Jesse Owens Story, Righteous Sufferer, The Proof of the Pudding, Priestess of the Household, Evil

1. For Black History Month today, I watched The Jesse Owens Story, a 1984 film that won a Primetime Emmy Award, and was nominated for other Emmys. Jesse Owens was an African-American athlete who competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, winning four gold medals. Adolf Hitler hoped to showcase the alleged superiority of the Aryan race, but Jesse Owens shot down that dream, as did other African-Americans who competed in Berlin that year (such as Jackie Robinson's brother).

In the movie, Jesse Owens is accused of tax evasion, and the African-American assigned by the court to investigate Owens' past has an ax to grind against Jesse. Jesse was in the public eye for thirty years, and he did not speak out in favor of the Civil Rights movement. Rather, he traveled the country giving speeches about patriotism and family. When two African-American athletes gave the black power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics, the Olympic authorities dispatched Jesse Owens to express their displeasure. As far as the investigator was concerned, Jesse Owens was an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his race.

But the investigator changes his mind as he talks with people who knew Jesse, as well as Jesse himself. He learned that Jesse Owens had a reason for being a Republican, for Franklin Roosevelt (like Adolf Hitler) did not shake his hand after the Olympics, whereas FDR's Republican opponent, Governor Alf Landon, did. The investigator never fully accepted Jesse's approach of dialogue as opposed to confrontation (a la Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Power movement), but he saw that Jesse tried to help African-Americans advance by assisting troubled youths (sometimes at ungodly hours of the night), getting Union Teamster Jimmy Hoffa to push for more African-American cab drivers in Chicago, and giving money to those who needed it. The investigator learned that Jesse Owens was a man of integrity, but he was puzzled as to why he cheated on his taxes. He finds that, with all Jesse's talk about dialogue, Jesse had a lot of deep-seated resentment about the racism he had experienced throughout his life. Jesse decided to keep money back because he felt he had paid his dues to an unappreciative country.

The movie is about different generations' reactions to racial discrimination. Jesse thought that racism was the way things were and that confrontation accomplished little---only a lot of trouble. He tried to get what he could for himself and his race within the system, which he thought was gradually changing. In one poignant scene, Jesse is talking with his family about the 1968 Olympics. His daughters are taking him to task for opposing the athletes who gave the Black Power salute, whereas he replied that it only caused trouble, threatening the advancements that African-Americans had made. Jesse tells his daughters the story of how he returned from the 1936 Summer Olympics and went to Alabama to speak at a banquet given in his honor, yet he couldn't eat at that banquet because he was black. He was laughing at that, as if it were a funny story, but his daughters thought that was horrible. And it turned out that, deep down, he thought so too.

The movie has a lot of actors who were in Roots and Roots: The Next Generation: Levar Burton, Ben Vereen, Debbie Morgan, Lynn Hamilton (who was also Verdie on the Waltons), Dorian Harewood (Simon Haley on Roots: The Next Generation) as Jesse, and Georg Stanford Brown (Tom Harvey on Roots and Roots: the Next Generation) as the skeptical investigator. Tom Bosley plays Jimmy Hoffa (though it was hard for Tom Bosley to appear sinister and calculating, as much as he tried). And George Kennedy---Carter McKay from Dallas---was Jesse's encouraging white coach, but he was nothing like his Dallas character because of his accent, his likeability, and his financial destitution (though Jesse changed that for him after winning at the Olympics!).

I love this movie. Jesse Owens had a different approach from other black leaders I've discussed here: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Yet, his goal was still to do good.

Here's an excellent article, which includes information on Jesse's political beliefs. Jesse was a Republican who was critical of the Great Society, and he admired Booker T. Washington, who encouraged African-Americans to improve themselves rather than confront white society. Jesse eventually changed his position on the Civil Rights Movement, however, concluding that it played a significant role in the advancement of African-Americans. The movie somewhat chronicles that change. At the end of the movie, Jesse still held on to his approach of reaching one person at a time through dialogue (as he learned from his coach, "If we walk enough and talk enough, we'll eventually reach an understanding"). But he helped a legislator friend of his pass a law banning racial discrimination in public places. Maybe both approaches are important.

