Ethnicity and the Bible

I don’t know if you know this. No interpretation is required with the Bible. Oh man. I’ve heard it said many times that it just says what it says and you don’t interpret it. Not what McClellan tends to say. But he’s not here, so I can say what it says.

You can say.

It’s my show. Hey, everybody. You’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. I’m Dan Beecher and there is no Dan McClellan today. In his stead, we’ve brought in someone possibly better. It’s Aaron Higashi. You’ve been on the show a bunch of times. Hi, Aaron. How are you doing today?

I’m so happy to be here. Not better than Dan, but ready to combat misinformation nonetheless.

You are. And what—and what a combat veteran you are. You’ve been here a few times and you are so—just so that the folks at home know, Dr. Higashi, you are a—you’re currently operating as a nerd-in-residence at The Bible for Normal People. Is that right?

That’s correct. I make content for them. I’ve written a couple commentaries for them. I have meetings with them. Zoom meetings. The most serious kinds of meetings with them.

The scariest of all the meetings.

Right? Yeah, but.

And—and the least amount of pants of all of the meetings.

That’s true. Especially in Phoenix where it’s 110 degrees.

Good. Is it—it is hot here. But I can’t imagine what it’s like in Phoenix. I’m very glad not to be there, though. I—I would—I would love to hang out with you. But you are also the—the author—we had you on before, but to talk about your book, First and Second Samuel for Normal People.

That’s right.

Which you did for The Bible for Normal People. And you’ve got another—another volume for them coming out about First and Second Chronicles.

That’s right. Hopefully by the end of the summer. First and Second Chronicles for Normal People.

That’s exciting.

First and Second Chronicles. Some of the most boring books in the Bible, but I try to make them fun and interesting and maybe even relevant to your life somehow through the magic of scholarly interpretation.

Amazing. Amazing. No, no, no. I don’t know if you know this. No interpretation is required with the Bible. Oh man. I’ve heard it said—I’ve heard it said many times that it just says what it says. And you don’t interpret it.

That’s the common wisdom of the YouTube comment section.

Yes, exactly.

Not what McClellan tends to say. But he’s not here, so I can say whatever I want. You can say—it’s my show. All right, well, I’ve asked you to come here. Dan is off, you know, gallivanting, signing books or whatever. But you, you have graciously agreed to be our resident scholar for this week. And one of the—what we decided we would talk about—I’m excited. We’ve got—we’ve got a couple of different topics. The first one we’re going to talk about—What Is That? And the “What Is That?” is going to be ethnicity as it pertains to the Hebrew Bible. And I—we—I think we’re going to stumble on some interesting stuff in that discussion. And then in the latter half of the show, we’re going to do—I haven’t even come up with a—what we’re going to call the segment, but we’re going to do a second segment about practicing safe texts.

So, yeah, that—that—that’s going to be fun. Stay tuned for that. You know, maybe it’s going to be more Pride Month stuff, so, you know.

We can never have too much.

You—well, again, comment sections would disagree, but that’s okay.

We’re good for engagement.

We’re gonna have a good time. And I hope the haters stick around for the end of the show and then just get furious with us.

The more the better.

But let’s—let’s get to a “What Is That?”

Yeah. Ethnicity in the Hebrew Bible. So if I had to make—make a list of the top three things that biblical scholars know about the Bible or at least think they know about the Bible.

That lay folks don’t necessarily know about the Bible. I don’t know what number one would be, but like, number two or number three, which is going to be our topic for today, would be that the Israelites are Canaanites. That the Israelites, they have—minds blowing all over the country, exploding.

That’s nuts because I have read several passages in the Bible where the Israelites are not pleased about the Canaanites.

Yes. Huge chunks of the Bible are written specifically for the purpose of showing their displeasure for the Canaanites.

So no, you, you wouldn’t get this impression. And this is why there’s such a big difference between what scholars think about this and what everyday lay folks, Bible readers think about this is because if you just read the Bible, that’s not the impression you get at all. The Bible goes way out of its way to demonstrate over and over again just how different these two groups of people are.

Right.

But I mean, this, this consensus has formed for a reason. And it gives us an interesting way to look at biblical texts. Because now we can look at biblical texts and we can ask this question, what does this passage or this story or whatever have to say about Israelite ethnicity?

Yeah, I mean, I guess we don’t. I. So one of the things that we should talk about, and I saw, you know, you and I have been corresponding about this, you sent me some very good notes about it, and I saw in it, one of the things that we need to talk about is what the word ethnicity means. Now you used in your notes the word defined. And I think I’m banned from talking about definitions on this show because part of this show. But, but, but you’re not banned from it. So maybe we should talk briefly about, like, what do we mean when we say the word ethnicity? Like, what is an ethnicity?

It’s a good question. Maybe I can still make Dan happy by, by, by referring to several definitions. So, so we don’t seem like we’re trying to overdetermine this word or anything, but it is an important, I mean, if we’re going to talk about ethnicity for a long time, we should, we should have some sense of what we’re talking about.

