1. Today, for Black History Month, I watched King, a three-part 1978 miniseries about Martin Luther King, Jr. It starred Paul Winfield, whom I’ve loved in such shows as Touched by an Angel and Star Trek: The Next Generation (the episode “Darmok”). Ossie Davis (whom I know from The Stand and Promised Land) did an excellent job as King’s crusty father, Martin, Sr. Members of King’s family also played in the miniseries; King’s daughter Yolanda, for instance, played Rosa Parks. And there were important historical figures who played themselves—such as Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General.
The movie got me thinking about J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary FBI director who opposed King. Hoover believed that one of King’s trusted advisors, Stanley Levison, was a Communist. On the movie, Attorney General Robert Kennedy advises King to fire Levison so that the civil rights agenda could move forward, but King is reluctant because Levison is a friend and has offered valuable advice and services to his movement. Kennedy says that the evidence against Levison is pretty damning, but, a few scenes later, a civil rights worker says that Levison was never a Communist.
Who’s right? When I watched the movie Good Night and Good Luck, I heard that not every accusation McCarthy made was correct (at least according to the movie). McCarthy accused Edward R. Murrow of being a member of the Communist Industrial Workers of the World (or something like that), a charge that Murrow denied. And there were times when rumor or hearsay played a role in people getting labelled as Communists. So I wanted to know the basis for the FBI’s accusation of Levison. The wikipedia article (see Stanley Levison) said that Levison was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) during the 1950’s, but he left it in 1957, which was before he assisted King. Because wikipedia is not always reliable, I did a search for a more reputable source, and I found an informative article from the Atlantic: The FBI and Martin Luther King – The Atlantic (July/August 2002). The article details the basis for Hoover’s claim that Levison assisted the CPUSA before he helped King, so Hoover wasn’t pulling his concern out of thin air.
The movie depicts J. Edgar Hoover as a racist, someone from the old school who believed that African-Americans should be cooks and chauffeurs. There may be documentation out there that such was the case, for articles turned up after I googled “J. Edgar Hoover racist.” But, in my own reading, I’ve gotten the opposite impression, or at least I saw another side to the controversial FBI man. Years ago, I read J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 book, Masters of Deceit, which was about the Communist movement in the United States. Hoover had a chapter on minorities. I expected him to argue that the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was a Communist front, but that’s not what I found. Actually, Hoover spoke highly of the NAACP, particularly its efforts to keep Communists from its ranks.
That picture of Hoover was seconded when I read Thurgood Marshall’s depiction of the man (see Thurgood Marshall on J. Edgar Hoover). Marshall was the lawyer who won the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, and he was also the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Marshall states that he and Hoover shared a common concern about Communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP, and he also denied that Hoover was a racist. Maybe racism was not a major reason for Hoover’s opposition to King, but it was rooted in Hoover’s fear that the Communist Party would promote racial discord to undermine America.
Was Hoover’s concern legitimate? In his mind, it was. I think he was well-intentioned. But I think that discrimination and treating people as second-class citizens on account of their race were more important problems, which King did well to fight.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jo Ann Hackett’s “Religious Traditions in Israelite Transjordan.” Hackett focuses on Balaam. According to Hackett, P (the priest) portrays Balaam quite negatively, for Numbers 31:15-16 ties him to the incident at Baal-Peor, in which Israelite males turned from God to appease hot Midianite women. According to P, the women got the idea to seduce the Israelites from Balaam. But other stories about Balaam are more positive. In Numbers 22-24, Balaam blesses Israel rather than cursing her.
