Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World

by E Randolph Richards

We think to understand ancient Mediterranean (and most modern Eastern)

collectivist cultures, you need to understand six basic ingredients: kinship, patronage, brokerage, honor, shame, and boundaries.

We think the West has contributed much to the work of God’s kingdom (and we’re not done); the East is where it began.

It is not an either-or but a both/and. Which wing of an airplane is more important? The challenge for many of us is that one side doesn’t understand the other well. This understanding gap is important because the Bible arose in an Eastern, collectivist context. Although it is God’s Word, an essential element of an orthodox (or evangelical, if you like) understanding of inspiration is that the personalities and cultures of the writers still come through. Jesus spoke with a Galilean accent (Mt 26:73); Paul got angry, and God used his anger to fuel a letter such as Galatians.1 Jeremiah wrote like an eighth-century Hebrew-speaking prophet, while John wrote like a first-century Greek-speaking evangelist.

In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth over old age.

In Paul’s world, there were also things that went without being said. Caesar promised peace and security.2 When Jesus said he didn’t bring peace like the world did (Jn 14:27), he didn’t need to connect the dots. It went without being said what he meant. Caesar promised peace, but so did Jesus. They were kings offering competing kingdoms.

seem confusing, as if some essential piece were missing. Often pieces are missing, because some cultural aspects go without being said. We think collectivism is a major piece, a key cultural given, and that understanding it better will help us understand the Bible better. Moreover, we hope that understanding the Bible better will help us live more faithfully as Christians in the world.

Rich has lived about a decade in the Middle East. He is fluent in Arabic and has a keen interest in how collectivism works in modern Middle Eastern societies and how that intersects with the biblical narrative.

I am often amazed at how frequently God speaks in a soprano voice.

Does an understanding of the unspoken social systems of the ancient Mediterranean help us to read the Bible better?

Yet Jesus practiced shaming. Jesus shamed those who objected when he healed a suffering woman: “When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame” (Lk 13:17 NRSV).

It was Jesus’ goal to shame them.

actions. We know he intended to do this because he says so—“I say this to shame you” (1 Cor 6:5; 1...

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to ...

Remember, the most important things in a culture usually go without being said. Since the Bible was written in a collectivist context by writers who were all collectivists, I am at risk of misreading Scripture with my individualist eyes.

in Middle Eastern culture, it went without being said that people marry to start a family. Whenever I went on to explain that waiting was a choice we had made, they were totally confused. “Why did you get married, if you didn’t want to have children?” Why choose to leave your family to start a new family and then not try to have children? It seems bizarre, like registering for college with no intention to attend, or buying groceries with no intention of cooking.

generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful. This general statement is itself a great example. When we try to lump together the various societies of the modern or ancient Mediterranean world and draw some conclusions, we must generalize.

“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about sixty-five years old—a long way from a contestant for Miss America.

else is going on. There is scarcely a story more foundational to the Bible than the story of Abraham. He leaves his homeland to start a family but has no children. So Sarah, his wife, offers to let Abraham sleep with her servant to produce a child. Western readers find this arrangement unthinkable, yet this is the part of the story the Bible assumes we all understand. This is one of the “obvious” parts that are supposed to explain the mysterious parts about God. The writers of Scripture assume we share the same values. So, there are things he left unsaid because “everybody knows that.” Understanding these values will help us understand the story, which will then help us to understand God.

Abraham was born and raised a polytheist.

Abraham is following a new, unnamed god. How does one even refer to a god with no name? Well, he’s called Abraham’s god, Isaac’s god, Jacob’s god

We need to be careful not to read the Bible backwards. We know he is the God of the universe, Creator, Sustainer, Savior, and so on, but Abraham didn’t know any of that. There was no Bible yet.

Abraham’s marriage was a failure.

When we read the biblical story, we assume Abraham and Sarah loved each other. I don’t know whether they did—I kind of hope they did, since I am a good individualist. But we certainly shouldn’t superimpose our motives back onto them. Ancients married in order to have children, to cement alliances, and to gain strategic relationships. When Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 7:8), it wasn’t because they had fallen in love at some royal ball. When we superimpose our values back on these ancient characters, we will miss something

the biblical story, sometimes the main point of the story. The Bible has a clear purpose for telling us Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter.