2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Paul Hanson's "Israelite Religion in the Early Post-Exilic Period." On page 505, he refers to "the theme of the righteous sufferer found already [by the time Job was written] in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite sources..." I referred to one possible source for that in my post, Roots 5, Josiah the Nationalist, Immortal King, Old Traditions?, Plato’s Leap?: Ugaritic literature mentions a King Khirta, who, like Job, loses his entire family. James Crenshaw's article on the Book of Job in the Anchor Bible Dictionary discusses other sources. Some of them date to the second millennium B.C.E., which is before the Book of Job was written.

The narrative I've often gotten is that, before books such as Job and Ecclesiastes came on the scene, there was a belief that God consistently rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. The universe was orderly, in short. We see this sort of belief in Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History, Proverbs, and Psalms. In Psalms, there are righteous people who suffer, but they trust that the universe is orderly and that God will deliver them and punish the wicked. In Job and Ecclesiastes, however, there is doubt that God even operates that way.

I've often wondered why Job and Ecclesiastes emerged, and why people didn't notice before that life is unfair. The answer I sometimes tell myself is that much of the Bible came from an elite scribal class, which could believe in an orderly cosmos because it was insulated from disorder. But the "righteous sufferer" stories in other cultures probably came from a scribal class as well, so being in an elite doesn't mean one has to promote an orderly and fair cosmos.

But the Egyptian Admonitions from Ipuwer refers to social turmoil, and that may have been what prompted its author to question Egyptian gods. Scholars have said that a catastrophic event touched the nation of Judah, including the elites, and that's why books like Job and Ecclesiastes emerged. For Paul Hanson, that event was the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E.

3. In Psalms I: 1-50, I read Mitchell Dahood's comments on Psalm 47. On v 9, which states that God is king, Dahood says: "What the phrase probably means is that Yahweh had proved himself to be a king by his victories over his rivals; hence he is king now."

Is the proof of the pudding in the eating? If God has not proven himself to be king, should we accept him as such? In the Bible, there is a lot of waiting, as people struggle to trust in God when he does not appear to be king, on account of all the evil and chaos around them. But, sometimes, they have stories of God's mighty works in the past, and that encourages their faith. Similarly, we have the testimonies of people whom God has brought through trials. Or, if we struggle to believe in that, we hopefully have their support!

4. In Theodore Mullen's Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, Theodore Mullen states (on page 142): Despite the dominant patriarchal emphasis of the Israelite culture and society, the deuteronomistic writer is careful to include the female half of that society in the projection of this ideal ethnic community. Victory and prophecy could be realized through female as well as through male leadership.

Why was the Deuteronomist egalitarian, at least compared to other biblical authors? Could that have been his way of coping with the exile? In the exile, there was no temple cult, and the family became the center for religious instruction---or at least one of the centers. And, in the family, the woman is prominent. Did the Deuteronomist want to encourage women to do their part in the religious and moral education of their children?

5. The second century C.E. philosopher Albinus says the following about evil (the quote is on page 302 of John Dillon's The Middle Platonists):

If someone turns himself towards vice, first of all it will not be as vice that he will be turning to it, but as to some good; and if someone comes to be in a state of vice, it can only be that he is deceived, in that he believes that he can derive from some lesser evil a greater good, and in this way he comes to vice without willing it.

I talked some about this issue in a post a while back, Evil. Often, we're in pursuit of some good when we do evil, whether that good be sexual pleasure, money, or a view we may have about protecting the good of society from people we consider villains (I'm thinking here of the motivations of Hitler and the KKK). But, when we end up hurting somebody else for our own pleasure, how could we consider that good?

Roots 6, Job the Humble Ruler, Defend the Poor or Abdicate, The First Servant in a While, God the Creating Father

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.

Roots 5, Josiah the Nationalist, Immortal King, Old Traditions?, Plato’s Leap?

1. For Black History Month today, I watched Episode 5 of Roots. I want to correct some things that I said in my post, Roots 4, Song of Songs Fertility Ritual?, Dahood on Psalm 2, Athaliah the Heroine, Ammonius on Apollo. Please see that post for background information, particularly my comments under (1.).

I said that slavemaster Tom Moore was obsessively afraid of slave revolts. Although he talked about a slave revolt in Episode 4, he didn't bring up the topic again until after Nat Turner had launched his slave rebellion. So was he continually paranoid, or simply responding to a recent event?

