1. For Black History Month today (February 14), I watched Alex Haley’s Queen, which is about Haley’s paternal grandmother, Queen (played by Halle Berry). Roots was largely about his mom’s side of the family, but the character of Queen was still in Roots: The Next Generation (see Queen vs. Roots: The Next Generation). Queen was a mulatto, who was born from a love affair between her mother Easter, a slave (played by Jasmine Guy), and her master, James Jackson, Jr. (played by Tim Daly). The movie was about Queen’s struggle to fit in and survive.
I picked this movie for Valentine’s Day because, more than other Black History movies than I have, it has a lot of romance. James Jackson, Sr. (played by Martin Sheen) was encouraging his son to marry a high-class woman, Lizzie (played by Patricia Clarkson). When James, Jr. replied that he didn’t love her, James, Sr. told him the story of how he married his mother, Sallie (played by Ann Margaret). When he first saw Sallie, James, Sr. said, he thought that she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, but he didn’t love her because he didn’t know her that well. But he learned to love her and found that he couldn’t live without her. A touching part of this scene was when one of the slaves, Captain Jack (played by Paul Winfield), left the door slightly open so that Sallie could hear her husband say those things about her—so she could learn how much he loved and valued her.
The love between Easter and James, Jr. was also highlighted in the movie. From what I’ve heard about the book, it says that they grew up together, so their love went back to their childhood. As an adult, James, Jr. confided in Easter more than he did in his own wife, telling Easter his honest opinion that war was approaching, whereas he told his wife that everything would soon blow over. At Easter’s death, he called her his love. And he regularly visited her grave. His love for Easter didn’t influence him to welcome Queen as part of his family, for he was trapped in a system with solid boundaries, which he didn’t dare to violate. But his relationship with Easter was far more than a fling or a lust-affair, of the sort that many white masters had with their female slaves. For James, Jr., love was a big part of it.
Queen’s marriage with her husband, the sharecropper and ferryman Alec Haley (played by Danny Glover), also deserves note. I liked how she said to her husband at the end of the movie that, when she was a girl, she dreamed of a prince coming on horseback to sweep her off her feet, but she never envisioned her prince riding on a ferry. And Alec Haley was a true prince. He loved Queen, even when she was too bitter to give him (or anyone else) the time of day. He especially tried to be a good father to her son, Abner, who wasn’t his biological son, but was born from her previous love. And he stood by his wife even when she was in the insane asylum.
I said that this movie had a lot of romance, but that’s not entirely the right word. What it portrays is love between a man and a woman, who decide to meet life’s challenges together.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Robert Oden, Jr.’s “The Place of Covenant in the Religion of Israel.” Essentially, Oden discusses the different scholarly attitudes on the concept of covenant in ancient Israelite religion. Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar who promulgated the Documentary Hypothesis (which divides the Pentateuch into four sources—J, E, P, and D), argued that the use of the term berit (covenant) “to characterize the relationship between Yahweh and Israel is something unknown to the pre-exilic prophets, including Hosea, and is ‘an entirely new thing’ when it appears later” (430). Later, scholars argued that ancient Israelite belief that Israel had a covenant with God went back much much earlier than Wellhausen proposed. They pointed to Hittite treaties, in which an inferior and a superior made a covenant, to show that the covenant concept was quite ancient and could influence Israelite thought even in pre-exilic times. And concepts in pre-exilic biblical writings—such as love—were read in the context of Israel’s covenant with YHWH.
According to Oden, the pendulum has swung back to Wellhausen, as scholars claim that the covenant was an innovation by the Deuteronomic School. I’m not sure if that means they date the covenant concept to the exile, however, for Oden states that they date it to the eighth-seventh centuries B.C.E. What’s different, he claims, is that, unlike the scholars of a generation ago, they don’t “support a Mosaic or tribal league date for the covenant’s origin” (446).
This essay posed questions that I hadn’t considered before. I assumed that, if there was an ancient Israel with a Yahwistic religion prior to the exile, then, of course, she believed in a covenant: a subordinate relationship with YHWH, in which she’d obey him to receive blessing and to avoid punishment. But, come to think of it, all ancient Near Eastern nations had that kind of relationship with their deities! As far as I know, they didn’t claim to be a covenant people. Covenant implies an agreement, in which an inferior party takes upon itself the responsibility of following the laws of the superior. God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt was a big part of the covenant, since that’s what entitled Israel to follow God; other nations, by contrast, didn’t have their own Exodus story. So there’s a sense in which the Israelite covenant concept is unique. The question is: When did it emerge?
