Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible

A Theoretical, Exegetical and Theological Survey

Brian Rainey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351260428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible looks at some of the Bible's most hostile and violent anti-foreigner texts and raises critical questions about how students of the Bible and ancient Near East should grapple with "ethnicity" and "foreignness" conceptually, hermeneutically and theologically. The author uses insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology and ethnic studies to develop his own perspective on ethnicity and foreignness.

Starting with legends about Mesopotamian kings from the third millennium BCE, then navigating the Deuteronomistic and Holiness traditions of the Hebrew Bible, and finally turning to Deuterocanonicals and the Apostle Paul, the book assesses the diverse and often inconsistent portrayals of foreigners in these ancient texts. This examination of the negative portrayal of foreigners in biblical and Mesopotamian texts also leads to a broader discussion about how to theorize ethnicity in biblical studies, ancient studies and the humanities. This volume will be invaluable to students of ethnicity and society in the Bible, at all levels.

1

Biblical scholarship and “the Other”

Introduction

As I was in the middle of working on my dissertation, an early incarnation of what would become this book, Trayvon Martin, a black seventeen-year-old was shot dead by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. The seemingly slow reaction from the local police and the police department’s refusal to arrest Zimmerman—based on their own reading of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” statute—led to local protests, which then caught the attention of the national news media. The incident touched off a long-standing conflict over the social status of black Americans and, in particular, their treatment by the legal system. An interesting aspect of the incident and its political aftermath involved the portrayal of Zimmerman. At first, he was labeled a white man, but after some of his family members mentioned that he had some Latin American heritage, some media outlets referred to him as “white Hispanic.” It was an extraordinarily controversial term that drew criticism from multiple quarters. One columnist for the Huffington Post’s Latin0 Voices stated that the “clumsy terminology was a result of a misunderstanding of Latin0 ethnicity…Latinos are a multiracial ethnicity. What we have in common is Latin American or Hispanic birth or heritage.”¹ Interestingly, the column affirms that ethnicity is a social construct, yet it simultaneously implies that ethnic and racial categories are objective realities. For the author, there is something clear and verifiable about Latinx ethnicity that can be “misunderstood” and distorted.

Since Martin’s slaying, Eric Garner, a black man accused of selling loose, tax-free cigarettes, died after he was placed in a police chokehold (a procedure banned by the NYPD). Right on the heels of that police homicide, Michael Brown, a young black man, was shot dead by Officer Darren Wilson (who was white) in the town of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. The city of Ferguson exploded in demonstrations, and some rioting and looting sporadically took place as well. Subsequent examinations of municipal ordinances and law enforcement procedures in the city of Ferguson, including an investigation by the Department of Justice, found that the city, especially the police, participated in systemic discrimination against its mostly black residents. After Brown’s death, a steady stream of reports about black men—and also women and children—killed by police ran through the media. Some of the more prominent of the slain included: Tamir Rice, only 12 years old, Akai Gurley, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Philando Castile and Jordan Edwards, only 15 years old. As this project unfolded, I found myself adding more names to this list. In April of 2015, Baltimore, Maryland was the next city to erupt in rage after the death of Freddy Gray. As usual, the television media provided in-depth coverage of the clashes with police, destruction of property and looting, but gave far less attention to exposing the systemic problems that led to the outbursts. During the period of protest in both Ferguson and Baltimore, cable networks chose to use their twenty-four-hour news cycles to replay footage of looting or property destruction on continuous loops instead of in-depth investigative reporting about the social and political circumstances that fueled the discontent.

Clearly, ethnicity and race garner much attention in America. The continuing debate over immigration around the world, the 2016 Presidential election in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK, the French presidential election of 2017, the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians, the fracturation of the Middle East and the increased prominence of far-right, protofascist parties in Europe all but guarantee that discussions of ethnicity and race will continue unabated into the future. The famous black social critic and activist, W.E.B. DuBois called race the “problem of the twentieth century,” but it is poised to be a major problem, if not the problem of the twenty-first century as well. Modern societies face deep ethnic conflicts, but the conflict between those deemed “native” and those deemed “foreign” is nothing new. Controversies over the treatment of those deemed outsiders or “alien” in some way are probably as old as human beings themselves and may even predate the existence of humanity as we know it. This book is mainly about the treatment of ethnic foreigners in the Bible, but it is also about the concept of foreignness and human categorization itself.