What’s going on here? For Hackett, the story in Joshua 22 is a significant piece of the puzzle. There, the Israelites on the western side of the Jordan are upset at those on the eastern side (the Transjordan) because they’ve built themselves an altar, which is a “no-no” because the LORD only wants one altar, the one on the western side. Leading the charge against the eastern Israelites is the priest Phinehas, who’s loved by the LORD because he violently ended an Israelite’s apostacy with a Midianite hottie in Numbers 25. But Phinehas and the western Israelites learn that their eastern brothers were intending no harm: the easterners were building an altar, not for sacrifice, but rather to testify that they’re Israelites too, even though they live in a location away from most of the Israelites (the ones on the West). The western Israelites then cease and desist from their mission to destroy their eastern brothers, accepting their explanation and acknowledging them as part of the fold.
According to Hackett, the eighth century Deir ‘Alla inscription from Ammon (see The Ammonite Balaam Story) indicates that there was at least one cult in the Transjordan that viewed Balaam as a prophet. The priest opposed that for various reasons, one being that he didn’t think that the Transjordan was part of the Promised Land (Hackett cites Numbers 32:7; 33:53; and Genesis 17:8). His negative Balaam story reflects his opposition towards the Transjordanian cult. But there were also inclusive voices, such as the one who wrote Joshua 22, and they “wanted to incorporate the eastern tribes into the fold of Yahwism” (130). An inclusive voice wrote a story that was more positive about Balaam.
So, for Hackett, the negative and positive Balaam stories are actually about the cult in the Transjordan, which is relevant to the question of the eastern Israelites’ legitimacy as Israelites.
3. In Reading Between Texts, I read Patricia Willey’s “The Importunate Woman of Tekoa and How She Got Her Way.” Willey looks at two stories: II Samuel 12, in which Nathan confronts David over his affair with Bath-sheba, and II Samuel 14, in which a woman from Tekoa (at Joab’s instigation) tells a parable to get David to acknowledge his estranged son, Absalom. Her parable is a fictitious case in which her son killed his brother (as Absalom did) and is being pursued by avengers of blood. The Tekoan woman asks David to protect her son’s life.
For Willey, the Tekoan woman gets David to take back Absalom by using the phrase “this thing” (II Samuel 14:3, 13, 15, 20), a phrase also used in the context of David’s murder of Uriah (II Samuel 11:11, 25, 27—though that’s actually “the thing”; 12:6, 14). Willey says that “Evidentally Joab knows what he has and how he can use it” (127). Is Willey’s point that Joab is trying to blackmail David through the woman of Tekoa? Is Joab saying to David, “Do my wish, for I have something I can use against you!”
4. In Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Mullen quotes D.J.A. Clines, who says that the Pentateuch portrays a movement towards a goal: land, descendants, and a divine-human relationship (128). I like what Mullen says: “The nature of Israel’s identity as an ethnic group…is defined in part by the ways in which the ‘primary history’ as a whole resolves the issues associated with the nature of the divine/human relationship.”
As I’ve read Mullen regurgitate the creation and patriarchal stories, I’ve wondered how he fits the stories’ details (e.g., sibling rivalry, divine providence) into what he believes is the historical context of their authors or compilers: Israel’s exilic and post-exilic periods. Actually, not every detail of the story has to convey a political point. In part, the stories are about wrestling with the divine-human relationship, which is an important aspect of Israel’s ethnic identity. The Aeneid also makes a political point, but it has stories with characters and lessons. National epics are like that, including our own.
5. In John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists (page 26), Dillon discusses Xenocrates (fourth century B.C.E.) and the Middle Platonist Plutarch (first century C.E.) on the Monad, the Dyad, and the World Soul. The Monad appears to be God (or something like that), whereas the Dyad is matter. But Xenocrates appears to associate the Dyad with the World Soul, which orders the cosmos. But how can that be, when Xenocrates says that the Indefinite Dyad is “an evil and disorderly principle.” Enter Plutarch, who was influenced by Xenocrates. He says that the World Soul is “formed from the Monad and Dyad, and so is not itself the Dyad.” I wonder, though, if the association of the Dyad with the World Soul led to identifying the Dyad as the Demiurge, the creator, as Neo-Platonists later did (see Men of Honor II, A Long Journey, Complacency, ANE Tales and Genesis 2-3, Dyad).