I wondered if Missie Ann lost loved ones in the Civil War. I asked this because I was curious about whether or not she suffered on account for slavery, for she betrays her slave friend, Kizzy, in Episode 4. Was there justice? There's a scene in Episode 5 in which Missie Ann is old and doesn't remember Kizzy, and I thought she may have suffered as a result of the Civil War by the time of that scene. Actually, the scene occurred before the Civil War. So did Missie Ann suffer? Maybe not. She's like the people Job criticizes, who oppress others, yet prosper and live to a ripe old age. Personally, I'm a little surprised that old Missie Ann didn't remember Kizzy. She remembered her when she returned to her uncle's (who was actually her father) farm as a young woman, although she hadn't seen Kizzy since their childhood. But maybe old age can cause one's memory to deteriorate. And yet, doesn't Alzheimer's entail remembering the earlier events of one's life, not the later ones? In that case, she should've remembered Kizzy.

I said that Tom Moore didn't experience justice. He did suffer, though. He felt like people regarded him as a cracker, so he was continually trying to prove them wrong. And he accumulated a heavy gambling debt. Is that evening the scales? Not really. But it's something.

I said that I expected Chicken George to kill Tom, and I was surprised that he didn't. Actually, on Episode 5, he was about to do so, since Tom had stripped away his hope for freedom. But his mom, Kizzy, stopped him, telling George that Tom was his pappy. I wonder why Kizzy did that. I doubt that she had affection for Tom, for she regarded him as a "Tubob" who could not be trusted. Maybe she thought that Tom still deserved respect as George's father. I'd think that her primary motive was that she didn't want George to get in trouble for murder, but she didn't mention that (as far as I remember).

One thing that stood out to me today: the Southerners in the movie were excited about the Civil War! I've seen that in other movies. I have a miniseries, The Blue and the Gray, which I may or may not get to for Black History Month. But the Southerners there are elated when South Carolina secedes from the Union! On Queen, by contrast, the Southerners were afraid of the onset of war.

I've thought some about war in my reflections on Black History Month. In Amistad, John Quincy Adams says that the Supreme Court should decide in favor of the slaves, and, if that offends the South and precipitates another war, so be it; in his eyes, it would be the continuation of the American Revolution, a fight for freedom! In my post, Amistad, I Kings 13, I was slightly surprised that Adams didn't consider the negative impact of a war on Americans' lives.

In Glory, the free and educated black, Thomas, enthusiastically enlists in the black Civil War regiment. I wondered if he truly knew what he was getting himself into. I was rather surprised when most of the characters died at the end of the movie, as they lost the battle. In many movies that I see, a man goes off to war and returns as a hero, as he regains his social status with pats on the back. That's what I was expecting for so many of the characters on Glory. But the opposite happened. Their lives were cut short at a young age.

On Roots, Southerners are excited about war. They get to challenge and to beat those elitist, supercilious Yankees! It's like people preparing for a football game. "We will, we will rock you!" But war's not exactly like a football game, as much as we like to treat it as that, in war after war. Lives are lost, or dramatically changed. The Southerners on Queen recognized that, so they were afraid of the prospect of war.

2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Norbert Lohfink's "The Cult Reform of Josiah of Judah: 2 Kings 22-23 as a Source for the History of Israelite Religion." In my post, Great Debaters, Feminism, Dahood, Dtr-What?, We're in Hades!, I discussed different views on the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-II Kings). Martin Noth said that all of it was composed in exile, whereas later scholars said there was an initial stage written in the time of Josiah, and a later stage in the exilic period. Interestingly, Lohfink says that Wellhausen (who was before Noth, and formulated the Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch) believed that the Deuteronomistic History had two stages. So scholars were actually returning to an older view when they rejected Noth's scenario.

Lohfink also explores the possibility that Josiah's reform was a nationalistic reaction against Assyria, which wanted to shove its customs down Judah's throat. Josiah was standing by traditional Judahite culture, to the exclusion of foreign elements. In this scenario, he was doing what Theodore Mullen claims, even if Mullen doesn't really believe in a historical Josiah, and sees him as a character devised to promote ethnic boundaries to exilic and post-exilic Israel, which was on the verge of losing its identity through assimilation. In the scenario that Lohfink discusses, a historical Josiah was trying to perform the same task---uphold national boundaries and prevent assimilation---centuries before the exile of the Jews.

