1. For Black History Month today, I watched the fourth episode of Roots. On it, Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy, is separated from her parents and sold to Tom Moore (played by Chuck Connors, of Rifleman fame), who rapes her. As a result, she has a son, Chicken George.
To show how things can inter-connect, Tom Moore actually talks about some of the events that the movie Amistad depicts. On Amistad, a West African named Cinque leads a revolt on a slave ship. According to Tom Moore, some of Cinque’s followers tried to incite revolts on plantations in Virginia, even going so far as to try to assassinate the Governor. This is the first scene with Tom Moore, and we learn something about him: he’s paranoid about slave revolts! We’ll see that in the next episode.
A theme that I thought about today was the apparent absence of justice. Before Kizzy was separated from her parents, she lived with them on the plantation of Dr. Reynolds (played by Robert Reed from the Brady Bunch). She was best friends from her youth with Missie Ann, played as a child by a young Traci Gold (from Growing Pains) and as an adult by Sandy Duncan. Missie Ann is really Dr. Reynolds’ daughter, from his affair with his brother’s wife. But she’s officially his niece. Because Kizzy fakes papers so that her boyfriend can run away, she is punished by being sold to Tom Moore. And Missie Ann does nothing to help her—she doesn’t intercede with her uncle to let Kizzy stay, even though her uncle adores her and gives her everything she wants. She does nothing.
But does she suffer in life? Kizzy had to endure rape for many years at the hands of Tom Moore. Did Missie Ann suffer in any way? I really don’t know. The next time I see her will be on the next episode, when she is old. Missie Ann rides in a carriage, showing that she’s still well-to-do. And she doesn’t even remember Kizzy. That looks like injustice—a lack of the evening of the scales. But maybe Missie Ann lost loved ones in the Civil War—I don’t know.
In Episode 4, Kizzy hopes that Tom Moore will get killed, particularly by her son, Chicken George. When I first watched this miniseries, I was seriously expecting that to happen. But the very last scene with Tom Moore is when he is old and smugly tells his wife, “What is a nigger to do?”, after he proposes to sell Chicken George’s family before he returns (or something like that). Tom’s very last words on the movie exult in Chicken George’s powerlessness as an African-American. Where is the justice?
But maybe there was justice. Missie Ann and Kizzy talk about the abolitionists and the Quakers who are “against God” (in Missie Ann’s words), and Missie Ann says that slavery is a part of God’s natural order. “If it weren’t, then the good Lord would change it!”, she said. But the good Lord did change it. Or at least somebody did, and it was through a bloody process known as the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln believed that the Civil War was God’s punishment of America for the institution of slavery, which calls to mind Thomas Jefferson’s statement when he was thinking about America’s treatment of African-Americans: “I tremble when I consider that God is just!” Could they have been right?
In a sense, mistreating others can result in a backlash by itself, whether or not God is involved. That’s why there were so many slave rebellions that were frightening Tom Moore: people don’t like to be mistreated. Life can look clean and neat, with the prosperous white plantation owner and his beautiful family, entertaining prominent guests, with African-American servants waiting on them hand and foot. The prosperous ones can easily conclude that they are experiencing God’s natural order—the way God intended things to be. But there’s a seething undercurrent of resentment that’s just waiting to bring the whole house down.
But is backlash biblical? Didn’t Jesus tell us to love our enemies? I think that Martin Luther King was right to try a non-violent approach to civil disobedience. I’m not sure how it would’ve worked if the slaves had tried it, though. But I recall James Farmer, Jr.’s words from the Great Debaters: the blacks are justified to use violence or civil disobedience. People should pray that they choose the latter. And, out of a desire for harmony and not retribution, that’s precisely what Dr. King did.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Helmer Ringgren’s “The Marriage Motif in Israelite Religion.” On page 423, Ringgren explores the possibility that the Song of Solomon has cultic roots. The woman seeks her beloved, which calls to mind the Ishtar-Tammuz religion and the Egyptian Osiris-Isis mysteries, as well as Hosea 2:7 (in which Israel seeks her lovers, the idols). The woman is strong and takes the initiative in Song of Solomon, so Ringgren offers the possibility that she was a goddess. There are processions in the Song (Song of Solomon 3:6-11), events occurring in a garden or vineyard (Song of Songs 1:7; 2:10-13, 15; 6:1, 10; cp. Isaiah 65:3; 66:17), and “references to raisins, apples, milk, and honey,” which “may allude to a ceremonial meal.” Was the mysterious Shulammite a goddess? Was the Song of Songs once part of a fertility ritual?