And there, there are different ways to define ethnicity, some that are going to be immediately relevant to this conversation. And thinking about the Bible, one from Fredrik Barth, he says here, I got a quote from him. Ethnic groups are not defined by the cultural stuff they carry, but by the boundaries they maintain. So the kinds of boundaries that we draw around our community, that’s a critical component of ethnicity. A second one here from Anthony Smith. An ethnic group is a named human population with myths of common ancestry and shared memories. So we think about on the inside of this definition are myths of ancestry and shared memories, true or not. And then on the outside are these really rigid boundaries that help separate the people who have those myths of common ancestry from everybody else. And then a third element that I want to bring in comes from a sociologist, Rogers Brubaker, who says we should think of ethnicity not as a thing, but as a process.

So let’s put those three things together. Ethnicity is a set of shared.

Yeah, you’re going to have to help me with all of this. Okay.

We’re going to, we’re going to make a sandwich here. We have myths of common ancestry for ourselves. We have boundaries drawn around those myths and then we’re working this all out together in a process. Those are the three key elements that we’re then going to bring to biblical texts. And we’re going to ask of these biblical texts, how do they contribute to these myths of common ancestry? How do they help us draw boundaries around this community? And how can we see this process change over time?

Yeah, it’s. I mean, I think if nothing else, those three definitions point out the, how sort of slippery this concept actually is. Like. Absolutely. And ethnicity is not really a thing, just sort of like, you know, you. When you hear sociologists and social scientists talking about race and they basically say there isn’t race, that’s not. Races are just as a sort of sociological or, or sometimes even ideological construct. You know, we’re not, what we’re not talking about is anything that could be tested with DNA or that could be like, there’s no, there’s no hard and fast scientific lines that we can draw that mean anything in the conversation about ethnicity. Is that, is that fair to say?

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely the domain of the social sciences rather than the hard sciences. So we’re not testing any of this in labs or anything like that. But it does, it is nevertheless something that emerges from everyday life. Right. As soon as people group, live whatever they need, whatever kind of work they need to do to survive, whatever kind of art and culture and food they produce, you’re well on your way to an ethnicity. And then, and this really comes to a head when that group encounters another group and they start to understand the differences. We live our lives this way. You over there live your lives that way, and that’s when that, that boundary element starts to come in and then you can really start talking about these two distinct ethnicities. But I do have to say ethnicity, I think, and perhaps this is because of my experience as a mixed race person, but I think ethnicity is more real than race.

I think ethnicity is more organic than race. Ethnicity just emerges from interactions between different people groups. But race was really invented for a specific reason, to classify people to really facilitate imperialism and colonialism and to facilitate racism. You know, racism is the—Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great quote that racism is the parent of race, not the other way around. It’s racism preceded. There was first a desire to be racist, and that’s what gave rise to the concept of race.

I think that that’s a valid. That’s a valid distinction to make, that racism was a motivated idea or race was a motivated idea, and ethnicity sort of arises out of sort of a cultural experience.

I think that’s a great description.

All right, well, let’s talk then about Israel and Canaan and sort of what we’re talking about when we say those words. I know. You know, it’s funny because you gave me two scriptures that are very interesting. Can we talk about Genesis 10 where we’re talking about sort of the lineages of Noah’s sons? Right. Is that what that is? Yeah. And then we’ll jump to Ezekiel 16 . So talk briefly about sort of what Genesis 10 says and why it—why we think it might say that.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is part of the reason why just casual Bible readers are going to assume that the Israelites and the Canaanites are very distinct people groups. And that’s because—and part of the reason, there are a lot of reasons—but part of the reason is because in Genesis chapter 10, we have this, the Table of Nations. And this is where we have these big lists of all these eponymous ancestors, that is, ancestors who are named after the people group that will descend from them. So we have on this list people named like Egypt and Canaan and stuff like that who are named after their eventual descendants. But we have all these ancestors on this. And one of the things that’s really interesting about the Table of Nations is that Canaan, the ancestor of the Canaanites, is grouped alongside Egyptians and grouped alongside several Mesopotamian groups. So, one, that’s weird because Egypt and Canaan and Mesopotamia are not anywhere near each other.

Right. It does. It does seem like the Israelites are surrounding themselves.

Yeah, they are. It is kind of strange how they’ve—I mean, this reflects sort of an argument almost that the Israelites are, you know, these people groups who have spent a lot of time dominating them, who have spent a lot of time in conflict with them, they’re all related. But then Genesis 10 locates the Israelites in an entirely different family.

Right.

Descended from an entirely different one of Noah’s sons. So all those groups are similar. Egyptians, Canaanites, Mesopotamia, they’re all related, but the Israelites are different. They’re set apart. They’re not like the Egyptians, they’re not like the Canaanites, they’re not like the Mesopotamians. And so that’s part of the reason why, as just a casual Bible reader, you’re going to make the assumption, well, they’re their own group. They have nothing to do with these other groups.

Does it feel at all to you, like—and this is me speculating, obviously—but one wonders if they chose these groups and grouped them together—Canaanites, Egyptians, Mesopotamian, whatever—they just picked all the bad guys in their stories and just said they all came from the same group, from the same lineage. Is it that?

