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1. For Black History Month today, I watched Malcom X, which starred Denzel Washington as the controversial figure. What went through my mind as I watched the movie were questions about the Nation of Islam’s beliefs.
In the movie, Baines is a Nation of Islam believer who brings Malcom to the teachings. He says that the nature of the black man is inherently good, whereas the nature of the white man is inherently wicked. When Malcom replies that he met some whites who were devils, Baines corrects him: “No. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad doesn’t teach that some white people are the devil. He teaches that all of them are. Look back at your life. Have you ever met a white person who was good?” Malcom then thought back to the social worker who wanted to take his widow mom’s children away from her, the white teacher who told him that he couldn’t become a lawyer because he was a “nigger,” the judge who sentenced him for theft and sleeping with white women, and his white girlfriend, Sophia, who has a sly facial expression in his flashback about her.
I love this scene because it made Malcom X’s hostility to whites understandable: he was basing it in part on his own experiences. But African-Americans in the movie did bad things, too. Malcom was once a hustler and a thief, as were the people with whom he was associating. The prophet and leader of the Nation, Elijah Muhammad, seduced young women in the organization, fathered children by them, and didn’t support them (according to the movie). Many in the Nation were envious of Malcom. If the nature of black people is inherently righteous, then why did they do bad things? Would the Nation say that the African-Americans who do such things aren’t acting according to their true nature? Would it say that the white man is worse? Would it say that African-Americans resort to evil due to negative environmental factors (crime, lack of opportunity), caused by the white man’s oppression of them? One thing Baines said was that Elijah Muhammad’s greatness outweighs any bad things he may have done. For Baines, Elijah Muhammad was a human being, like the heroes of the Bible, who also had flaws. Baines cites drunk Noah and adulterous David as examples.
That brings me to my next point. I was somewhat surprised to hear Baine’s appealing to drunk Noah and adulterous David, because of a conversation I once had with a Muslim. In my post about that encounter, My Conversation with a Muslim, I recount the following:
[The Muslim] then went on about the errors in the Bible, such as Noah being drunk and David killing Uriah to get Bathsheba. “How do you know they are errors?” I asked. “Because prophets are holy men. They are moral examples,” he responded.
It’s ironic that the Muslim I spoke with used the same examples that Baines cited in the movie, only my Muslim friend was treating them as errors in the text, whereas Baines was using them to defend his “Elijah Muhammad’s only human, like the great saints of the Bible” spiel. Who is right? Or is there diversity within Islam on this issue? The movie acknowledges that the Nation of Islam believed that the Bible had errors, for Malcom refers to the corruption of the Gospel of Matthew. (That’s something I picked up by reading the captions. Otherwise, I would have missed it!)
Something else I wonder: Baines says that the Africans were once a race of kings, in a time when the white man was still in a primitive, savage state. An African-American friend of mine once made a similar claim: that the Africans were sailing in ships and making cultural advancements a long time ago. I often assumed that the whites were able to enslave the Africans because whites had a head start, and thus the technology to enslave the African people, who didn’t have that level of technology at the time. But if the Nation of Islam believes that the Africans were the ones who had the head start, how would they explain the white man’s ability to enslave the Africans? Would they say that the Africans were enslaved because of some kind of sin? Baines said that the African-Americans were of the nation of Shabazz, exiled in an oppressive land. That calls to mind the Hebrew Bible, in which the once-powerful Israelites are exiled for their sins.
Did the Nation of Islam believe in violence? In the movie, King, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King talks with Malcom X. King tells Malcom that blacks would lose in a war against their white oppressors, so non-violence is the best policy. Did Malcom X believe that African-Americans should rise up against their white oppressors? In the movie, he says that he’s against violence, but he supports it for the purpose of self-defense, meaning he’s not for violence on the offensive level. Yet, he also warns that the African-Americans could cause a lot of damage, if the white man didn’t allow them to separate and become self-sufficient.
2. For President’s Day, I watched a PBS documentary of Andrew Jackson, narrated by Martin Sheen. I learned that Jackson was called “Old Hickory” because, as a commander of his unit, he walked all the way to a far destination, while allowing the wounded to ride on horseback. I also learned that the donkey was adopted as a symbol for the Democratic Party because it’s a reliable animal for the common people, to whom the Party was appealing. I heard the story of how President Jackson basically disregarded a Supreme Court decision in favor of the Native Americans of Georgia, in an attempt to get their land for white settlers. According to the movie, Christian missionaries supported the Native Americans, which shows that not all white Christians were behind Manifest Destiny. And here’s something interesting: Jackson’s Secretary of War, John Eaton, had a relationship with a woman that proved scandalous, which a professor compared to the Monica Lewinsky debacle. What’s ironic is that the woman in question, Peggy Eaton, looks almost exactly like Monica Lewinsky (see here)!
3. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read M.H. Goshen-Gottstein’s “Tanakh Theology: The Religion of the Old Testament and the Place of Jewish Religious Theology.” On page 629, MHGG lists certain issues that would loom large in an Old Testament theology: “God’s self-revelation and withdrawing, creating and directing the world, instructing and reacting, demanding and retributing, succeeding and failing, compelling and allowing freedom, ‘running the show’ and letting it run on its own…”
Running the show and letting it run on its own. This reminded me of two things. One was some of Lawson Stone’s recent posts: Day 326:Where Is God?, Day 327: Where God Is, Day 330: Where Is God When He’s Not There?, Day 331: Somebody Stop Me, and Day 332: Overlooking a Slipper. Stone talks about how God usually appears to be hands-off, allowing the consequences of evil to take their course, even though he’s eager to minister to people through their horrible experiences. Yet, according to Stone, God places a lot of responsibility on our shoulders as well. He refers to the story of Gibeah in Judges 19-21, in which Benjamites rape and murder a man’s concubine, prompting a war. For Stone, that’s an indictment of the Israelite leaders, who failed to do their righteous duty to uphold justice. He tells the story of when his first child was born:
My mind pondered all the terrible things that could happen to him through his life from physical injury to spiritual destruction by moral predators…and I began to pray. I asked God to put his hands around this child and protect him. Though I rarely experience God “speaking” to me, I felt I heard him that night. God said to my heart, “I have indeed provided for his protection: I have given him the two of you as his parents.”