3. In Psalms I: 1-50, I read Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 18. On page 111, he discusses the god Athtar, who “was obviously unfit to supplant Baal as the ruler of the visible earth and had to be content with governing the dead.” The story of Helel ben Shachar (or “Lucifer” in the KJV) in Isaiah 14 may be based on this ancient Near Eastern tale.
Actually, it appears that I wrote about this a while back, in Helel Ben Shachar: Satan. But Milton went through my mind as I read it this time: It’s better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.
4. As I read Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, I got an idea about Theodore Mullen’s view on the Conquest stories. I may be wrong, but my blog is a place for me to convey my impressions, as imperfect as they might be. In Murtha and Wilson, Antwone Fisher, Monarchy and Theology, Suffering Samson, Tetrateuch After Deuteronomy, Philo Fun, I was puzzled about Mullen’s treatment of the Conquest in his book about the Pentateuch. He said that the post-exilic period was the date for the Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers). But, for him, Deuteronomy existed before those books, and it had the Conquest. But he says that the Tetrateuch came along partly to provide other rationales for Israel’s possession of the land (God’s promise to Abraham, God owns the Promised Land because he created the earth and can give it to whomever he pleases, etc.), since the Conquest motif was no longer viable in the post-exilic period. As he notes, the Jews weren’t entering Palestine as conquerors, but as the conquered. But I was confused, for I wondered how Mullen reconciled this with his claim that Deuteronomy dates to the exilic or post-exilic periods. Could the Conquest tradition speak to the people’s post-exilic situation, while also not speaking to it? Is Mullen inconsistent here?
But maybe Mullen’s saying that the Conquest tradition emerged in exile to separate the Jews from the other nations, to encourage them that God was on their side (even in exile) and that they were different from the other nations, which deserved to be destroyed. Mullen says that the exile was a time when Israel was confronted with the threat of assimilation, so she needed firm boundaries to mark her off from the other nations. When Israel was returning from exile, however, the Conquest tradition was no longer adequate, for the Jews were coming to their land as conquered people. They may have been able to dream of Conquest in exile, but when their return became a reality, they saw how unrealistic it really was.
Mullen may have a point, but it’s not an absolute, for Ezra-Nehemiah seems to hold on to aspects of the Conquest tradition, particularly the part about not intermarrying with the native inhabitants of Palestine.
Also, those who date the Conquest traditions to the pre-exilic period make a similar point to Mullen, particularly those who don’t believe that the Conquest literally occurred. Many argue that the Israelites were disaffected Canaanites, who developed the Conquest tradition to distinguish themselves from the other Canaanites, with whom they shared similarities.
5. In John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists, I read about Plutarch’s views on daemons, who were spirit beings and intermediaries between humans and the divine. Plutarch was a Middle Platonist philosopher in the first-second centuries C.E. On pages 218-220, Dillon says that, for Plutarch, the righteous souls could become daemons and eventually gods. As daemons, they could guide or punish humans. Yet, they don’t have free reign, for they can be punished if they abuse their authority.
This is an interesting concept, and we see something similar in various cultures’ regard for their ancestors, or in Buddhism’s belief in bodhisatvas (people who have attained Enlightenment, yet help us do the same), or in Catholic belief in intercessory saints, or in New Age concepts of spirit guides. I find the concept intriguing, but I don’t want it to detract from the worship of God, which was probably the fear of ancient Israelites who disliked the cultural regard for ancestors, or Protestants who don’t care for how Catholics view departed saints.
6. At Latin mass this morning, philosopher priest talked about peace. For him, we arrive at internal peace when our passions and thoughts are directed to a single goal: the beatific vision of God. And we can only have peace with one another if we believe in Jesus Christ, he said.
I can somewhat see his point. If I loved God above my own selfish desires, then I’d probably have inner peace, since the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of my selfish desires wouldn’t matter to me anymore. I’d be so drunk with the love of God! And, if everyone acted this way, then we wouldn’t hurt one another, or be in competition, or give others a hard time for not meeting our wants.
But life isn’t like this. People are different, so there is conflict. And that’s where our commitment to peace is tested, as we try to live together while respecting our individuality and variety.