Some have contended that Josiah had broad nationalistic ambitions. He challenges the imperialistic king of Egypt, for example, losing his life in the process (II Kings 23:29). Was he seeking to recreate the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms, to restore Israel to her former glory? Was his religious reform a part of that? And is there a theological lesson here? God loved Josiah's religious reform, even if it had a nationalistic motivation. But God didn't exactly share Josiah's nationalistic ambitions, for he allowed Josiah to get killed by the king of Egypt. Often, so many of us seek glory in our religious pursuits, but God wants us to think beyond that.

3. In Psalms I: 1-50, Mitchell Dahood says that "the king was expected to receive the gift of immortality on the day of his coronation" (132). He refers to King Kirta of Ugaritic poetry, who was considered immortal because he was the son of El and Asherah. Here's a summary of his story. He experiences the loss of his family (like Job) and a debilitating disease, from which El saves him. But the story ends with his son attempting to take over the throne, so we're not told if Kirta dies or not.

Dahood is making these points in commenting on Psalm 21:5, which (in his translation) reads: "Life eternal he asked of you, you gave it to him; length of days, eternity, and everlasting." Does eternity mean forever and ever here, or merely a very long time, meaning the Psalmist is saying that the king will live long before his death? Or could the king's eternal life exist in the perpetuity of his dynasty?

In the Book of Daniel, foreign kings are told to "live forever" (Daniel 2:4; 3:9; 5:10; 6:6, 21). But they died! Were they being told literally to live forever, or did living forever mean something other than a life that does not end?

4. In my reading of Theodore Mullen's Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, particularly pages 93ff., I was unclear as to whether he believed that the Deuteronomistic Historian used old traditions to compose his history. Mullen seems to say "yes" and "no," but I may be misreading him. I can understand if he's saying "no," for, to him, the stories speak so appropriately to Israel's exilic and post-exilic period that it makes sense they were invented at that time. But could they have a historical kernel, even if the interpretation of that kernel is rooted in an ideology responding to the Jews' exile?

5. For my reading of John Dillon's The Middle Platonists, something on page 277 caught my eye: "The second [example of Albinus' scholastic method] is the ascent through those propositions that can be proved and demonstrated to propositions which are indemonstrable and immediate. The illustration for this process is the enquiry into the immortality of the soul in Phaedrus 245Cff."

Phaedrus is a Platonic dialogue, and you can see a summary of its arguments on the immortality of the soul here. I may not understand them entirely, but I wonder how much they're based on presuppositions and analogies. Plato says, for instance, that the soul is self-moving, so it's always been around. But why's he think that? Even if it's self-moving (and I'm not sure what that means, at the moment), why couldn't a creator have made it in a self-moving state, meaning it's self-moving and had a beginning? Plus, why couldn't it stop self-moving---at death?

Plato says that the soul is immortal because it's most like the divine. But do similarities in some areas have to entail similarities in all areas, in this case, immortality?

Here's a summary of the Opposites Argument:

Whatever has an opposite comes to be from its opposite; the cold from the warm, the weaker from the stronger, the sleeping from the waking. Between every pair of opposites there must always be two processes of transformation, e.g. cooling down and warming up, falling asleep and waking up. Living and dead are evidently opposites, and one of the processes between them, namely dying, is evident to us. We may infer that there is a second process by which living things and stuff come from dead things or stuff. This conclusion is taken (by a palpable equivocation on ‘the dead’) to mean that ‘the souls of the dead must be somewhere whence they can come back again’. An appendix argues that if the process from life to death were not matched by a process from death to life, then the original stock of living things would have been exhausted in the infinite past.

But, just because there are opposites in nature, why's that mean that everything has to have an opposite? So there's warm and cold. That doesn't mean a process from death to life has to exist just because there's a process from life to death.

Then there's the Argument from Knowledge:

Our ability to give the right answers in abstract discussions shows that we possess a kind of knowledge (of the Forms, as it happens) that we must have acquired before birth. It follows that ‘our souls existed apart from the body before they took on human form’. That they continue to exist after we die is said to follow by combining this proof with the Opposites Argument outlined above.

But how much is that due to our socialization? Plus, couldn't God have created our soul with knowledge of the Forms built in, meaning that our innate knowledge doesn't have to mean that our soul always existed, or forever will exist.

I've not read the dialogue, so maybe I'm missing stuff. But the summaries bring to my mind Dillon's comment that Plato tried to go from the proveable to the indemonstrable. I just wonder if his connection of those two things was rather tenuous.

