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

by E Randolph Richards

Joseph’s brothers should be able to count on their brother. Joseph should look after them and treat them fairly. They are, after all, family. Well, one would expect a man to treat his brothers well. Yet, Joseph’s attitude about inheriting has already been made clear to them:

If God gave him that dream (which the Bible doesn’t say God did), Joseph is under no obligation to share it with his brothers.

At this point, a bit of Egyptian history will help us—another thing that went without being

said. Egypt had been ruled by Egyptians (of course). But in the 1700s BC a group of Asiatics from the region of Canaan

By 1720 BC they had established a capital in the eastern Nile Delta at Avaris. These rulers were called the Hyksos (Rulers of Foreign Lands).2 These Hyksos were of the same general ethnic group as Joseph. If the Pharaoh was Hyksos, then likel...

Joseph refuses. Good for him, but we should note why. (There aren’t Ten Commandments yet.) Joseph states:

Joseph states he is the greatest person in the house and Potiphar has put everything (including her) into Joseph’s hand. We are supposed to notice that Joseph has placed himself above her as well as above all the other slaves. They are his new household unit, but the same arrogance he had with his brothers he has here. Of course, Potiphar is going to know what happened. Slaves see what’s going on, and someone will pass the word

to Potiphar.

It seems that whatever Potiphar decides to do, he loses. He clearly doesn’t believe his wife’s story, because Joseph isn’t executed.

if he divorces her the bridal price, almost certainly the estate, will go back to her family. Thus, Potiphar can keep the estate and lose his manager, or he can keep the manager and lose the estate. Potiphar is furious that Joseph has put him in this mess. Potiphar decides to keep the estate his wife.

he is placed in the best prison in Egypt, the one where the king’s servants are placed. We think of prisons as solitary places, but Joseph is given a new community. Yet again, Joseph rises to prominence in his community. But something is different. This time, for the first time, Joseph doesn’t alienate his new community.

We haven’t highlighted it, but Joseph was also supposed to be his brothers’ patron, someone expected to use his status to protect and care for others. Joseph fails to fulfill this role initially, but then he does at the end. Potiphar was Joseph’s patron, as was Pharaoh.

with Pharaoh. Kinship, patronage, and brokerage are key social structures in the story.

The author assumes his intended audience knows these social structures.

Equally important (or perhaps even more so), the audience is expected to notice when these values should be in play but are

not. To ancient hearers (and many modern collective ears), it is obvious that Joseph’s arrogance played a role in his being separated from his community, as did his father’s passivity and his brothers’ fear and jealousy.

4). Despite the broken family and failings, God is faithful. He is the star of the story.

Many things in our cultures are so deep down that we never even think about them. In fact, the most important things in our cultures are usually buried the deepest, way below anything we are really aware of and yet influencing everything above them. The collectivist and individualist distinction is one of these things. We are usually not aware of it, and so in both collective and individualist cultures, this orientation almost always goes without being said.

It’s common to hear collectives grumbling, “People always think they have a right to get involved in my life and give me their opinions,”

Naturally then, when we see other cultures acting differently, we assume our culture is the norm, the baseline, the standard. This makes their way different and quite strange. We Western individualists might be surprised to learn that our modern Western culture is the less common view. Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede measured individualism and collectivism across people from fifty-three nations. He found the three most individualistic nations in the world were the United States, Australia, and Great Britain. Their scores weren’t just the furthest left of the global norm; they were actually more than double it.5 In other words, the global normal or the baseline, the standard, is more similar to the ancient and modern Mediterranean cultures than our Western culture.

Our Scriptures arose in a collectivist world, a world of orange trees, so it would help us to learn a bit about collectivist cultures. Collectivism is so deep in the culture of the biblical writers that they rarely say so directly. It goes without being said, so we can miss it. To exacerbate the scenario, we often fill in what went without being said in their world (collectivism) with what goes without being said in ours (individualism).

we assume Paul as an individual wrote his letters. In fact, I grew up calling them “Paul’s letters.” But the Bible actually tells us differently. The opening of the letter to the Thessalonians tells us: “Paul, Silas and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you” (1 Thess 1:1).

As a Western individualist, I immediately dismiss this. Paul couldn’t really mean that they worked together to write the letter. Western scholars suggest that it just means Silas and Timothy are sending their greetings. Yet, when Timothy sends greetings, it is at the end of a letter: “Timothy, my co-worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason and Sosipater, my fellow Jews” (Rom 16:21). Other scholars

suggest Paul is just being humble. Yet, why wasn’t he humble to the Romans, G...

as an individualist, I think the Bible was written to me. I “forget” that the opening of the letter tells us it was written to a group of people: “Paul, Silas and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and Peace to you [plural]” (1 Thess 1:1). I grew up reading the letter as if Paul (an individual) were speaking to me (an individual).

