International law has been criticized, not just for its formal incoherence, but for its alleged complicity in the exclusion of large numbers of people from the benefits and processes of the international system. In this Article I consider a story from the New Testament for what it might say about those critiques. A woman of Syrophoenician origin, whose daughter is possessed by an evil spirit, asks Jesus for help. Jesus protests, “First let the children eat all they want, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” The woman replies, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus is impressed by this reply and tells the woman her daughter is well. The way in which the story unfolds is crucial because Jesus’ statement is troubling; it could only have been understood as an insult. More critical interpretations say the story folds back on itself: the invitation to life and love implicit in the story undermines the denigrating statement of even the founder and by implication the structures, conceptual and institutional, that make such a statement possible. The Syrophoenician woman’s story implies that orders and outcomes in which some are at the table and others or not, or where some get loaves while others get crumbs, are unacceptable. But it also holds out the possibility for reconciliation.

I use the story as a foil for examining three recent visions for international law that try to respond to international law’s critics: 1) international law as incorporating a theory of resistance urged by Balakrishnan Rajagopal; 2) international law as the temporary resolution of paradox suggested by Emmanuelle Jouannet; and 3) international law in service of a comparative-capabilities approach to justice proposed by Amartya Sen. Much in these visions resonates with the themes of the story; at the same time, each of them raises the question why people would want to sit at a common table in the first place. Thus, I turn to a recent argument by the theologian, Miroslav Volf, that reconciliation is possible only through embrace, a strong form of altruism that makes room for the other even at the potential cost of one’s own self. I argue that Volf’s articulation of that heuristic makes an important contribution to the question of reconciliation raised by the three visions for international law, even though it does not yet present a complete answer to the issues under discussion here, because it is unclear how embrace can be lived out in large communities. I conclude with a discussion of what embrace might mean in the current ‘negotiation’ taking place between those who have benefited from international law and those who have not.