1. For Black History Month today, I watched The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman on YouTube. It’s a 1974 movie about a 110-year-old African-American woman in the 1960’s South, who grew up as a slave during the Civil War. It got nine Emmy Awards. The last time I saw this movie (before today, that is) was in fifth grade, which was over twenty years ago.
Memory is odd. There were things in the movie that rang a bell, and things I was expecting to see but did not see. Things that rang a bell: a kindly Union officer changes Tassey’s name to “Jane,” to replace her slave name; a bigoted and bereaved white woman (played by Katherine Helmond of Soap, Who’s the Boss, and Everybody Loves Raymond) gives newly-freed Jane and her friend a drink of water, but won’t let them put their “filthy black mouths” (her words) on the cup; the white reporter interviewing Jane chows down on some tasty raw sugar cane; and Jane drinks from the “whites only” water fountain, as the white sheriff and the bigots surrounding it decide not to beat her up or arrest her on account of her age.
For some reason, I was expecting to see a scene in which Miss Jane had a romance, and her husband was killed by the KKK, which was burning a cross outside of her home. But that wasn’t on the movie. There was a scene in which Jane’s husband owed his white employer fifty dollars for keeping the Klan away. In another scene, Jane’s activist son is shot by a hit-man, who was friends with Jane and warned her that he was ordered to kill her son. And Jane’s activist grandson was killed for trying to drink from the “whites only” water fountain.
There was also a reference in the movie to “the one.” I remember Oprah calling Barack Obama “the one,” the person who would lead African-Americans to freedom. She may have gotten that concept from this movie, or from the book that inspired it. Miss Jane said that black mothers wonder if their newborn baby boy is “the one” who will lead their people, and she thought that her grandson was that one. And, in a sense, he was, for he encouraged an African-American church to participate in the Civil Rights movement. Maybe there’s not just one “the one,” but there can be more than one leader who brings freedom to the African-American people, or leads them so that they can gain freedom for themselves.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jon Levenson’s “The Sources of Torah: Psalm 119 and the Moses of Revelation in Second Temple Judaism.” Levenson dates Psalm 119 (which praises God’s law and commandments) to the Second Temple Period, which was after the exile. During part of that period, the Pentateuch was in flux, and people were producing documents purporting to be divinely-inspired, such as the Book of Jubilees. According to Levenson, the ”Torah” that Psalm 119 exalts is not the Pentateuch (although the Psalm draws some from Deuteronomy), but rather “(1) received tradition, passed on most explicitly by teachers (vv 99-100), (2) cosmic or natural law (vv 89-91), and (3) unmediated divine teaching (e.g., vv 26-29).” Levenson still acknowledges, however, that Psalm 119 draws from ”books we consider ‘biblical’”, for they ”hold a kind of normative status for him” and “provide the language with which to formulate a significant statement.”
Still, I’d like to think that, when the Psalmist asks God in Psalm 119:18 to open his eyes so he can see wonderful things from God’s law, he’s asking God to help him to learn from a book that we consider biblical—a book with laws. But I’m open to the Psalmist embracing other forms of divine revelation as well: education from teachers, guidance from God, etc.
3. In Psalms II: 51-100, I read Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 97. Dahood calls it an “eschatological hymn of three parts portraying the coming of Yahweh as universal judge.” I wonder when he dates it. Does he date the Psalm to Israel’s post-exilic period, a time of intense apocalyptic expectations? Ordinarily, Dahood dates Psalms earlier than that—to Israel’s pre-exilic period, sometimes even the time of Solomon. One can perhaps make a case that some form of eschatology existed that far back. As I said in my post, Black History Month at the Library, Mean Persians, ANE Universalism, Saul’s Reminder, Desolation—However Long It Takes, Dahood contends that the belief in a god who rules over all people was common in the ancient Near East as far back as the third millennium B.C.E. In my posts, God in the Ancient Near East and Thy Kingdom Come, I discuss the ancient Near Eastern belief that a righteous king will come and set things right. So Dahood may think that a Psalm can be eschatological and pre-exilic at the same time.
4. I finished Theodore Mullen’s Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries. I’ve wondered if Mullen’s thesis is that the Deuteronomistic History was created out of whole-cloth during the exile to give Israel a common history and a sense of nationality. I was a little thrown on page 273, where Mullen says that the Deuteronomist has to explain why God didn’t immediately destroy Israel for the sins of Ahab, and Dtr’s solution is that Ahab repented. According to Mullen, the ability of repentance to postpone divine punishment is a common Deuteronomistic theme. But why does the Deuteronomist have to solve any riddles, if he’s writing the story out of whole-cloth? That the Deuteronomist has to solve riddles at all indicates that he’s using sources that he considers authoritative and historical, and he’s trying to explain their contents in terms of his own religious ideology. That’s a challenge that creates puzzles!
On page 285, Mullen states that “The ethnic unity of Israel was one to be recreated from the traditions, history, and culture that had so nearly been lost in the flames that destroyed the old state of Israel and that had now nearly enveloped Judah.” So maybe Mullen does believe that the Deuteronomist used pre-exilic traditions, as he conformed those traditions to an ideology that would speak to Israel in exile and give her a sense of identity.
5. I also finished John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists. (I realize that I’ve been calling him “John Denton” over the last couple of posts. I’ll change that when I feel up to it.) On pages 386-388, he discusses the origin of the cosmos, according to Valentinian Gnosticism. Gnostics hated the material world and viewed it as the creation of an evil—or at least ignorant—Demiurge. Yet, there’s a higher god in Gnostic thought—a good God. So how did evil arise? According to the Valentinians, what got the ball rolling was the goddess Sophia (wisdom) desiring to know her origin and the “nature of the Forefather.” She fell as a result of this wish, and was later reinstated, yet her fall caused a lot of disruption in the realm of the gods. Out of this disruption came the Demiurge, who tried to create the world according to the eternal forms but was ignorant. The Demiurge made man, but his mother put the pneuma in human beings so that they can have the ability to know their spiritual selves and to be united with the divine after the material world comes to an end.