Suspicion, I think, rings true. I mean, okay, they, I mean, there is no other reason. I mean, they have, they have no language in common. They don’t have any geography in common. They’re not really, you know, they’re not overlapping in power at any given time, and they’re, they’re competing against one another. So there’s, they have no real, they have no genetic relationship. So that they have, there’s nothing that actually ties them together except that from an Israelite perspective, they are frequently antagonists. I mean, that, that is, yeah, that is the common thread for these, through these different groups. But no, I mean, in, in real life, you know, that, I mean, one is a northeastern African country and one’s, you know, way over here and one’s, you know. Yeah, so.

No, all right, I like it, I like it. The etiology for why, for all the people I don’t like. For all the people I hate. Yeah, that’s okay. So, so what, what is an Israelite? Like, where maybe help me understand, like, because here’s, here’s another trick and maybe you can help me understand this too. There are words that I encounter a lot because I don’t know if you know this. I do a whole podcast about the Bible and I don’t know much about it, to be perfectly honest. And I get confused by words like Israelite, Hebrew. They’re, you know, Judahite, and they all seem to be referring to us. Like there’s an us group in the Hebrew Bible.

And I, I, I’m sort of, I keep struggling to figure out what is meant by, like, what these groups are. Are they distinct? Are they the same? I don’t know.

Yeah, I mean, and your, your confusion is, is totally reasonable because even different biblical texts will use—so even if you just looked at the Bible and said, Bible, tell me what these terms mean, you’re going to run into trouble sometimes because sometimes they do mean different things. So, I mean, anything that’s related to Judah is primarily going to be a geographic description of people who live around the region of Judah. But that region is produced by a kingdom occupying this space in southern Canaan. So there is a kingdom there. It becomes synonymous with the region. Later it’s a Persian province. Even later still, it becomes a province under Greek rule and then Roman rule. And each time the boundaries change a little bit. And so there’s a lot of flexibility there. But Israelite is first defined biblically. I mean, if you’re reading the Bible left to right in sort of the order that it presents itself, or right…

To left if you’re in Hebrew. But either way, sure, yes, yeah.

They are defined as the sons of Israel, and Israel is who Jacob is renamed to. So ostensibly these are all people who have—they’re part of the same family who were originally in Canaan, who went down into Egypt and then in the famous Exodus story, came back out again 400 years later to resettle in the land of Canaan. So the Israelites are the people who had that experience, the experience of going down into Egypt and then coming back out again. They are related to one of these 12, 13, 14 tribes, depending on exactly how you count them. They’re one of those people.

Okay. And that, that grouping that you just used does seem to mesh very well with the idea, the, with the, with the sort of the definitions that we talked about of ethnicity, which is to say we’ve got this common ethnic ancestry myth idea. They are, they are a group, they are, they are, you know, sort of self-contained there. They have their boundaries. So, I mean, I guess that makes sense, right?

Yeah. The difficulty is that, I mean, the Exodus is a huge part of that myth of common ancestry, that going down into Egypt and coming back out again, except of course, the Exodus never happened.

Right. That is a bit of a sticky wicket, isn’t it?

So the Exodus, as it’s described in the Bible, did not happen. We have good archaeological evidence that it did not happen. The Bible describes more than 2 million people coming up out of Egypt to resettle into Canaan. Those are impossible numbers. Yeah, it doesn’t look like that number of people or even a tenth that number of people ever migrated from Egypt to Canaan at any of the times that the Bible says that is supposed to have happened. And the Bible contradicts itself on when that was. So, I mean, that’s an additional problem. So then the question is like, well, if this story didn’t happen, then what is Israelite ethnicity? If that’s the defining feature, if that’s a big part of what’s separating Israelites from the surrounding people. What happened instead? And this, this is where that scholarly consensus comes in. That did not happen. Instead, Israelites emerged more gradually, coming into their awareness of themselves as Israelites over the course of several centuries, starting around 1200 or so at the end of the 13th century BCE and then taking really several centuries beyond that to establish themselves as self-conscious Israelites who are different from the Canaanites that they grew out of.

So, yeah, I mean, they, so coming out of the Canaanite ethnicity, but then, but then, you know, eventually becoming sort of sworn enemies or whatever of that, of the group from which they emerged. Do we have a sense of how that would have happened or what that would have looked like? Or is, I mean, I, I’m guessing there’s, you know, what, what we have is, is as you say, a sort of a fictionalized story about, you know, being in bondage in Egypt.

But yes, I mean, that’s a big part of it. Remember again, this is a process and for the ancient Israelites, a big part of that process was the text they produced. So when we look at the earliest stories in the Hebrew Bible, they go a long way towards helping define who the Israelites are. I’m sure Dan has mentioned before, but the earliest parts in the Hebrew Bible scholars generally consider to be Exodus 15 , the Song of the Sea, which is a version of the Exodus story. Escaping from Pharaoh, God defeating Pharaoh with waters that have been supernaturally manipulated and then coming up into or around the region of Canaan, passing by all these other people. Right. The text goes out of its way, Exodus 15 goes out of its way to mention these other groups are in the land who, who the Israelites are not. They are not the Edomites that they pass by. They are not the Philistines they pass by. They are not the Moabites, they’re not Canaanites, they’re somebody else.

And they’ve been brought into this land by God to serve God. So this is sort of the, the story that, that share that myth of common ancestry that the rest of the Bible is based on. Now, it’s not true archaeologically. We know that, that this did not happen, at least in a way that involved a lot of people. But it’s still, it’s a powerful story and it’s such a powerful story that people can then build an identity off of.