Malcom X, Andrew Jackson, God’s Absence, God’s Name, Josiah, Why Souls Enter Bodies

1. For Black History Month today, I watched Malcom X, which starred Denzel Washington as the controversial figure. What went through my mind as I watched the movie were questions about the Nation of Islam’s beliefs.

In the movie, Baines is a Nation of Islam believer who brings Malcom to the teachings. He says that the nature of the black man is inherently good, whereas the nature of the white man is inherently wicked. When Malcom replies that he met some whites who were devils, Baines corrects him: “No. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad doesn’t teach that some white people are the devil. He teaches that all of them are. Look back at your life. Have you ever met a white person who was good?” Malcom then thought back to the social worker who wanted to take his widow mom’s children away from her, the white teacher who told him that he couldn’t become a lawyer because he was a “nigger,” the judge who sentenced him for theft and sleeping with white women, and his white girlfriend, Sophia, who has a sly facial expression in his flashback about her.

I love this scene because it made Malcom X’s hostility to whites understandable: he was basing it in part on his own experiences. But African-Americans in the movie did bad things, too. Malcom was once a hustler and a thief, as were the people with whom he was associating. The prophet and leader of the Nation, Elijah Muhammad, seduced young women in the organization, fathered children by them, and didn’t support them (according to the movie). Many in the Nation were envious of Malcom. If the nature of black people is inherently righteous, then why did they do bad things? Would the Nation say that the African-Americans who do such things aren’t acting according to their true nature? Would it say that the white man is worse? Would it say that African-Americans resort to evil due to negative environmental factors (crime, lack of opportunity), caused by the white man’s oppression of them? One thing Baines said was that Elijah Muhammad’s greatness outweighs any bad things he may have done. For Baines, Elijah Muhammad was a human being, like the heroes of the Bible, who also had flaws. Baines cites drunk Noah and adulterous David as examples.

That brings me to my next point. I was somewhat surprised to hear Baine’s appealing to drunk Noah and adulterous David, because of a conversation I once had with a Muslim. In my post about that encounter, My Conversation with a Muslim, I recount the following:

[The Muslim] then went on about the errors in the Bible, such as Noah being drunk and David killing Uriah to get Bathsheba. “How do you know they are errors?” I asked. “Because prophets are holy men. They are moral examples,” he responded.

It’s ironic that the Muslim I spoke with used the same examples that Baines cited in the movie, only my Muslim friend was treating them as errors in the text, whereas Baines was using them to defend his “Elijah Muhammad’s only human, like the great saints of the Bible” spiel. Who is right? Or is there diversity within Islam on this issue? The movie acknowledges that the Nation of Islam believed that the Bible had errors, for Malcom refers to the corruption of the Gospel of Matthew. (That’s something I picked up by reading the captions. Otherwise, I would have missed it!)

Something else I wonder: Baines says that the Africans were once a race of kings, in a time when the white man was still in a primitive, savage state. An African-American friend of mine once made a similar claim: that the Africans were sailing in ships and making cultural advancements a long time ago. I often assumed that the whites were able to enslave the Africans because whites had a head start, and thus the technology to enslave the African people, who didn’t have that level of technology at the time. But if the Nation of Islam believes that the Africans were the ones who had the head start, how would they explain the white man’s ability to enslave the Africans? Would they say that the Africans were enslaved because of some kind of sin? Baines said that the African-Americans were of the nation of Shabazz, exiled in an oppressive land. That calls to mind the Hebrew Bible, in which the once-powerful Israelites are exiled for their sins.

Did the Nation of Islam believe in violence? In the movie, King, there’s a scene in which Martin Luther King talks with Malcom X. King tells Malcom that blacks would lose in a war against their white oppressors, so non-violence is the best policy. Did Malcom X believe that African-Americans should rise up against their white oppressors? In the movie, he says that he’s against violence, but he supports it for the purpose of self-defense, meaning he’s not for violence on the offensive level. Yet, he also warns that the African-Americans could cause a lot of damage, if the white man didn’t allow them to separate and become self-sufficient.

