12 March 2024
In chapter two of Misreading Scripture, R/OB attempt to talk about race and ethnicity. They do a poor job, trying to virtue signal without noticing that the Bible is quite racist. Here's my point: human are racist by wiring. Infants are racially aware. It is utterly impossible to turn that off, though we have been conditioned to pretend. The only right question is to ask ourselves why God made this a part of our nature.
How people handle their racial awareness can vary all over the map, and it's usually a mess. The first thing is to realize that racism (as commonly defined) is not a sin, but simply human nature, by God's design. The second thing is that pretending we aren't racist, or that we can stop it or even ameliorate it, is a sin. We must become utterly insensitive about being called racist. You can come up with your own response, but if I have one, it's usually a simple, "And so are you. Big deal."
The next thing is deciding how God expects us to use that awareness for His glory. If not a sin, it is complete folly to embrace the American mythology about ethnic differences. Some differences between ethnic backgrounds are very much a matter of DNA. For example, the instinct for high or low trust social expectations is partly genetic, based on survival of those who picked the right way of handling others in their context over multiple generations. To deny that DNA makes a difference in culture is one of the worst lies, and R/OB have bought into that.
The whole point of this book is to become aware of real human differences and have some idea of how our white American culture is different from that of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments -- and how the two testaments themselves differ from each other. At the same time, we cannot cite racial awareness as an excuse for the sins of abuse. Being realistic does not mean it's open season. It's just that we cannot do justice to God's Word by ignoring reality.
R/OB do note that racism is part of the Bible narrative. Rebekah's complaint with Esau's wives was not the polygamy, but that they are pagan foreigners. It's an ethnic complaint that happens to be justified, as these women bring their pagan idolatry into the camp with them. In the New Testament, Paul used a few racial slurs to get his readers' attention, but English translations hide this. The label "Galatian" carried racist overtones comparable to our "Redneck".
Again, the Roman soldiers taking Paul into custody in the Temple typically didn't like Jews in the first place; they were mostly Syrians with a history of contempt for Jews (part of the reason Rome assigned them to police Jews, to prevent collusion). They mistook Paul for some crazy Egyptian, probably because his head had been shaved in a ritual. His fluency in Greek surprised them. Very few Jews spoke Greek, and only the upper class Egyptians did. Of all the Bible authors, it seems Luke goes out of his way to point out ethnicity in the narrative, simply because it mattered in the context.
And then we have the complaints of Miriam and Aaron that Moses had taken a Cushite wife -- from the far Upper Nile Valley (south). She was almost certainly black-skinned. Racism? It's likely they assumed she was not a full convert to the Covenant, but it's hard to be sure. Our authors make too much of previous generations of scholars assuming "black skin" meant they were naturally slave races. Shoot, it was the Hebrews that were the local slave race where they lived in the Nile Delta. By now, we all know that the Cushites were famous warriors, not slaves. Somehow we must connect the fact she was Cushite with their primary complaint that Moses was not the only prophet in the tribe, because that's how the Hebrew text words it.
The authors do get around to telling us that, on the one hand, "Jew" (short for Judean) was a broad ethnic/national identity more than it was a religious one. It as bad enough that Jews could be racist with each other in some situations -- Judeans versus Galileans, both against the Diaspora Jews, etc. -- so no one should be surprised that Paul's biggest hassle in his work was Jewish and Gentile racism about each other. The whole point of Acts 6 is that the local Hebrews had a different social structure than the Diaspora Jews, and it required making changes in the church body to accommodate that. I believe the authors are mistaken on the implications of this, reading it as semi-racism when it was honestly more of a cultural difference.
I'm not the least surprised that R/OB screwed this one up; I rather expected it. Books that get published and promoted by the likes of Amazon will always express at least some wokism. We'll have to work past that.
Comments
jaybreak
I've always thought that if you were to eliminate "racism" in someone, they would simply find another way to be prejudiced.
CatRez
Yeah, if you close one door, they will simply take another.
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