More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 21 - May 11, 2020
If we don’t know what went without being said for the ancient audience, we might supply what goes without being said for many Westerners and conclude that Miriam and Aaron were upset with Moses because he married a black woman and therefore married below himself.
in the Nile River valley of ancient Egypt, the Hebrews were the slave race.
The Cushites were not demeaned as a slave race in the ancient world; they were respected as highly skilled soldiers.
It is more likely that Miriam and Aaron thought Moses was being presumptuous by marrying above himself.
Jews made ethnic distinctions even among themselves.
we tend to assume that Jewish was primarily a theological or religious designation for Jews of the first century.
People of Jewish ethnicity, however, were quite divided. These divisions threatened the unity of the early church even before Gentile Christians entered the picture.
some of the Grecian Jews were “being overlooked in the daily distribution of food” (Acts 6:1), while the Hebraic Jews were receiving what they needed as usual.[8]
To the Hebraic Jews, these Diaspora brethren were second-tier Jews.
It is significant that of the seven, at least five have Greek names.
In order to ease tensions among the Grecian Jews, the early Christians recognized that the distribution of food should be overseen by Grecian Jews.
This is an obvious example of how ethnic divisions among Jews posed a problem for the church, and it should remind us to be alert to
other situations in which prejudices among the Jews might play a role in the story.
The Bible gives us clues that the ancients also discriminated on the basis of how people sounded.
In Judges 12, Jephthah rallies the men of Gilead to battle the Ephraimites. Ethnically, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites were related. Both tribes were Semitic, and they shared Joseph as a common ancestor.[10]
The trouble was, Ephraimites couldn’t say the word correctly because they couldn’t pronounce the “sh” sound.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but most folks didn’t know that. He was raised in Nazareth (Galilee). Since his accent was Galilean, no one considered the possibility he might actually be a Judean (Jn 7:41-43).
If visitors to a foreign culture have a hard time detecting ethnic stereotypes based on geography, we have an even harder time detecting the same issues in the Bible.
blatant.
Flagrante
Jews in neighboring areas seldom found anything amazing about Nazarenes. When Nathanael found out Jesus was from Nazareth, he was unimpressed; “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” he replied (Jn 1:46).
To us, Jerusalem and its environs comprise “the Holy Land.”
Entornos
Jerusalem was insignificant in Jesus’ time. Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23-79), a famed Roman philosopher, statesman and soldier, traveled extensively and described the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day as “the most illustrious city in the East.” That was actually faint praise.
Palestine was not known for anything except trouble.
But that region controlled the only land route to the breadbasket of Egypt and all of Africa.
It was important that Rome controlled the land, but the activities that took place there wer...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, so important for Jews and Christians at the time, were marginal events in a nothing town on the edge of an emp...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What likely goes without being said for us is that the church was divided either theologically or over devotion to different personalities.
We may be failing to note ethnic markers that Paul sprinkled all over the text. Apollos was noted as an Alexandrian (Egyptian) Jew (Acts 18:24). They had their own reputation. Paul notes that Peter is called by his Aramaic name, Cephas, suggesting the group that followed him spoke Aramaic and were thus Palestinian Jews. Paul’s church had Diaspora Jews but also many ethnic Corinthians, who were quite proud of their status as residents of a Roman colony and who enjoyed using Latin.
The problem was ethnic division: Aramaic-speaking Jews, Greek-speaking Jews, Romans and Alexandrians.
Take time to prayerfully consider your prejudices. Do you harbor bad feelings for members of a particular ethnic group? Or people from a certain sociopolitical group?
Carefully consider why you feel the prejudices you do.
Your increasing awareness about your own ethnic prejudices will help you be more attuned to them in the biblical text.
Biblical authors don’t often tell us how they or their audiences felt about specific people groups, but they do give us clues by telling us where people are from.
Identifying places on a good atlas can help you detect when the author is making judgments based on geography and ethnicity—and when the writer expects us, the readers, to be doing the same thing.
let the Bible be your guide. First of all, the narrator may clue you in through repetition that the ethnicity of a character is an issue. This was the case with Moses’ wife in Numbers 12.
kinsman
Pariente
see if Scripture can shed light on the issue. The Bible is a good resource for determining what the biblical authors and audiences thought and felt about their neighbors.
The fact that the Moabites, along with the Ammonites, originated from an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters (Gen 19:36-38) may help us understand why Ruth’s ethnicity is an issue in her narrative.
For these reasons, the Lord declared, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation” (Deut 23:3).
we are not endorsing prejudice.
The Christian message is clear: ethnic prejudice is morally reprehensible. It is wrong.
Columnist Jack White once observed, “The most insidious racism is among those who don’t think they harbor any.”[13]
those of us who leave our ethnic stereotypes unexamined will inevitably carry them forever, perhaps even pass them on to others.
The writer expected us to know our geography: while Samson was called and equipped by God to smite the Philistines, he married one instead.
they were considered citizens of the actual city of Rome.
They were quite proud of their Rome citizenship. And they didn’t care for Jews. Note how they used the term Jews to fire up the crowd against Paul (Acts 16:20).
How does it affect your view of Jesus to know that he was born to a people group considered inferior by the majority culture (Romans) and in a town that other Jews considered backward and unimportant (Nazareth)?
The flexibility of our own prepositions, which make perfect sense to us, illustrates the challenge well. On and in mean different things, and the difference is clear: “the book is on the table” versus “the book is in the drawer.” Yet in America we ride in a car but on a bus, in a canoe but on a ship.
Words are indeed the raw materials of language.
When we cross a culture, as when we read the Bible, we often assume that what goes without being said in our culture and language also goes without being said in other cultures and languages. This can lead to profound misunderstanding.