Yet the you in the passage is plural; the commands are plural: you all rejoice. Since the church would have been assembled and listening as a group to Paul’s letter as it was read aloud to them, they most likely discussed together how Paul’s command for them (as a group) to rejoice, pray, and give thanks should shape their community life. Why does this matter? We think that recognizing the collective nature of the biblical world helps us to be better readers of the Bible, and crucially, better able to apply it to our lives and to help each other apply the Scriptures to our lives.

In the collective culture of the Middle East, I can sometimes talk to someone for over an hour before they ask me my first name. The first question they ask is, “Where are you from?” They ask about my job, my family, my age, my children, and my religion.

I am the sum of my group.

To know me means to know who my group is, or more accurately said, to know ...

People in individualist societies, such as me and most likely you, think of ourselves as an individual person: I am me, and the rest are they. Members of an individualist culture such as me think of my identity as comprising my individual attributes, personality traits, and what I have achieved in my life. As an individualist, these things define the way I see myself as a person and how I see others. I focus on fulfilling my own potential. I was taught in college I should want to be self-actualized. I should seek to be independent and autonomous, and only be expected to look after myself and my immediate family.

A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh, had Piglet say, “The thinks that make me different are the thinks that make me ME.”9 Collectivist people find Piglet’s statement confusing in more than just grammar. Collectivist people define who they are in relation to others. I might say, “I’m an honest guy.” A collectivist friend would reply, “Says who?”

As an individualist (from Texas), such a reply sounds to me like a challenge, maybe even fighting words. My collectivist friend was just wondering who decided that I was an honest guy. If the community that thought I was an honest guy was a community whose opinion my friend valued, then I would be accepted by him and his community as honest. And it wouldn’t just be token acceptance. The community would be willing to entrust valuables to me because I was proven honest.

Individualist societies tend to think of community as being the sum of the individuals.

In collectivist societies, however, the individual is the sum of the community. The community identity, characteristics, values, and talents form the identity of those who all belong to that community.

by the things they share with others, things such as shared blood, shared interests, shared history, shared land, and shared loyalty. They define their core identity as being part of a group, in distinction to other groups.

Collectivist people understand their identity from the group they are part of. It is about identity, which is why people in collective societies live...

To an individualist, that may sound dreadful or disempowering, but there are upsides. Responsibility is shared corporately. It is never just my fault. In fact, I admit that many times as an individualist I have asked others to help me make a decision. I wanted their wisdom, but I also wanted to socialize blame. Yet, this was my (individual) strategy.

She believed she had the individual right to choose her own curtains for her own house. They had not respected her right. She had expected to be able to make the decision based on what she preferred. The community, however, was frustrated. She hadn’t listened to wisdom. They expected her to make the decision based on what the community preferred. After all, she wouldn’t want every guest who entered her house to think her curtains were too short, would she?

It was their responsibility to make the decision for her, as her new landlords, neighbors, and friends. Everybody was oblivious to what was really going on. It wasn’t really about curtains. That was the surface symptom,

but all the real activity was occurring deep down in the social structu...

kinship, patronage, and brokerage—as if they were separate or distinct from one another. Like most of life, it is never so neat and clean. Often these roles overlap or are mixed, muddled, or switched partway through a story.

in the story of Abraham and Sarah, Abraham is the one responsible to lead, care for, and protect the large group he is leading. He is described as their father, but not by blood or marriage. He is a patron of the group. The issues of Abraham and Sarah’s marriage are problems of kinship (in our eyes, a personal matter); yet, how that gets worked out affects everyone else in the group.

If Abraham has an heir, everyone in his care will still have a father. So Sarah acts on her own family’s behalf to restore her own and her family’s honor, but she is also a broker (mediator) between Abraham and the rest of the group.

The roles of father, patron, and broker are all a bit jumbled. There is no contradiction in this. Ancient writers mixed their images because they were confident their readers could follow. These were, after all, basic ideas that everyone understood. They reflected real life.

These supposedly unique preferences are not actually the most foundational aspects of who they are. Like decorations on a cake, these things can easily change.

Her story illustrates that in many ways in the East today, as in the biblical world, the family is the basic building block of society.1 People live with their extended family. They look out for and care for their family. They rely on their family, and they make their personal decisions as a family. They do this because they see themselves as “we” (our family) rather than “me.”

The biblical authors think that introducing someone requires explaining their family.

complicated. Kinship dynamics play an important role in stories throughout the Bible. Some of these dynamics are clear, but others go without being said. When we see how ancient families worked, how they were organized, how people joined them, and how people remained in them, then we will become even better readers of the Bible.

In the West, we have another odd saying, “You can pick

your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” My Eastern friends would completely agree. But we mean very different things. As a Westerner, this saying suggests friends are to be preferred because they are chosen. My Eastern friends draw the opposite conclusion, pointing out this saying means family is far more permanent than choice.