Yeah, is the idea of. I, you know, I remember the concept of the Promised Land and that was, and that was sort of Canaan, right? It was, it was. So it seems like at some point that mythos must have come from something, right? This idea that, that we, that we weren’t from here, but we took it over, that, that it seems unlikely to me that that came from nothing, that they just made that up out of whole cloth. Do we have any other sources that can shed light on, on whether they actually did come from somewhere else or go somewhere else and come back to that land? Or like, do we have any, anything on that or is it just.

Part of where it might come from? Is, and, and this is, this is kind of a minority opinion amongst biblical scholars, but it is it is popular amongst those that I like the most. So it’s, yeah, it’s not, it’s not the consensus, but there was a biblical scholar named Norman Gottwald who had this idea that it was really lower-class Canaanites, so, so they didn’t come from somewhere else. But the idea of Canaan as a promised land flowing with milk and honey that is replete with natural resources just waiting to be used was the dream of a lower class within Canaan that was able to essentially revolt against wealthier city-states and then take possession of the rest of the land of Canaan. And this helps us sort of explain that idea of this idealized Canaan that, that, you know, that these people are coming to inherit now. They’re not coming from outside, but they’re coming from relative poverty.

And this, this actually does match some of the archaeological data a little bit, because while we do have an Israel, something called Israel, by the end of the 13th century, starting in the. I’m sorry. Yeah, in the 13th, starting in the 12th century, we have this, just a huge number of relatively poor highland villages that get settled in the middle of Canaan from, if you have a map in front of you, from the middle of the Jezreel Valley down to Hebron. So in that, like kind of in the spine of the territory up in the mountains, more than 100 villages over the next couple hundred years, couple centuries are settled. But they’re poor villages, not a lot of people in each of them. Certainly not the kind of numbers that get talked about with the Exodus. But there is a redistribution of the population away from wealthier city-states, down closer to the coast to these highland villages.

So there is a social transformation that’s happening there. And Norman Gottwald really capitalizes on this and says, well, the best explanation for this is that people with this Israelite identity who worship this heretofore unknown God, Yahweh, which also doesn’t appear to originally be a Canaanite deity. They developed a new way of life and separated themselves from the Canaanites.

Wow. Okay, that’s interesting. I like that. One of the, I guess one of the things that we should talk about is like other ways that Israelites sort of differentiated themselves from Canaanites and—or were different from Canaanites and sort of where those boundaries were drawn. Not just physical boundaries, not just geographic boundaries, but like sort of ethnic boundaries.

Yeah. So, and this is where a lot of the laws in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible come in. Many of these laws seem to have roots in a desire to draw very strict boundaries around the Israelite community.

Oh, okay.

And that’s because there’s hardly any difference between these two groups of people.

Right, interesting. So, you know, it’s funny because I’ve heard Dan say many times on our show that a lot of the laws that are laid out in these passages were not for practice. They were—there was—they were there as some sort of marker point, but they weren’t there as a day-to-day, like enforceable law. And I never really had much sense of why that would even be a thing. But this is a really good reason, just to create a distinction between us and them. We do this even if we don’t do it. But like, on the books, at least, this is a difference between us and them.

Right? The “on the books” is the important part. Right. These are primarily priestly groups and scribal groups—so people in positions of relative power, the makers of culture and, when it comes to it, the enforcers of culture on occasion. So it is important for them because they’re the ones who are manufacturing—again, it’s a process, it’s not a one-and-done thing, but over the course of centuries, they are manufacturing Israelite identity. And you can do that in a relatively secluded place. You can create these texts and you could teach these texts to the next generation of scribes and priests. And then, you know, anytime these upper-class people interact with lower-class people in sacrificial practice, for example, they will remind them, “You are engaging in the sacrifice in the way that you do because you are an Israelite and not a Canaanite. Don’t do it.” So even without the laws ever necessarily being enforced, their existence amongst producers of culture still has an impact on everyday people.

In fact, there’s, I mean, even some laws that are very difficult to understand at first glance make a lot more sense when we consider them in this way. So people may be familiar with the law, “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”

Right.

Which is sort of a famous example of a weird-sounding law. What exactly is it getting at? It’s often interpreted by Jewish communities today—they go so far as to not have any meat and dairy together at all.

Right.

In an effort to avoid having even accidentally boiled a kid in its mother’s milk. But there is some reason to think that this was a Canaanite fertility practice of some kind. So this law exists, you know: don’t do what the Canaanites did. They did this thing. You don’t do that.

So they—the Canaanites would have, you know, “Oh, well, we need—if we need to get pregnant, get some of the mother’s milk and boil a kid.” And kid, in this case, just to be clear, is a baby goat.

Yeah, the baa. Yeah. Not a human being. We’re not, we’re not on the episode about human sacrifice, I think Dan, already.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve done that one. We’ll probably do it again.

But yes, as a way of preparing an animal for, for ritual consumption.

Yeah, okay, yeah, that does, that makes way more sense than just as a as a, you know, bizarre food prohibition.