This unnamed god had offered them an heir, a source of joy and a way out of their shame—but at a high price (leaving their homeland and gods). They decided it was worth it to take this unknown god’s

offer. When no child came, their shame probably increased.

There is no absence of strong cultural reasons why Sarah would do what she did. It would have made sense to people in her culture. No one would have scratched their head wondering why she did it.

We are puzzled because we don’t have the right cultural pieces to put in the gaps. Worse, when we don’t understand, we often automatically fill the gaps by trying to squeeze in pieces from our culture, where they don’t fit. Recognizing these cultural gaps and the pieces that go into them helps us to understand the Bible better.

We view their behavior as if those people are just branches off our same tree. In other words, we note the behaviors are different but assume the parts we haven’t noticed are the same between “us” and “them.”

Individualism and collectivism describe two very different ways people relate, interact, and live together, but much more too, such as how they view themselves, the way they think, the emotions they feel, the way they make decisions and why, and what motivates them to behave the way they do.

We will say it again: generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.

The biblical cultures of the Mediterranean world were all collectivist societies and, as we shall see, had a lot of foundational elements in common.

When we tell a story, a lot goes without being explained. For example, I might say, “After I finished speaking, I looked at the audience. They were all smiling. Someone in the back shot me a big okay.” If you are from my culture, you would conclude the speech went well. The exact same response in Indonesia signals a disaster. They smile when embarrassed. Our okay symbol is obscene in Indonesia. Same words, but what

Every writer assumes the reader can “read between the lines,” so there is no need to state the obvious.

This explains why readers today might misinterpret aspects of the Bible—we don’t share a common culture.

Add to that cultural gap thousands of years and a jump from collectivism to individualism, and we have real potential for misreading the Bible.

The Bible was written in high-context cultures. People in these cultures assume there’s a high level of shared information between them and their audiences. This means they don’t feel the need to state everything explicitly. They take it as a given that everyone knows how things worked—and at the time, they did. This is not a sign they were bad low-context communicators, but rather that they were very good high-context communicators.

Sometimes a modern collective pattern seems to have ancestors in the biblical text, but often it does not. So, perhaps there is a parallel, but we should not simply assume it. You will see that when we exegete (explain) the biblical text, our exegesis comes from standard hermeneutics (methods to interpret) and is based in what the texts say.

We use stories from the culture around the text at times to help explore what they meant by what they said. These are taken from the language and culture around the time of the Bible, not today.

The story of the patriarch Joseph (with his multicolored coat) has a lot that went without being said. Since many Western readers don’t know that culture, we tend to fill in the gaps. The result is that we can inadvertently turn the Joseph story into the American success story.

I grew up as an individualist and thought the pinnacle of Joseph’s story was when he became second only to Pharaoh. The small-town boy had made it big. I also admired Joseph for actions that the biblical author expected me to be appalled over,

the entire story of Joseph is actually about Joseph’s family and how God reconciled them. For collectivists, it is not a story about how God advanced Joseph’s

career. It is not an urban-migration success story. Rather, Joseph angered his brothers, who respond badly, and Joseph becomes estranged from the family.

My individualist culture constantly gives me signposts that point me to focus on individuals and their interests. I often miss or underplay collective groups and their collective interests. These same individualist signposts can also cause me to misread the story of Joseph. I easily assume the whole story is about him, almost turning it into a fable about how a young man left home, overcame adversity, and found success. Worse, the way I read the story had the Bible reinforcing capitalism and the American dream.

a pattern in Jacob’s behavior of not respecting relatives, including his own brother (Gen 25:29-34).

Leah, the older sister, bears sons aplenty, but Rachel “was not bearing Jacob any children” (Gen 30:1). As a modern individualist, I see this as a personal matter, perhaps a personal tragedy, because whether one has children is an individual matter. Every part of my last sentence contradicts the values of the ancient Mediterranean world. Children are not a choice. Children are not an individual, personal matter. Children determine inheritance, who owns the flocks. They are a gift and a blessing from God (to the family).

When Jacob gives the multicolored coat (or full-length robe) to Joseph, this isn’t just a matter of Joseph getting a nicer Christmas gift than the other brothers.

It isn’t merely Jacob showing he loves Joseph more. Jacob is indicating who will be the heir.

Jacob is indicating that the inheritance will run through Rachel’s side of the family, the wife he loves.