped believing in what he calls the holy spirit in people who help each other. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of, he tells Tom. The phrasing is folk. The structure is Matthew 25.
Casy's initials, J.C., are not an accident. Steinbeck arranges his death deliberately. Casy, who has organized migrant workers, is killed by men who do not know what they are doing — a phrase the gospels reserve for one moment. The book carries this moment without underlining it. The verse beneath it is the same one. Casy's life with the Joads has been a sustained living-out of I was a stranger, and ye took me in. His death, in Steinbeck's frame, places him on the side of the verse's me.
Rose of Sharon's Final Scene
The novel's last scene has been argued about since publication. After losing her child, Rose of Sharon — caught with her family in a barn during a flood — is led by her mother to a stranger who is starving. What she does for him is a direct embodiment of the verse's first clause: I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat. Steinbeck places no commentary around the action. The mother's eyes meet hers. She nods. The scene ends.
Critics have read the ending in many ways. The most exact reading is the verse's. The novel began with hunger; it ends with someone feeding someone they had no obligation to feed. The verse named this exchange centuries before. Steinbeck filmed it.
What the Title Was Doing
The title still does its work. The book is angry — at banks, at landowners, at agribusiness, at the system that moves people without housing them. The wrath is real. But the verse the book is finally written from is not from Revelation. It is from the gospel passage where the criterion for judgment turns out to be a list of small kindnesses. Steinbeck's anger and Steinbeck's tenderness are not in tension. The verse holds both. Wrath, in the verse's grammar, is reserved for those who walked past the hungry. The opposite of wrath is the meal.
The Forty Seconds
Read Matthew 25:35 once. For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Forty seconds. In that time the Joads' road is summarized. The book is the verse, set in 1939, traveling Route 66 with people who will, in the end, give their last meal to someone they have just met.
The dust is the spectacle. The verse is the road. I was a stranger is what every Joad says without saying it.