1. For Black History Month today, I watched George Wallace, a 1997 TNT miniseries starring Gary Sinise, Mare Winningham, Angelina Jolie, and Clarence Williams III. It received many awards, and I once read that Gary Sinise received his Emmy for his depiction of George Wallace on the same night that the real George Wallace passed away.
The movie depicts Wallace as a progressive who lost his first election for Governor of Alabama because he didn’t criticize African-Americans, and resolved from that point on to be a vocal proponent of racial segregation. According to the movie, his rhetoric agitated race relations in Alabama and led to the deaths of four African-American little girls, when their church was firebombed. When he was paralyzed by an assassin’s bullet and had managed to push away many of the people who cared about him, he reflected on the damage he had done in his pursuit of political power. As the box for the VHS tape says, Wallace was “a man who once hungered for power and now hungers for forgiveness.”
Indeed, George Wallace capitalized on a system that treated African-Americans as inferior, as did his political opponents, and that was wrong. As his friend and predecessor, Governor “Big Jim” Folsom, told him, Wallace should’ve been a moral leader and encouraged people to listen to their angels, rather than reflecting their demons to gain political power. “Big Jim” was also right to say that George Wallace had unleashed the dogs of hate, who would one day come back to bite him. That reminds me of Malcom X’s statement after the Kennedy assassination that the “chickens had come home to roost,” for violence begets violence. Consequently, the true heroes of the movie were the African-Americans who chose to forgive Governor Wallace, after all the pain he’d caused them.
But the movie should’ve acknowledged a little bit more than it did a point that was made in the book that inspired the movie, Wallace, by Marshall Frady, who also wrote the teleplay for the movie: Wallace accomplished a lot of good for his state, at least by liberal standards. Frady states on pages 140:
As governor, Wallace proved to be, aside from his racial aberration, essentially a Populist…He built fourteen new junior colleges and fifteen new trade schools, initiated a $100 million school-construction program and a free textbook policy. He pitched into the largest roadbuilding project in the state’s history, devised plans for new nursing homes and medical clinics, and introduced an ambitious act to keep all the waterways of the state twinkling clean. And the proportion of Alabama citizens—338 out of every thousand—participating in public welfare programs at the end of his term was exceeded by those of only one other state, Louisiana.
The American Experience documentary on George Wallace, Settin’ the Woods on Fire, said that Wallace as Governor enacted programs that helped all of Alabama’s citizens, white and black.
Wallace should be criticized for what he did wrong, and praised for what he did right.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Shemaryahu Talmon’s “The Emergence of Jewish Sectarianism in the Early Second Temple Period.” My impression of Talmon’s argument is that he thinks there wasn’t much sectarianism in pre-exilic Israelite society because the country was rather homogeneous. Sure, there were clear differences, but the Israelites agreed on the things that distinguished them from other cultures. I can somewhat see Talmon’s point, even though I admit that there were differences in ancient Israelite society: some worshipped YHWH alone, and others worshipped other deities as well; there was a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom. But both kingdoms embraced some sort of Yahwism. And, after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, the temple in Jerusalem was acknowledged as an important place of worship by the Israelites.
But, during and particularly after the exile, Talmon contends, there was debate about who was truly Israel. (At least that’s how I’m reading Talmon, and I’m far from inerrant!) The returning exiles excluded the Samaritans from their community, and regarded the returnees from exile as the genuine Israelites. Eventually, there were debates about who was a true priest, as disaffected Zadokites fled to the desert to establish their own community. So there was division after the exile that didn’t really exist before, and that led to sects. (As Jon Levenson liked to say, “The Second Temple Period had a lot of sects.”)
Actually, what’s ironic is that the post-exilic Israelites had more agreement on religion. At least everyone agreed by this point that Israel should worship only one God! So sects emerged when there was greater unity. It’s like fundamentalism: the fundamentalists broke away from mainline Christianity because they agreed on certain fundamentals (i.e., inerrancy, virgin birth, etc.), but then the fundamentalist denominations started splitting up in pursuit of doctrinal purity.
3. In Psalms II: 51-100, I read Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 89. On page 316, Dahood says there’s a “plural of majesty” in v 51 (in the MT), which uses the plural for God’s singular servant, who (in the singular) bears reproach. Or maybe the verse is asking God to remember the reproach of all of God’s servants, of which the Psalmist’s is one example. In any case, I think there is something like a “plural of majesty” in the Hebrew Bible, for the plural of adon (“lord”) is often used for a single human being (e.g., Genesis 24:9-10; 39:2, etc.). Yet, I should note that there are scholars who dispute the existence of the “plural of majesty.” When I referred to it in a paper, my professor wrote in the margin, “There is no plural of majesty.” Maybe he’d say that the use of the plural of adon for a single person is just something the Hebrew does. I don’t know if it does the same thing for non-majestic words.
4. I read more of Theodore Mullen’s Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, which I will probably finish either tomorrow or the day after. Mullen seems to be saying that the Saul and David stories speak to Israel in exile. Not only do they establish Israel as a nation, by giving her a legend in which she had a king (a big aspect of nations), but they also teach her lessons about obedience, a fresh start (which David was after the disappointment that Saul was), and God’s faithfulness to Israel even as he chastises her for sin.
My impression of Mullen is that he’s somewhat of a minimalist. That reminds me of a good post by John Hobbins, A Critique of Minimalism: Walter Dietrich reviews John Van Seters, in which Hobbins critiques both maximalists and minimalists. Is the David story legend conveying an ideological point, or is it solid history? Maybe it’s a little of both!
5. While reading John Denton’s The Middle Platonists, I was trying to get somewhat of a handle on the views of the second century philosopher Numenius (whom my long-time readers have met before, in my post, Numenius’ Trinity). Numenius didn’t care much for matter, and he advocated asceticism and valuing the soul over the body. Was he like the Gnostics, who viewed the material world as the creation of an evil sub-deity? Not exactly. On page 369, Denton says that Numenius felt the creator Demiurge had a lust for matter, which caused him (the Demiurge) to forget himself. That’s weakness of will, but not exactly evil. Plus, according to pages 375-376, Numenius proposed that souls entered bodies because they were tempted by the pleasures that the material world would give them. But Numenius didn’t believe that the world was totally evil, for he held that its evil principle is subordinate to the Good.