2. For President’s Day, I watched a PBS documentary of Andrew Jackson, narrated by Martin Sheen. I learned that Jackson was called “Old Hickory” because, as a commander of his unit, he walked all the way to a far destination, while allowing the wounded to ride on horseback. I also learned that the donkey was adopted as a symbol for the Democratic Party because it’s a reliable animal for the common people, to whom the Party was appealing. I heard the story of how President Jackson basically disregarded a Supreme Court decision in favor of the Native Americans of Georgia, in an attempt to get their land for white settlers. According to the movie, Christian missionaries supported the Native Americans, which shows that not all white Christians were behind Manifest Destiny. And here’s something interesting: Jackson’s Secretary of War, John Eaton, had a relationship with a woman that proved scandalous, which a professor compared to the Monica Lewinsky debacle. What’s ironic is that the woman in question, Peggy Eaton, looks almost exactly like Monica Lewinsky (see here)!

3. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read M.H. Goshen-Gottstein’s “Tanakh Theology: The Religion of the Old Testament and the Place of Jewish Religious Theology.” On page 629, MHGG lists certain issues that would loom large in an Old Testament theology: “God’s self-revelation and withdrawing, creating and directing the world, instructing and reacting, demanding and retributing, succeeding and failing, compelling and allowing freedom, ‘running the show’ and letting it run on its own…”

Running the show and letting it run on its own. This reminded me of two things. One was some of Lawson Stone’s recent posts: Day 326:Where Is God?, Day 327: Where God Is, Day 330: Where Is God When He’s Not There?, Day 331: Somebody Stop Me, and Day 332: Overlooking a Slipper. Stone talks about how God usually appears to be hands-off, allowing the consequences of evil to take their course, even though he’s eager to minister to people through their horrible experiences. Yet, according to Stone, God places a lot of responsibility on our shoulders as well. He refers to the story of Gibeah in Judges 19-21, in which Benjamites rape and murder a man’s concubine, prompting a war. For Stone, that’s an indictment of the Israelite leaders, who failed to do their righteous duty to uphold justice. He tells the story of when his first child was born:

My mind pondered all the terrible things that could happen to him through his life from physical injury to spiritual destruction by moral predators…and I began to pray. I asked God to put his hands around this child and protect him. Though I rarely experience God “speaking” to me, I felt I heard him that night. God said to my heart, “I have indeed provided for his protection: I have given him the two of you as his parents.”

Many atheists and agnostics, however, have problems with the existence of a benevolent God precisely because he doesn’t take an active role in the world. In a comment under his post, Another Misguided Argument from Dinesh D’Souza, former fundamentalist Ken Pulliam says to the provocative Christian ”ZDenny”:

I am getting tired of your ranting about the love of God. Why don’t you try telling the people of Haiti about your god’s great love. Tell the parents of those children with childhood cancer. Tell those children who are starving to death (about 25,000 a day), how loving your God is? If morality is based on your god, then genocide is okay. Human sacrifice is okay, slavery is okay, polygamy is okay, treating women like property is okay. I’ll take my morality any day over your loving god’s.

Stone is talking about moral evil, whereas Pulliam is commenting more on natural evil. But both wrestle with the question of why God so often seems to be absent. I’m usually not satisfied with the answers of Christian apologists, who say that God never violates free will, for there are times when God does influence it in one direction or another. Moreover, why doesn’t God rain manna on the starving of the world, as he did for the ancient Israelites? Personally, I don’t think there are rigid rules that God absolutely has to follow all of the time, for he does different things in different situations, or seasons, or time periods. I believe that his ultimate intentions for us are good, however, for that’s a prominent promise in the Bible.

4. In Psalms I:1-50, Mitchell Dahood’s comments on Psalm 20:2 caught my attention. The verse says that the name of Jacob’s God “will be your bulwark” (Dahood’s translation). Dahood says that the name of the Lord is a personification that appears in the Hebrew Bible and in Canaanite mythology. In Exodus 23:21, God sends an angel with Israel, and he’s placed his name in him. In UT 127:56, Athtart is called the name of Baal. I did a search on “Athtart” and found that she’s the same as the goddess Ashtarte, a consort of Baal. That reminds me of my post about P. Kyle McCarter’s comments on “YHWH and his Asherah” (see YHWH and His Asherah, Genesis 12 and 20 and the Reader, Samaritan Priestly-Line). I summarize McCarter as follows:

He refers to examples in Northwest Semitic religion in which a goddess is a hypostasis or manifestation of a god. For McCarter, YHWH’s Asherah was his visible manifestation, which appeared in the cult. And that manifestation was marked with a wooden pole, which is called an Asherah. YHWH’s Asherah is somewhat like YHWH’s consort, but it’s also like YHWH’s Shekinah—his manifestation, which conveys the transcendent God to humans. And the pole is a symbol of that visible presence.