Right. Yeah. So there’s—and we, we also know like, don’t—

The—

The prohibition against eating pork sometimes we’re able archaeologically to identify Israelite sites versus Canaanite sites because of the prohibition on pork. So they’ve created this almost arbitrary restriction on themselves just for the purpose of differentiating themselves.

Oh, the Canaanites. That, you know, that right there is a great reason to stay Canaanite, frankly.

I mean, bacon is the—

I’m a huge pork fan myself. I like the pigs. So, you know, I, I suppose. But you know, Dan talks about costly signaling all the time. I guess that’s a, that’s. That, that’s what we’re talking about here is like we don’t do X because we are not they. Yes, it does, it does have a very, a defensive position, doesn’t it? Like a posture of, of like, just like we’re not. Yeah, it feels, it feels defensive to say to, to craft your entire legal structure based on not being somebody else.

Yeah. And I mean, and there’s, there’s always tensions here. Right. So so much of it is designed to draw a sharp line between the Israelites and Canaanites at the same time. I mean, there are whole sections of these law codes that are drawn from, you know, other ancient Southwest Asian law codes. I mean, in particular the Code of Hammurabi, they’ll just copy and paste laws.

Right.

So, so there is this weird, you know, we are going to take some of these from other cultures, whole cloth, but then these other laws are going to be created for the purpose of. So there are several motivations operating all at once. And that’s one of the reasons why we have multiple interpretive lenses for these texts. Because no one lens is going to capture all of this at the same time, of course.

So. And you know, there’s some of the laws, you know, there are the silly like food laws and whatever, but there were also like rules about how, how Israelites are allowed to interact with Canaanites, including like marriage and that sort of thing. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? About inter-ethnic marriage?

Yeah. So again, something that we find in all the legal codes is a prohibition against intermarriage with Canaanites, usually also buttressed by commands to commit genocide against the Canaanites to wipe them all out once you get there.

Fortunately, the Israelites were never actually in a position to commit genocide against Canaanites. That’s, that’s not how that actually went down historically. So hopefully it looks like this didn’t happen in actual practice. Nevertheless, the rhetoric in the texts is very aggressive. Yeah, kill them completely and be sure you don’t intermarry with them.

Right.

And that intermarriage is another way of creating a boundary around your community. And this one’s especially difficult. There’s always going to be some like, leakage here. Right. Because again, in actual life the line between the Israelite and the Canaanite is so very thin. And so it’s a very difficult sentiment to enforce. And so all throughout these texts we have Israelites marrying other people. I mean, famous marriages even between Moses and Zipporah, who’s a Midianite, or David and Maacah, who’s from an Aramean city-state. So you have all these marriages that are inter-ethnic marriages in the actual narratives of the text, but the law codes are all very clear. Do not intermarry with them because then you’re going to commit idolatry. If you intermarry with them, you’re going to commit idolatry. And idolatry doesn’t really feel like a super relevant concern for us today. But if the primary difference between Israelites and Canaanites is the worship of Yahweh, then to commit idolatry is to stop being an Israelite.

To commit idolatry is to become a Canaanite again.

And so there, there’s, there’s a lot more writing on this than just, you know, preferences of religious practice. There’s a lot more writing on this, it would seem to them at least than just who you happen to marry.

It gets violent. I mean, like, you know, even though, as you say, there’s, there’s lots of examples of the interethnic marriage. Like there’s also prohibitions that, that involve like death or involve, you know, that, that have pretty, pretty horrific consequences. Theoretically. Yeah.

Yeah, theoretically. Yeah. So I mean, you see a lot of those in the book of Joshua , for example, in these conquest stories where you have, you know, the wholesale slaughter of populations like Jericho and Ai and it comes up later in First Samuel when the slaughter of the Amalekites, it comes up in Numbers with the slaughter of first the Moabites in, in, in Numbers 25 and, and then it sort of becomes the Midianites in Numbers 31 . So yeah, there are a lot of.

These are, sorry, are all of these groups, the, the Moabites, the Midianites, blah, blah, blah. Are all of them considered Canaanites? Is that, is, is that an umbrella term?

Or they could be. Strictly speaking, the Moabites are a little bit southeast of Canaan. But I mean, a lot of the thinking about Canaanites still ends up applying to the Midianites regardless. So there’s, again, the boundaries between here are very thin. I mean, there’ll even be places, you know, in the book of Ruth , for example, where Moabites are incorporated into the line of David. So some of David’s ancestors are Moabites. So is that, you know, we’re crossing these boundaries all the time. But I think technically the Moabites and the Edomites and some of these other groups would, they’re outside Canaan proper.

But they’re treated in some of the same ways.

Oh man. We could go on and on about this, but I did promise that we had another segment. So help me, help me wrap this up just in a way that like, what is there? Is there, is, is there any takeaway for today from all of this? Is there? Because I know, because we have seen how many people use some of these passages about like no interethnic marriage or no, you know, all of these things. They can be used in pretty horrific ways in modern times. What are your, what are your thoughts? What, what’s a, what’s a takeaway that we can sort of, that we can apply to now?