While Ringgren says that the Song of Songs had to have lost its pagan connotations to even make it into the canon, he points to ancient Near Eastern artifacts about YHWH and his female consort: “the occurrence of the goddess Anath together with Yahweh in the Elephantine texts, and the recently discovered references to Yahweh and his Asherah at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud” (424). Moreover, Ringgren notes that the exclusivist Yahwism that made its way into the Hebrew Bible didn’t totally abandon fertility religion: it merely re-adapted it to coincide with its Yahwistic exclusivism. So, for Ringgren, the Song of Songs’ roots have may been in a fertility cult, with a goddess.
3. In Psalms I: 1-50, I read Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 2, which is probably a coronation Psalm. In it, the kings of the earth threaten to rise against God’s son, the king, but God laughs at their vain pretense.
Because of the “genuinely archaic flavor of the language,” Dahood dates the Psalm to the tenth century, which would be the time of David and Solomon. He disagrees with scholars who think that it reflects post-exilic Jewish belief in a Messiah. And, on page 14, Dahood states that the Psalm is “railing against the Canaanite concepts of divine kingship, reminding the rebel Canaanite kings of vss. 1-2 that they too are appointed for the inevitable hour.” Dahood may be saying that the Canaanite vassal kings under David or Solomon are seeking to overthrow their captors and destroy Israel. After all, v 3 (in Dahood’s translation) says, “Let us snap their bonds, and throw off their yoke from us.”
4. On pages 27-32 of Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, Theodore Mullen offers a revisionist history of Queen Athaliah (II Kings 11), the daughter of the Northern Israelite king Omri (II Kings 8:26), who married the Davidic king in the South and sought to destroy the Davidic line after his death. Mullen sees some implausibilities in this story. For example, if everyone in Judah were against Ahaziah, as the text indicates, then how did she get the power to slaughter the House of David and to reign? She couldn’t have done that alone, without political support, right?
Mullen presents an alternative scenario: perhaps she was trying to preserve the meager remains of the House of David (Joash) after Jehu had slaughtered it in an attempt to take over the South (see II Kings 10:12-13, in which Jehu kills the brothers of Ahaziah, the king of Judah). Or maybe Joash wasn’t a Davidid at the outset, but was part of a conspiracy by the high priest Jehoiada to take over the throne. I’m unclear about why the Deuteronomist would attempt to portray Athaliah as evil, or the high priest would oppose her. My guess is that they didn’t like someone from the House of Omri ruling on the throne of David, since Omri was (for them) evil in the sight of the LORD. So, for Mullen, the Deuteronomist made her look worse than she really was—in history or the traditions. (Mullen’s somewhat of a minimalist, so I don’t know if he believes there was a historical Athaliah.)
5. Ammonius of Athens was a first century C.E. Greek philosopher and the teacher of Plutarch. In a speech (recorded or invented by Plutarch), Ammonius refers to the “oneness and unchangingness of the Supreme Deity…for whom Apollo (etymologized as ‘Not-Many’) is the perfect epithet.” Ammonius also corrects those who identify Apollo with the sun rather than with the sun’s archetype, and he goes on to say that the acts attributed to the Supreme God are actually performed by a “daemon,” “Hades” or “Pluto,” who is concerned with the sub-lunar region. So John Dillon says on page 191 of The Middle Platonists.
I wonder how Apollo became the Supreme God, since I thought that title belonged to Zeus. Did he take over the highest position in the Pantheon, as Marduk of Babylon did? Was Apollo called the Supreme God, the same way people in the ancient Near East called many gods the Supreme or only god, whatever his place in the pantheon may have been (see God in the Ancient Near East)? Was Apollo a manifestation of Zeus? I don’t know.
And is Ammonius saying what the Gnostics proposed about God: that a sinister sub-deity is actually ruling this earth, while the true God is above and beyond him?
I also found it intriguing that Ammonius separates the god from nature, something that the Hebrew Bible also does when it criticizes those who worship the sun (Deuteronomy 4:19; 17:3; Job 31:26-27).