The Judas Tree (ballet) official website, this ballet is about "betrayal and guilt, individual and communal". The plot references the biblical betrayal story of the Kiss of Judas, which leads directly to the arrest of Jesus and his later crucifixion. In this same source it is said that MacMillan was also thinking of contemporary "instances of betrayal, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989." Since the protesting students demanding democratic reforms were taken down by the Chinese army, "in spite of politicians’ assurances that there would be no violence". The Royal Ballet website describes it like this: "The Judas Tree is MacMillan's final
Ethics in the Bible from morally edifying... Second, though Old Testament stories are about what we might call 'moral issues', it is often not easy to decide what is being commended and what deplored. Third there is a general problem about describing the moral world of biblical narrative... are we talking about the real world...or the imagined world?" Barton concludes, the Bible's moral "philosophy is more complicated than it might appear." Jewish philosophers Shalom Carmy and David Schatz explain one of many difficulties doing philosophy in the Bible is that philosophers dislike contradicting themselves whereas the Bible, by contrast, "often juxtaposes contradictory ideas, without