the unexpected appearance of the samaritan led joseph halévy to suggest that the parable originally involved "a priest, a levite, and an israelite", in line with contemporary jewish stories, and that luke changed the parable to be more familiar to a gentile audience." halévy further suggests that, in real life, it was unlikely that a samaritan would actually have been found on the road between jericho and jerusalem, although others claim that there was "nothing strange about a samaritan travelling in jewish territory". william c. placher points out that such debate misinterprets the biblical genre of a parable, which illustrates a moral rather than a historical point: on reading the story, "we are not inclined to check the story against the police blotter for the jerusalem-jericho highway patrol. we recognize that jesus is telling a story to illustrate a moral point, and that such stories often don't claim to correspond to actual events." the traditionally understood ethical moral of the story would not hold if the parable originally followed the priest-levite-israelite sequence of contemporary jewish stories, as halévy suggested, for then it would deal strictly with intra-israelite relations just as did the lev 19:18 command under discussion.