I mean, ethnicity is a very powerful idea. Some of these texts against interethnic marriage were quoted by people who supported, you know, bans on interracial marriage in the 20th century. So there’s that element to it. I mean, a takeaway could be that ethnicity is a very powerful thing and much more complicated than it appears. And there have been some news articles lately that I think really attest to how complicated ethnicity can be. If you’ve been watching the news past couple months, a number of stories have appeared in which people who are, you know, voting for Trump and very harsh immigration policies have then had their loved ones, their spouses or their children arrested by ICE for, you know, some number of weeks. And a lot of the comments are about, well, how, how could you possibly vote against your own interests? How could you not know that this was going to happen? Ethnicity is much more complicated. You know, the, the person who looks who, who you depend on, who’s inside your boundaries, right?

Who you share, you know, stories with and shared memories with, those people never seem foreign to you, right? And so the way that the state, in the exercise of its power, is going to define ethnicity is probably going to be different than the way that you define ethnicity. So you think these people. You think. You think foreigners are people way over there who have very different lives from you. And you think the people in your household who you love and who you depend on, they’re natives, they’re domestic. They are. You know, they’re here with you. They’re the same ethnicity. You know, so that. That. I mean, ethnicity is more. Much more complicated.

Yeah. You know, I don’t want to hit the ICE thing too hard, but I have a friend whose family is Cuban in Florida and thought—and literally, like, their whole thinking was, you know, this. They were. They were Trump fans because they. They thought that they were. That they were immune from what was going to happen to the Venezuelans and to the, you know, the Mexicans or whatever, because they were Cubans in a way that I thought, you know, I don’t think that Trump and his cohort are actually making the same distinctions that you’re making.

Okay, I like it.

In Ezra, chapter 10, there’s this terrible incident in which we’re later in history now, where the people of Judah, after they come back after the captivity, have resettled, they’ve rebuilt Jerusalem. But all these men, these Judean men, Jewish men, have intermarried with foreigners, the peoples of the land. And they see this as a big problem. Ezra thinks this is a threat to the community. And this guy comes to Ezra, this guy named Shekhanyah, he comes to Ezra and he’s like, we need to divorce these foreign women. We need to do it fast. We need to kick them out, and we need to kick out any children that have been had by these foreign women. And then, unfortunately, very, very sadly, this happens. Then Ezra forces more than 100 couples to get divorced. And that’s what the bulk of Ezra chapter 10 is. It’s just a big list of people that he’s forced to get divorced. But ironically, Shekhanyah’s father, a man named Yechiel, he is on that list. Right. So Shekhanyah has accidentally advocated for his own deportation from the community.

And so if this story is to be believed, his father, Yechiel, married a foreign woman. He was found guilty of intermarriage. He was forced to divorce her and send her away with Shekhanyah, who is his son.

Right.

So this, it’s just, this is a biblical example, a biblical parallel of this thing that we see happening today. There are different definitions of ethnicity in play at the same time. And if you get on the wrong side of the one that the state defines, the one that’s going to have the power to discriminate behind it, then bad things can happen.

Yeah, yeah, it’s. It is fascinating to see. I guess that’s the danger, right? Like, because it’s a nebulous idea. Because these ideas are not. There’s no solidity to them whatsoever. Yeah, they can be. The idea can be deployed in ways that are welcoming and fun and good and, and create community and create a sense of shared responsibility, or they can be deployed as a way of excluding and as a way of making sure that, you know, of. Yeah, it can be a bad thing. It can be. It can be used to harm. And I think that that is, that’s the real danger. Okay. Yeah, I thank you for that.

That was fascinating. I want to keep talking about it forever. Anyway. Let’s keep going. Let’s move on to what is that? And this. What is that? is we’re talking a little bit about. We’re going to take as our jumping off point a book by one of your teachers. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah. Talk to us about, about this book and, and sort of what. Where, where. What it’s talking about and, and. And what we’re. What we’re talking about here.

So I wanted to bring a text into this conversation called Practicing Safer Texts by my advisor and professor Ken Stone. And I mean, it’s a wonderful book in its own right, but it’s about food, sex, and also in one of the chapters in particular about ethnicity and how discussions about food practices and sex practices relate to ethnicity. We’ve already seen that a little bit in our conversation about Pentateuchal laws and how laws about food and laws about who you can and cannot have sex with get used by Israelites to help them, you know, maintain this boundary between them and Canaanites. But Practicing Safer Texts by Professor Stone is mainly in response to people who would say that while the Bible does talk a lot about food stuff, when it talks about food stuff, that stuff doesn’t really matter anymore.

Right.

It’ll. It’ll tell us what we can and cannot eat. It’ll create elaborate laws about food practices. But that stuff is culturally relative. That was specific to them back then. That doesn’t matter now. We don’t need to do that stuff now. But who will also say the Bible talks a lot about sex stuff? It talks about the kinds of sex we can and cannot have, about the kinds of relationships we can and cannot have, but that stuff still matters.

So you’ll find lots and lots of everyday Bible readers and conservative evangelicals in particular, who know full well that the Bible talks about both these topics but will only keep one.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and—and it uses—I mean, the Bible—make no mistake, the Bible uses, like, pretty strong language about the food stuff. You know what I mean? Like—

Like the strongest of language.

