"... Jesus has selected a creature that is valued very cheaply by humans, of course on the basis of its limited usefulness to them. Even a creature that humans think so unimportant is important enough to God for it never to escape his caring attention. Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the saying make the point in slightly different ways. Matthew’s is the more specific and relates to the capture of sparrows for food. The sparrow’s fall to the earth is not, as modern readers often suppose, its death, but what happens when the hunter’s throw-net snares it and brings it to the ground (compare Amos 3:5). It will then be sold in the market. The sparrow’s capture cannot happen ‘without your Father’ (Matthew 10:29), i.e. without his knowledge and consent. There is a remarkably close parallel, not only to this point but also to the moral which Jesus draws from it with regard to God’s care for the disciples, in a later rabbinic story, which must show that Jesus is drawing on traditional Jewish teaching. The story concerns Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai (mid-second century CE), who at the end of the second Jewish war spent thirteen years hiding in a cave with his son. Rabbi Simeon realizes that his fate is in the hands of God, to whom he can therefore entrust himself, when he realizes that this is even true of each bird. If Jesus drew on traditional Jewish teaching, this teaching was itself rooted in the Old Testament ..."