Dahood may be conveying a similar idea: that Athtart was Baal’s “name” in that she was his representative, as was the angel who bore the LORD’s name while leading the children of Israel.

5. I’m going to take a leap in my comments today on Theodore Mullen’s Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries. In my post yesterday (Queen on Valentine’s Day, the Date of Israel’s Covenant Concept, Athtar Rules in Hell, the Function of the Conquest Story, Daemons, Peace), I may have put words into Mullen’s mouth in my attempt to make sense of what he’s saying. I’ll be doing the same thing today.

My impression of Mullen (which could be mistaken) is that he doesn’t believe in the historicity of the biblical Josiah story, in which Josiah, the righteous king of Judah, extirpates paganism from his nation and Northern Israel. So what’s the purpose of the story, according to Mullen? He believes that its function is to create ethnic boundaries—things on which Israel can stand and unite as a nation. The author of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-II Kings) could have written stories about kings who transgressed those boundaries through their reception of foreign customs, and that would account for Israel’s exile. But he’d also want to include heroes for the people to emulate: noble figures who stood up for righteousness and the cultural distinctiveness of Israel. When the exiles returned, they’d have those heroes and the villains in mind. In this scenario, the Deuteronomistic History could be a fiction designed to form a nation, which may be Mullen’s overall argument.

Personally, I think there could be some historicity to the Josiah story, for archaeologist William Dever says that images disappear from seals in or around the time of Josiah, perhaps marking a time of aniconism. Yet, I’d agree that ideology plays a role in the telling of the Josiah story. As a professor of mine notes, the story of Josiah in I Kings 21ff. doesn’t really distinguish between the Aaronide priests and the Levites, which is characteristically Deuteronomistic: the priestly author makes that distinction, whereas Deuteronomy does not.

6. On pages 245-246 of the Middle Platonists, John Dillon discusses Taurus’ views on the soul. Taurus was a second century Athenian philosopher, and Iamblichus records two beliefs that Taurus or his followers had on why souls enter into bodies. One reason is to make the cosmos perfect. I don’t want to project the Bible onto Taurus, but I’ll do so anyway: it’s like Genesis 1-2, which imply that human beings are necessary for the completion (or perfection) of God’s creation. We are to rule it with intelligence, as beings made in the image of God (in Genesis 1), or as God’s cultivators (according to Genesis 2). The second explanation for why souls enter bodies is so the gods can reveal themselves through our souls. This may be saying that our soul is something that resembles the divine, so it became enfleshed so that the gods could express their goodness in a concrete setting.

Queen on Valentine’s Day, the Date of Israel’s Covenant Concept, Athtar Rules in Hell, the Function of the Conquest Story, Daemons, Peace

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.

Andre Braugher, I Kings 14

1. For Black History Month today, I watched Glory, a 1989 film about the 54th Massachussetts Volunteer Infantry, an African-American unit during the Civil War.

One thing that surprised me was the identity of the guy who plays Thomas, an educated African-American who draws the scorn of his peers, yet saves the life of his loudest mocker (played by Denzel Washington). It’s Andre Braugher, who plays Owen on Men of a Certain Age. I didn’t recognize him, since Owen is a big guy who (as his dad says) “talks like he has cheeseballs in his mouth.” Thomas, by contrast, was slender and well-spoken. Well, as far as the weight part goes, I should remember that Glory was made a little over twenty years ago. People change!

When I first learned of Men of a Certain Age, I was eager to watch it because of Ray Romano and Scott Bakula, for I love Everybody Loves Raymond and Quantum Leap. I didn’t know who the guy playing Owen was, and I somewhat regarded him as an outsider to my little clique of me-the-viewer, Raymond, and Scott Bakula. But it turns out that I identify with Owen more than the other characters (whom I still like). He’s an adult who reluctantly relies on his parents, a car salesman who’s not that good at his job, and a diabetic who likes to snack because that’s one of the few areas of his life where he has any power. I overlap with these in many respects, but not totally. And, as I watched Glory and saw Thomas’ awkward attempts to adapt to the rigorous military training of his unit, I felt for him, remembering my own days in gym class. So I feel a kinship with two Andre Braugher characters!