Yeah. We’re talking about it’s an abomination to eat shellfish or whatever, you know what I mean? And then it uses that same word about some sex act. And like you say, modern, modern readers are more than happy to down shrimp as they’re writing a comment about how much they hate Pride Month on the internet. Yeah, so—so, so why should—I mean, it seems clear to me why—why these are parallel. But do you have a sense of why people—why the—the food stuff was able to be jettisoned, but the sex stuff persists?

There’s a lot. There’s a lot of layers to it. One is we start to see—well, we start to see some reinterpretation of both these things in the New Testament, but people notice the reinterpretation of the food stuff more so. I mean, there are passages in the New Testament, for example, which really call into question the necessity or maybe the efficacy of some of these food prohibitions. So in Mark 7 , there’s a Jesus—there’s a famous saying that, “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from the outside can’t defile them?” in reference to a conversation about food, which seems to indicate that you can kind of eat whatever you want. And then, you know, there’s a famous vision in Acts chapter 10, where Peter sees all these foods, all these animals, and he says—and God says—anything that I make clean can’t be made unclean. Now, Peter sort of takes this as an encouragement to incorporate Gentiles into the church.

But a lot of people who read this take this as a, “Oh, we can eat anything we want,” right? And then you have the big council in Acts 15 , which is all these early Christians sort of deciding what parts of the Mosaic law they ought to keep, and they jettison most of the food laws and only end up with a handful, like, don’t eat foods sacrificed to idols and don’t eat blood or animals that have been strangled, which, you know, takes like a hundred laws down to three.

Right?

So—so we see some of this reinterpretation in the New Testament. So people sort of—they—they stay on that tack. Right? And they—and—and because it would be inconvenient for people to continue to take these food laws seriously, they just drop them. They take a lead from what they see in the New Testament, what they perceive to be in the New Testament, and they continue on that tack. They don’t notice the way that the New Testament is reinterpreting some things having to do with sexuality. There—there’s a very strong preference for chastity and singleness in the New Testament that often goes unnoticed. People—and by people, I primarily mean straight folks—spend a lot of time romanticizing and finding in the New Testament the celebration of heterosexuality, when, in point of fact, there’s a lot more celebration of singleness and chastity. Jesus was obviously single. Paul spends a lot of time exhorting singleness and chastity, preferred that people would be unmarried their entire lives and only permits marriage as a concession to people who are of weak will.

Right—which in any other circumstance, you’d see, well, that’s a sin. I mean, any other situation in which the person is like, “I can’t control myself,” so you’d be like, well, that’s a sinful thing to have. But he’s willing to grant this concession.

He’s like, all right, you can—you can do it. Look, if you’re—if you’re that hard up.

Right, fine, exactly.

But—but try to be a little bit more—have a little more willpower, will you?

Right. So—but—but that would get in the way of people’s lives, the kind of lives that people would want to live. You know, anti-LGBTQ evangelical Christians will always make fun of LGBTQ Christians for reinterpreting the Bible to match their lifestyle. But straight Christians are reinterpreting the Bible to match their lifestyle all the time when they try and find bits and pieces to celebrate heterosexuality when there is such a strong preference for singleness and chastity in the text. So it comes down to the desires of the interpreter. Yeah, right. You do see reinterpretation in the New Testament, but they cling to one while they largely ignore the other.

I mean, that’s kind of the gag, right? That’s kind of the way this is—this always goes. I mean, and it’s—it’s kind of one of the themes of this show and of Bible scholarship in general, which is that the Bible—you know, Dan’s book—the Bible doesn’t say anything.

Yeah. And it’s especially… I mean, we could sort of sit back and say, you know, anybody can interpret the Bible any way that they want, but some of these interpretations really hurt people. Some of these interpretations kill people. Some of these interpretations deprive people of quality of life. So as… as flexible as the act of interpretation is, the outcomes, the consequences of interpretation, we can’t be lackadaisical about that. We have to contest harmful interpretations where we find them.

Yeah, I mean, maybe talk a little bit about that. I mean, I think what you’re… a lot of what you’re talking about, at least in a modern context, is the way people use the Bible to ostracize the LGBTQ community. Specifically, right now, trans people are being… are being really hit hard, and… and they’re… they’re… they’re dying because of it. It’s literally, you know, trans kids are killing themselves. Trans people are killing themselves. And that’s… it’s just not okay. That’s like, this is… this is not an… an acceptable outcome for an interpretation of a book that could be interpreted any number of ways.

Yeah. So I… I think often the first step is you… you have to try and force people to see that there is a certain arbitrariness to their interpretations. They’ve made choices, both before they’ve come to the text and in the act of interpreting the text; they are making certain choices to privilege certain concerns, to center their own identity. They’ve put themselves and their interests into this interpretation in order to get this result. And one of the ways that you can show people this is by interpreting texts in different ways, because when you show them that difference, you can see much more clearly where they’ve inserted themselves. So one of the early examples in Practicing Safer Texts, in Dr. Stone’s book about this, is so many Christians take the Garden of Eden story. This is a story about sexuality. This is a story about the beginning of heterosexuality.

In particular, the… the bumper sticker thing is always, it’s, you know, “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Right. This is… this is a… the creation, not just of… of the first people, but of a normative sexual institution that we’re all obligated to follow.

Right.