Many atheists and agnostics, however, have problems with the existence of a benevolent God precisely because he doesn’t take an active role in the world. In a comment under his post, Another Misguided Argument from Dinesh D’Souza, former fundamentalist Ken Pulliam says to the provocative Christian ”ZDenny”:
I am getting tired of your ranting about the love of God. Why don’t you try telling the people of Haiti about your god’s great love. Tell the parents of those children with childhood cancer. Tell those children who are starving to death (about 25,000 a day), how loving your God is? If morality is based on your god, then genocide is okay. Human sacrifice is okay, slavery is okay, polygamy is okay, treating women like property is okay. I’ll take my morality any day over your loving god’s.
Stone is talking about moral evil, whereas Pulliam is commenting more on natural evil. But both wrestle with the question of why God so often seems to be absent. I’m usually not satisfied with the answers of Christian apologists, who say that God never violates free will, for there are times when God does influence it in one direction or another. Moreover, why doesn’t God rain manna on the starving of the world, as he did for the ancient Israelites? Personally, I don’t think there are rigid rules that God absolutely has to follow all of the time, for he does different things in different situations, or seasons, or time periods. I believe that his ultimate intentions for us are good, however, for that’s a prominent promise in the Bible.
4. In Psalms I:1-50, Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 20:2 caught my attention. The verse says that the name of Jacob’s God “will be your bulwark” (Dahood’s translation). Dahood says that the name of the Lord is a personification that appears in the Hebrew Bible and in Canaanite mythology. In Exodus 23:21, God sends an angel with Israel, and he’s placed his name in him. In UT 127:56, Athtart is called the name of Baal. I did a search on “Athtart” and found that she’s the same as the goddess Ashtarte, a consort of Baal. That reminds me of my post about P. Kyle McCarter’s comments on “YHWH and his Asherah” (see YHWH and His Asherah, Genesis 12 and 20 and the Reader, Samaritan Priestly-Line). I summarize McCarter as follows:
He refers to examples in Northwest Semitic religion in which a goddess is a hypostasis or manifestation of a god. For McCarter, YHWH’s Asherah was his visible manifestation, which appeared in the cult. And that manifestation was marked with a wooden pole, which is called an Asherah. YHWH’s Asherah is somewhat like YHWH’s consort, but it’s also like YHWH’s Shekinah—his manifestation, which conveys the transcendent God to humans. And the pole is a symbol of that visible presence.
Dahood may be conveying a similar idea: that Athtart was Baal’s “name” in that she was his representative, as was the angel who bore the LORD’s name while leading the children of Israel.
5. I’m going to take a leap in my comments today on Theodore Mullen’s Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries. In my post yesterday (Queen on Valentine’s Day, the Date of Israel’s Covenant Concept, Athtar Rules in Hell, the Function of the Conquest Story, Daemons, Peace), I may have put words into Mullen’s mouth in my attempt to make sense of what he’s saying. I’ll be doing the same thing today.
My impression of Mullen (which could be mistaken) is that he doesn’t believe in the historicity of the biblical Josiah story, in which Josiah, the righteous king of Judah, extirpates paganism from his nation and Northern Israel. So what’s the purpose of the story, according to Mullen? He believes that its function is to create ethnic boundaries—things on which Israel can stand and unite as a nation. The author of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-II Kings) could have written stories about kings who transgressed those boundaries through their reception of foreign customs, and that would account for Israel’s exile. But he’d also want to include heroes for the people to emulate: noble figures who stood up for righteousness and the cultural distinctiveness of Israel. When the exiles returned, they’d have those heroes and the villains in mind. In this scenario, the Deuteronomistic History could be a fiction designed to form a nation, which may be Mullen’s overall argument.
Personally, I think there could be some historicity to the Josiah story, for archaeologist William Dever says that images disappear from seals in or around the time of Josiah, perhaps marking a time of aniconism. Yet, I’d agree that ideology plays a role in the telling of the Josiah story. As a professor of mine notes, the story of Josiah in I Kings 21ff. doesn’t really distinguish between the Aaronide priests and the Levites, which is characteristically Deuteronomistic: the priestly author makes that distinction, whereas Deuteronomy does not.
6. On pages 245-246 of the Middle Platonists, John Dillon discusses Taurus’ views on the soul. Taurus was a second century Athenian philosopher, and Iamblichus records two beliefs that Taurus or his followers had on why souls enter into bodies. One reason is to make the cosmos perfect. I don’t want to project the Bible onto Taurus, but I’ll do so anyway: it’s like Genesis 1-2, which imply that human beings are necessary for the completion (or perfection) of God’s creation. We are to rule it with intelligence, as beings made in the image of God (in Genesis 1), or as God’s cultivators (according to Genesis 2). The second explanation for why souls enter bodies is so the gods can reveal themselves through our souls. This may be saying that our soul is something that resembles the divine, so it became enfleshed so that the gods could express their goodness in a concrete setting.