2. For my weekly quiet time today, I read and studied I Kings 14. Abijah, the son of Jeroboam (the king of Northern Israel) is sick, so Jeroboam sends his wife to consult Ahijah, the prophet who predicted that Jeroboam would become king. Jeroboam tells his wife to disguise herself so that no one will recognize her. Scholars disagree as to why Jeroboam wanted his wife to disguise herself and avoid recognition. My hunch is that her disguise would protect her on her journey from Tirzah (in Manasseh) to Shiloh (in Ephraim). Why do many celebrities choose to keep a low profile when they go out in public?

Jeroboam’s wife comes to Ahijah, who knows who she is, notwithstanding her disguise, for he had been informed by the LORD that she was coming. Ahijah tells her that God is upset with Jeroboam’s idolatry and will bring his reign to a violent and degrading end. As for her son, Abijah, he will die of his sickness, but (in contrast to many in his family) he at least will be buried in a grave, for God has found in him something good.

For some reason, I assumed that Abijah was a baby or a little child, as you can see in my post from a while back, Loving, Even When “Unfair”. I thought that, in I Kings 14, God was pleased with the innocence of a little baby and was sad that he had to let him die as part of God’s statement against Jeroboam. But most interpreters that I encountered treated Abijah as a young man, since the Hebrew naar can encompass a broad age-range. In rabbinic interpretation, God liked Abijah because he had secretly removed Jeroboam’s sentinels from the border between Northern Israel and Judah. They were preventing Northern Israelites from going to Jerusalem for the festivals, and Abijah wanted his countrymen to worship God in the proper manner—at Jerusalem, rather than at his father’s golden calves. And, in rabbinic interpretation, Abijah himself went to Jerusalem on the pilgrimages, though I’m not sure what he would have told his father before he left! So, for the rabbis, Abijah was an adult.

But back to the biblical text! Jeroboam’s son dies, and the author of I Kings 14 concludes the reign of Jeroboam. He then turns to Rehoboam, the king of Judah. The text says that Rehoboam provoked God to jealousy and built high places, pillars, and asherim (see YHWH and His Asherah, Genesis 12 and 20 and the Reader, Samaritan Priestly-Line). There were also qadesh in the land, who committed the abominations of the Canaanites, whom Israel had driven out. What was a qadesh? That’s a debated topic within biblical scholarship. English translations render it as “sodomites” and “male temple prostitutes.” I consulted the Anchor Bible Dictionary’s articles on prostitution to get insight into the debate. Many scholars contend that the qadesh were non-Yahwistic priests, whose inclusion into the Israelite cult angered the strict, exclusivist Yahwists. Others point out that the term qadesh occurs within a discussion about prostitutes in Deuteronomy 23:18-19, so “male prostitute” is an acceptable translation of the term. In short, the scholarly consensus that the ancient Near East had cultic prostitution in an attempt to bring about agricultural fertility has been widely questioned, as scholars take another look at ancient Near Eastern texts. That’s spilled into the debate over the meaning of qadesh.

I Kings 14 goes on to say that Shishak, the king of Egypt, came to Jerusalem and plundered the treasures of the temple and palace. To replace the golden shields that Shishak had taken, Rehoboam made bronze shields. The glory that his father had built up was being removed. The implication in I Kings 14 may be that God sent Shishak to punish Judah for her transgressions. I Kings 14 is not explicit about this, which is why I use the word “implication,” but II Chronicles 12:2 explicitly makes that connection.

Many scholars agree that Shishak was Shoshenq I, who ruled in the tenth century B.C.E. Dissenters from this view are advocates of the New Chronology, who identify Shishak as Raamses II (whom they date later than do most historians). According to the Anchor Bible Dictionary article on Shishak, Shishak’s goal was to establish an imperial hegemony over Palestine, both North and South. (Some note that I Kings 14 doesn’t mention Shishak’s activity against the North, presumably because its primary interest is to show God’s punishment of Jerusalem for Rehohoam’s transgressions.) The epithets of his son, Osorkon, indicate that Egypt had such hegemony up to the end of the tenth century B.C.E.

Roots 4, Song of Songs Fertility Ritual?, Dahood on Psalm 2, Athaliah the Heroine, Ammonius on Apollo

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).