And one of the first things that Dr. Stone does in this book is show that this text is not about sex. Or it could be about so many other things. It could be about food. And he catalogs all these instances in the ancient world where people read the story in Genesis 2 and 3 and they saw in this a story about food, about the dangers of gluttony, the dangers of the lack of self-control. After all, that’s the sin that brought down the world, is we ate when we shouldn’t have, when we weren’t supposed to eat. Right. So if, you know, all sin begins with a failure for human beings to tame their stomachs. If only we could tame our stomachs, then we would be free from all these other sins. So there have been times and places where people have looked at the same story and… and… and they never thought “this is the foundation of heterosexuality.” They thought “this is the foundation of a prohibition against gluttony.” And when you put that up against people’s faces, then sometimes it’s a little bit clearer to them that they’ve made this text about what they want it to be about.

Right. I mean, I… I should be clear that, like, I think a lot of people don’t actually choose the interpretation of the Bible that they… that they espouse. Like, they inherited or they’re… or they’re given it by someone that they put in authority over them, so like a pastor or, you know, a priest or whatever, and they’re… and they’re just trusting in that authority for that interpretation. So I don’t think that this is always something where people are thoughtfully choosing an interpretation for themselves. Yeah, I… and I do think that a lot of people, you know, a lot of the listeners that come to this show, a lot of the people who, you know, follow you on social media do so because they need… they… they had never experienced any kind of different interpretive lens other than the one that… that they were given from birth or the one that they were, you know, raised up in and supplied by… by the community that was surrounding them.

So I think that… I think that it’s… there’s something… I think there’s something so beautiful about what you’re talking about and that is the idea of showing people different interpretive lenses and saying, “how is this any less valid than the one that you did?”

I mean, that’s a very good clarification.

You mean you mentioned the Adam and Eve story. That could just as easily have been a sort of the, rather rather than sort of the, the etiology for heterosexuality. Heteronormativity. It could like Eve is trans. Right. She starts as, as Adam’s side. She is, she is part of a, of, you know, they’re both the same thing and then, and then they are separated out and become different. It could be the etiology for transness as you know that. I don’t see why that’s not just as valid an interpretation.

Yeah, I mean that’s, there’s several good points there. Yeah. I’m glad you clarified. It’s not choices. Maybe too strong a word in some instances. A lot of this is happening unconsciously, right? Yeah, a lot of this is happening unconsciously. So part of the power of showing people alternative interpretations is to force it to be conscious. Right. When you’re confronted with the alternative. We could also read it this way. There’s sort of this aha moment. Oh, you know, certain choices have gone into their interpretation. Maybe certain choices at some point back have gone into mine. Right. So they’re, they’re sort of forced to confront the reality of difference. But you’re right, I mean that you could do a trans friendly reading of, of Genesis 2 and 3. I mean one, one of the most famous articles. This won’t mean most much to most people. One of the most famous articles in feminist biblical interpretation was by Phyllis Trible 50 years ago now and she pointed that out. You know, the, the. This being.

This first human being is gender ambiguous. You know, it’s, it’s difficult to say exactly what Adam is to start with in, in, in Genesis 2 because the story is much more about splitting a creature in half.

Than it is to. I mean we, we have this cartoonish version of taking a rib and fashioning, you know, from a. Very clearly. From a man, somebody who’s very clearly a man. Making somebody who’s very clearly a woman. But in the actual text and in the original language, it’s this very ambiguous being who split in half. And it’s only after being split in half that the gender becomes more clear. So, yeah, that could be the transition from one gender to another from, from gender ambiguity to gender clarity and back again. Yeah, could, could be as much of what this story is about than, than anything else.

Yeah, yeah. I, I, you know, and you know, I, none of this is to say we know what the original authors meant by any of this because we can’t know that. We can’t. You can’t get to what the, you know, even in spite of what our current Supreme Court believes, originalism doesn’t work because you can’t, you can’t get into the minds of the authors. They’re, they’re gone. So, so it’s just a matter of what we can make it mean to us and how we can make it useful to ourselves.

Yeah, and that’s, that’s where the title of the book comes from. Practicing Safer Texts. It’s obviously a pun on safer sex, but the idea is that there are some interpretations that are safer than others, some interpretations that won’t hurt as much as others. So while we, while we can’t have a final, we can’t know for certain what an original author meant, what we can know for certain is what harmful interpretations are doing. We can know for certain the lives that are being lost. We can know for certain the relationships that are being destroyed. We can see those things. And in light of those things, we can practice safer interpretations of the text.

I love that. I love it so much. Thank you so much for bringing this to us. Thank you for filling in. Aaron Higashi. You are amazing.

Happy to do so.

I, I just, I love the way your brain works. I, I’m very lucky I get to be surrounded by such smart, cool people. Anyway, friends at home, if you would like to become a part of making this show what it is and keeping it going, you can join our, our intrepid group of patrons by going to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and, and signing up there where you can receive early and ad free version of every show. You can also get at a certain level the, the after party which is bonus content every week and you can uh, and, and you can feel good about being part of, of helping this show get out to the world. If you’d like to write to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogma.com.

Well, thank you for having me.

We’ll talk to everybody next week.

Ethnicity and the Bible

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology