Gaster's Exempla (1924), Nos. 360–362, preserves three old parables about what friendship really means. This adaptation focuses on the first — a teaching about the difference between a hundred acquaintances and one true friend.
A father asked his son whether he had any true friends. The young man laughed. "I have one hundred." The father smiled. "I myself," he said, "have only one — or perhaps only half of one. Let me put your hundred to the test."
The father took a sheep, killed it, put its bleeding carcass into a sack, and tied the sack to his son's shoulder so that blood dripped steadily down his clothes. Then he and his son set out in the middle of the night and began knocking on the doors of the son's friends. At each one the father said, "My son has killed a man by accident. The body is in this sack. We need shelter to hide him until the morning."
The first friend refused. The second refused. So did the third, and the fourth, and every one of the hundred, until the son stood in the street weeping, drenched in sheep's blood, with his father watching quietly.
Then the father took him to the one man he called a friend. The friend opened the door, pulled them inside without a word, and said, "We will dig a grave in my garden tonight, cover the earth with flowerbeds before dawn, and no one will ever know." He was prepared to bury a murdered body to save a friend's son.
The father did not let him finish. He untied the sack, revealed the sheep, and said to his son: "This is a friend. You had a hundred men who would share your wine. I have one who would share my grave."
The other two stories in the cluster sharpen the same point — a friend who renounces a beloved slave-girl so his sick friend may recover, and a friend who offers himself to die in another's place so the innocent will not be executed. The rabbinic tradition holds: friendship that will not bury a body is not friendship. It is an arrangement.