1. Today, for Black History Month, I watched the second episode of Roots. In it, the African Kunta Kinte has arrived to America on a slave ship, and he’s purchased by Mr. Reynolds, who’s played by Lorne Greene of Bonanza fame. Kunta runs away, but he’s recaptured by Mr. Ames, who supervises the slaves on Mr. Reynolds’ plantation. In what’s probably the most famous scene from the miniseries, Mr. Ames has Kunta whipped until Kunta says that his name is Toby—the name that Mr. Reynolds gave to Kunta.
One thing that stood out to me was that Kunta could’ve been bought by the same guy who purchased Kunta’s love from Africa, Fanta. But the guy lost in the auction to Reynolds. Would Kunta have been happier with Fanta? Maybe. Maybe not. Had he been with Fanta at the outset, he wouldn’t have gotten his foot cup off for running away to meet her. But, even if he were with Fanta on the other guy’s farm, his master would’ve still had power over the lives of the couple. The master could sleep with Fanta anytime he wished, regardless of what Kunta thought about it. And he could also take away any children that Kunta and Fanta had.
I did a little reading on the guy who played Mr. Ames, Vic Morrow. He looked familiar to me, plus I liked how Mr. Ames acknowledged the humanity of the African slaves. Unfortunately, however, that insight didn’t lead him to treat them better, but rather worse, for he (in contrast to more educated whites, such as Reynolds and his physician brother) believed that slaves had to be made, not born, implying that he didn’t deem slavery to be part of the natural order. Reynolds and his brother, by contrast, held that Africans were naturally suited for slavery. But Ames was far from being an abolitionist, mind you! Because he thought that slaves had to be made, he tried to break their spirit and take away their hopes, so that they’d view slavery as their only option for the rest of their lives. As Charlton Heston said to Pharaoh Sethi in the Ten Commandments, “You strip them of hope and faith, all because they are of another race, another creed.”
Sadly, Vic Morrow died at a young age. He’s also known as the white racist from the 1983 Twilight Zone movie, who became an African-American pursued by the Ku Klux Klan, and a Jew hunted by the Nazis. He died on the set for that movie, while playing a Vietnamese man who was about to be killed by American soldiers. A helicopter crashed on top of him.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Moshe Weinfeld’s “The Tribal League at Sinai.” Weinfeld argues that there was YHWH worship among Midianite/Qenite tribes. Egyptian toponymic lists substantiate this. And Weinfeld argues that the relationship between Moses and Jethro (which, for him, was “the kernal out of which grew the whole epic of the exodus and Sinai”) was historical, for why would a pious Israel make up a story of Jethro eating a meal with Aaron and the elders before YHWH, or of Jethro coming up with Israel’s judicial system, had these things not been true?
Weinfeld also talks about excavations at Timnah, which include a Midianite shrine on top of a mutilated statue of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, as well as a copper snake like that made by Moses in Numbers 21:4-9. Notwithstanding the snake, Weinfeld also states that aniconism was practiced by “nomadic tribes in the wilderness of Sinai and southern Palestine and seems to have persisted down to the time of the Nabateans in the third to the second century B.C.E.” (310).
I’m not entirely clear what Weinfeld’s thesis is, but part of it seems to be that the Midianites played a role in the development of Israelite Yahwism. I wonder if anyone has argued that it was vice-versa: that Moses or Israel contributed to the development of Midianite Yahwism. Exodus 18 presents Jethro acknowledging the superiority of the LORD after hearing about the Exodus!
3. In Reading Between Texts, I read Deborah Krause’s “A Blessing Cursed: The Prophets Prayer for Barren Womb and Dry Breasts in Hosea 9.” In Hosea 9:14, the prophet asks the LORD to give Israel a barren womb and dry breasts. A prophet ordinarily intercedes for Israel by asking God to show her mercy, but this one does the opposite. Israel believes that her blessings are from another god, and the LORD wants her to realize that they are from him, through drastic means, if necessary.
What struck me as I read this article was Hosea 9’s reference to Baal-Peor, the Numbers 25 incident in which Israelite males forsook the LORD to pursue Midianite and Moabite babes. I was surprised to see that in Hosea 9 because I thought Hosea romanticized the wilderness, much like Jeremiah, who, in Jeremiah 2:2, presents Israel devotedly following God into the desert. In Hosea 2:14ff., God says he will speak alluringly to Israel in the wilderness and she will sing to him, as she did after her departure from Egypt. In Hosea 13:5, God says that he knew Israel in the wilderness, a place of drought, but she has forgotten him in her prosperity.
There could be different authors of Hosea here—one romanticizing the wilderness days, and another viewing them as a time of apostacy. Or maybe there’s a single author who views Israel's wilderness experience as a time of good and bad, or at least as better than what came later (namely, Israel forgetting God in her prosperity).
4. On page 245 of Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, Theodore Mullen states that the Jubilee law in the Torah (the return of sold land to its original owner every fifty years) may have been designed after the exile, to speak to people who viewed themselves as Israelites returning from foreign captivity. (Remember that Mullen doesn’t believe that the returned exiles were necessarily connected with the Israelites who left Palestine about a century before—see Men of Honor, Direction of Languages, the Spies Did WHAT?, Something to Conserve). For Mullen, the message of the Jubilee law may have been that the Promised Land belongs to the Israelites, not the people who took it over when the Israelites were exiled. For Mullen (if my impression is correct), the Pentateuch’s emphasis on the land belonging to the Israelites was part of an attempt to create a people, with its own land.
5. In The Middle Platonists, John Dillon refers to Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras (14), which states that Pythagoras spent time in Palestine consorting with “the descendants of Mochos the prophet and philosopher” (143). Iamblichus was a third-fourth century Neo-Platonist philosopher, but Dillon speculates that his work may contain an earlier legend about Pythagoras. In the first century C.E., the Hellenistic Jew Philo of Alexandria asserted that Greek philosophers got their stuff from Moses. Could he have based this in part on a story about Pythagoras learning from the Palestinian descendants of Mochos, or Moses? And where did this legend come from? Iamblichus wasn’t a Jew or a Christian, so why would he make up a story glorifying Moses, if Mochus was Moses? Would he be trying to promote good interfaith relations, or appealing to Jews and Christians to accept his philosophy because it was ultimately from their own sage?