“Ethnic Foreigners” in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian texts

This book will examine literary portrayals of peoples who were labeled “foreigners” in biblical literature as well as some portrayals of foreigners in Mesopotamian literature. I have used the English word “foreigner” to describe the characterizations of certain groups within the Hebrew Bible, but anyone who wishes to use a modern term to signify an ancient phenomenon must wrestle with the fact that the peoples who inhabited the ancient world held vastly different assumptions and expectations about nature, the world and the divine. This is not a new problem; those who study ancient cultures realize that there is a gulf between the worldviews of modern peoples and the worldviews of ancient peoples.²

In an attempt to tackle the problem, this book considers a variety of perspectives—anthropological, sociological, psychological and cognitive—to theorize the notions of “foreignness” portrayed in certain biblical texts and select Mesopotamian texts. It is my view that the kind of foreignness that is portrayed in biblical texts and to a lesser degree in Mesopotamian texts can typically be described as ethnic foreignness. To put it another way, the writers of the biblical texts that I explore usually understood the foreigners that they depicted as members of distinct ethnic groups. This introduction and the chapter that follows explore what I mean by “ethnic groups.” Of course, by referring to these foreigners as ethnic foreigners or members of ethnic groups, I believe that the notion of “ethnicity” is an appropriate concept by which to understand how ancient texts portray foreigners. “Ethnicity” is not a notion only appropriate for analyzing some concepts of foreignness in the modern world,³ but is a theoretical frame that can be used to analyze constructions of foreignness in antiquity as well.

When it comes to the study of the Bible, a collection of ancient texts and the main subject matter of this book, it is not uncommon to encounter scholars—even scholars writing in recent years—who use words such as “ethnicity” and/or “race” to describe the kind of foreignness portrayed in the Bible, with little theoretical reflection on these highly controversial terms. Writing about the exclusion of foreigners in the book of Ezra–Nehemiah, a later biblical text likely composed in the fifth century BCE, Hannah K. Harrington says that for the authors of Ezra–Nehemiah, “people of other races are simply not eligible for Israel’s holy status.”⁴ In his Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament article on the word gôy (“nation”) in the Hebrew Bible, Ronald Clements holds that concepts of “race, government and territory” are a part of the definition of the term.⁵ To be fair, these articles are not written to be sociological or anthropological studies on ethnicity, so a reader should not expect a long, drawn-out theoretical discussion about ethnicity. At the same time, considering that the terms “race” and “ethnicity” are contested, it is interesting that so many make casual references to them. I would suggest that the casual references to ethnicity and race are not due to carelessness or sloppiness on the part of scholars, but that there is a very good reason.

The reason for these casual references is simple: scholars are human beings, both in the sense that we err and make mistakes and also in that we cannot help but see similarities between ancient peoples and ourselves. In addition to understanding that thousands of years separate a modern biblical scholar from an ancient Israelite, we understand that people who lived in the ancient world were also just as human as we are. Consequently, what people thought, said or did in antiquity ought to be, at least in part, comprehensible to us. Obviously, there must be some congruity between modern concepts of foreignness and ancient concepts of foreignness, otherwise, it would be thoroughly impossible to apprehend the terms, nokrî, zār, KÚR, or nakru/nakāru—some Hebrew, Sumerian and Akkadian words translated “foreign(er).” Even though translators must make philological arguments to draw out the nuances and precise meanings of these words, there must be points of reference by which modern readers can understand what ancient peoples were talking about when they use words typically translated as “foreigner.” Yet, just as there may be deep similarities, there are equally profound differences. The art of interpretation involves navigating a complex web of both understanding and misunderstanding, and navigating the web when it comes to the idea of foreignness in ancient texts can be extraordinarily difficult. One of the questions I want to answer is whether or not this term “ethnicity” is helpful for a modern interpreter who wishes to understand the foreigners depicted in ancient texts. My theory is that there is “something” in the way that foreigners are depicted in biblical texts that prompts scholars and modern readers to use the word “ethnicity,” and I want to talk, as precisely as possible, about what that “something” might be.

