1. For Black History Month today, I watched Episode 6 of Roots, which is the final episode. The Civil War is over. Blacks are free, but what are they to do with their freedom? They need to find some way to support themselves. As Master Harvey said when he came to his celebrating slaves, “I’m not sure where we’ll go from here.” Freedom is great, but then there are the nuts-and-bolts of how to survive as free people, once the security of slavery is gone. Slavery had its own set of insecurities, mind you: a slave getting beaten on his master’s whim, slave women being forced by their master, the callous split-up of slave families. But, by and large, slaves didn’t have to worry about where their next meal would come from.
Someone I know once made this point in support of slavery (yes, I know such people!). “At least the slaves were taken care of,” he said. “But, after the war, the North just forgot about the freed slaves and left them to falter. That wasn’t very nice!”
But, actually, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman sought to give free blacks forty acres and a mule, to get them on a path of financial independence. But President Andrew Johnson revoked that order, and the property was returned to its white owners.
I’ve been thinking some about the “nice slave masters” as I’ve watched Roots. Granted, there were masters who were good people. As Chicken George’s wife, Mathilda, said to the departing Master Harvey, “You was better than most of ‘em.” An Englishman who wanted to buy Chicken George said he’d buy his wife and kids, too, saying, “I don’t like to split up families.” Heck, even though Dr. Reynolds (Mike Brady) split up Kunta’s family, he said earlier in the movie that this wasn’t his policy. “We’re one big happy family here,” he said. “As long as the slaves obey my commands, I’ll keep their families together.”
Sure, there were good masters. But a problem with slavery was that they could split up the slaves’ families. Family togetherness shouldn’t be based on the whim of a master.
2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read J. Gerald Janzen’s “The Place of the Book of Job in the History of Israel’s Religion.”
I don’t entirely understand Janzen’s point, but he makes an intertextual connection between the Book of Job and Mark 10:35-45, in which two disciples ask to be given prominent positions of rulership in Jesus’ kingdom. Jesus asks them if they’re able to do what’s required for the position: suffer. They brashly respond, “We are able.”
On pages 534, Janzen seems to be saying that God’s giving Job a nature lesson to invite Job to rule God’s wild creation. Yet, through suffering, Job learns that he’s but dust and ashes in relation to God, and that subverts his “formerly royal self-understanding.” Was Job being prepared to become a humble ruler of God’s creation? Job wanted to rule, but the prerequisite requirement was suffering.
A while back, I wrote a post, Job and Tobit, which contrasted Job before his suffering with Job after his suffering. Before his suffering, Job helped the poor and was their advocate, but he looked down on them as if they were rifraff. (Actually, he said this while he was suffering, when how he truly felt was coming out!) And he saw God as a taskmaster whom he had to appease with good works, for the security of himself and his family. He thought that God consistently rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. But, through his suffering, Job started to notice a lot of unfairness in life, as the wicked forced people off their land into poverty, while dying prosperous at a ripe old age.
Was God telling Job in the whirlwind speech that the world is wild, and that Job needs to do his part as a human being to tame it? But he must do so from a position of humility and compassion, not pride and arrogance, regarding those he helps as part of the human race, just like him.
3. In Psalms I: 1-50, I read Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 45. On page 272, he states:
In Canaanite literature Prince Yassib is said to have taxed his father with failure to defend the rights of the poor and the widows and should accordingly abdicate his throne. The text is UT, 127:45-50, “You judge not the cause of the widow, nor adjudicate the case of the wretched. You do not drive out those that prey on the poor (dl), nor feed the fatherless in front of you, the widow behind your back.”
This interested me for two reasons. First, it says that other ancient Near Eastern nations besides Israel criticized rulers for not upholding social justice. I knew from the Code of Hammurapi that the king promoted justice for the vulnerable of society, but I’ve heard some argue that the prophets of other ancient Near Eastern nations supported the government, while those in Israel (or, more accurately, the true ones) spoke truth to power. This may be an accurate statement about prophecy, but there were people in other ancient Near Eastern countries who spoke truth to power.
Second, a king could abdicate the throne. This is important to me because it may indicate that King Saul could have abdicated the throne, rather than go down to his death defending his claim to it. I often thought that Saul got a raw deal: God rejected Saul as king and preferred David, but could Saul have abdicated the monarchy and had a rich relationship with God, as a private citizen? Or did Saul have to stay on the throne and take whatever God dished out to him? Perhaps the former is the case. I’d like to think so.
4. On page 124 of Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, Theodore Mullen says that Joshua was the last person called the servant of the LORD in the Deuteronomistic History, until David came along. The exception is Samson, who refers to himself in prayer as “your servant” (Judges 15:18). According to Mullen, David was similar to Joshua in the area of the Conquest, for David completed what Joshua began but (according to Judges) did not finish.
5. In John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists, I read a quote on pages 283-284 from the second century C.E. philosopher Albinus, who said that God is Father because he’s the cause of all things and orders “the heavenly Mind and the Soul of the World in accordance with himself and his thoughts,” setting in order the nature of the world. That reminds me of a brief discussion I had under Rachel Held Evans’ post, Lent, Depravity, and Why Hyper-Calvinism Has It Backwards. AmyB said that God was the Father only of believers, and I replied with Acts 17, which says that we’re all God’s offspring (and Paul was saying this to non-believers). AmyB responded:
In that passage, Paul is quoting a Greek poet who says that we are God’s offspring. Clearly, Paul is using a cultural allusion that the audience would be familiar with to help them understand his point. We certainly are all created by God, our life and breath are sustained by Him. And so in that sense are his “offspring” in that we sprung forth from His creative hand. And more than that, all people are made in His image! That is significant as well. It seems to me that the primary point Paul is making here is that we all have it within us to recognize that there is one real God, who is not made by human hands.
I guess Albinus shows that at least someone in the ancient world interpreted God’s fatherhood in light of his role as creator.