The use of the term “ethnicity,” even in a modern context, is controversial enough, demonstrated by the ferocious debates over what constitutes an “ethnic group” within the humanities. The debate between so-called “primordialists” and “instrumentalists” that persisted from the late 1960s through the late 1990s is just one example of the controversy over defining ethnic groups.⁶ Primordialists are best understood as theorists who see ethnicity as an outgrowth of real kinship networks and rooted in the structures and customs that developed within real kinship networks. The “primordialist” view is traditionally represented by Clifford Geertz and his famous idea that primordial attachments such as blood ties, speech and custom “flow more from a sense of natural—some would say spiritual—affinity than from social interaction” that “have ineffable and…overpowering coerciveness.”⁷ Primordialists vary in how broad they are in their language. Some are more prone to make sweeping statements about how deep, “natural” and inexplicable these “primordial” kinship connections are. Other “primordialists” attempt to use sociobiology to explain the extension of the idea of kinship to ethnic groups.⁸ “Instrumentalists” argue that ethnicity is a strategy pursued by interested actors or groups. They stress the strategies by which people construct ethnic boundaries, and see the content of ethnic group perception as highly malleable and contextually dependent.⁹

My own view is that ethnicity is a way of categorizing people in which common ancestry and common territorial origins are conspicuously important components of ethnic group conceptualization. Katherine E. Southwood’s understanding closely approximates my own viewpoint:

The contents of an ethnic identity are defined situationally, on an emic level, according to the subjective criteria and requirements of the group in question and in relation to other groups with whom interaction occurs. Numerous cultural features, such as religion, class, caste, or language, may be symbolically manipulated by ethnic groups in accordance with such identities. Unlike other identities, the sense of ethnic solidarity and cultural uniqueness crystallizes around putative myths of descent, associations with territories, and shared “historical” memories.¹⁰

For readers who may see this as grossly oversimplified, more nuances, complexities and arguments will be spelled out in Chapter Two. My own perspective does not require that ethnic group constructions necessarily “crystallize around” common ancestry and territory. Rather, ethnicity is a classification scheme in which, among the various social or cultural “features” that might define ethnic groups, purported common ancestry (often expressed in terms of “blood,” “heredity,” or “descent”) and common territorial origins play significant—but not necessarily the most significant—roles in delineating group membership.¹¹ By “territorial origins,” I mean the territory with which the ethnic group is associated and affiliated—i.e., its “homeland.” The ethnic group need not have absolutely originated in its ascribed “homeland,” from a historical-critical perspective, but at a (largely arbitrary) point in history the group becomes linked to a particular territory.¹² I have settled on this way of understanding ethnicity to respond to some difficulties that have arisen in attempts to define it.

The first difficulty involves separating “ethnicity” from other ways in which we categorize human beings. There are a variety of ways in which people place human beings into stable, seemingly unchangeable categories, such as: race, gender, ethnicity, class, caste, tribe, nationality, religious background and sometimes occup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Biblical scholarship and “the Other”
• 2 Birds of a feather: explaining ethnic foreignness
• 3 “Brood of destruction”: Mesopotamian caricatures of foreigners
• 4 “He fixed the boundaries of the earth”: some biblical idioms of ethnicity
• “A non-people, a foolish nation”: caricatures of foreigners in Deuteronomistic texts
• 6 “I was repulsed by them”: caricatures of foreigners in holiness texts
• 7 “Foolish by nature”: the reverberations of ethnic polemics in the Bible
• 8 “In order that i might horrify them”: a theological appraisal
• Bibliography
• Index