The Bible TI251 Fall 2020

What really stood out to me from this lesson was the short documentary that touched on the city of Jericho and how it fell-down. I found myself reminiscing on the song I learned years ago about Joshua fighting the battle at Jericho and the walls come tumbling down as I watched the video referencing Jericho. But in all reality, the structure of Jericho might have come down because of seismic activity years before Joshua was ever there. What I wonder is if the inhabitants of ancient Jericho might have attributed the seismic activity to an act of Godly intervention? It is interesting to see how archaeologists have found this action and figured out how the walls fell and when this happened. Through cross-referencing remains that were at the same level as pieces that fell is a way that the archaeologist could have referenced when this happened. Furthermore, they could do carbon-dating on the physical remains and DNA tests on the human remains, thus double-checking the resources to which the walls might have fallen. What is even more interesting is the comparison to the bible stories and the dates of when these happened as well. Joshua must have come in at some point to Jericho, but was this battle as dramatic as it has been put up to in the Bible and how did this become a huge event as written by the author?

Something that I’ve never really thought of when it comes to the Bible is how its history can actually be attempted to be proven. I have always had the mindset that the Bible is divine and everything that takes place in the Bible, no matter how you interpret it, seems quite untouchable physically because of how many years have passed since events from the Bible have taken place, which is between about 3500-2000 years. To uncover and discover physical documents or other physically attainable things from that time period is mind-blowing to me, and to actually interpret these artifacts and compare these interpretations to the Bible and what it says is so fascinating.

I had so closely associated the history of Israel with the stories from the Bible that it hasn’t occurred very often for me to look up the archeological or written history of Israel outside the stories in the Bible. It’s not impossible for the stories that we see in the Bible to be dramatized, abridged cultural stories of Mesopotamia. Earlier in the semester we looked at different stories, like Gilgamesh, that share strong similarities to different stories in the Bible. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in where modern-day Iraq is located, giving it a close cultural proximity to the authors of the Bible. We also looked at two rock formations that are in both Israel and Jordan that are known to both lands as Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt. The rock formations are referenced to be the same person, and it’s not hard to image that tales and stories migrated back and forth from places like Jordan and Israel. Books like Genesis could be abridged versions of cultural tales much like Aesop’s Fables: a compilation of tales that aim to teach morals to the next generation.

What is “ethnocentrism”? Ethnocentrism is the natural tendency to understand other cultures by comparing it to their own, your culture is us, and theirs them. By recognizing our natural tendencies towards bias rather than outright ignoring them is the preferred approach when interpreting scripture. Ethnocentrism isn’t just on a cultural level, it exists also on an ideological level as well, many of the early Church’s teachings had elements of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in their dogmatics. Others have gone as far as to apply modern political and economic ideologies to scripture, this ended up as modern liberation theology and the so-called “Radical Christianity,” a postmodern critical theory of Christianity.

The Orthodox Church with its many national patriarchates does interpret scripture through the language that is spoken in said patriarchate yet they are limited by the very medium which the information is conveyed. The Church has made it clear that phyletism, ethnic tribalism, is heresy after the Bulgarian Patriarchate opened a church in Constantinople which was only open to Bulgarians. Because of the natural tendency to be ethnocentric, I find that individual interpretation should be done with care, I would say that using academic biblical standards is the most fool-proof method against interpretations which might go too far.

This was my favorite lecture so far because of the portion where we talked about biblical economics, I’m an economics major. The situation we talked about with ancient peoples selling themselves to slavery in times of need was a crazy thing to think about, even if we did talk about how slavery wasn’t as bad then. When I think of American society and really all of western society the number one priority I think of is our civil liberties, to give them up is the very last thing I would do on this planet. When you really dive into it and think about the moral differences in today’s society and then it makes sense. We discussed a lot of the differences between now and then in class, but for our morals to be so different when we come from the same religious roots is fascinating. It doesn’t seem like God would change the things he wants humans to practice so this begs the question of who’s truly following God’s word best.

The First Commandment “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the first commandment for a reason. By making it the first commandment, this places the rest of the commandments in the context of the first, perhaps making it the root of all law. With God as the root, this gives value to upholding the law, to uphold it is now the objective good. We are of course called to uphold the “spirit of the law” rather than the law itself as individuals since sin is individual, not collective. These laws were formulated as natural theology, the Judeans certainly believed that basic ethics such as not killing, stealing, and the like should be enforced before the emergence of Abrahamic ideology.

Because of the commandments as products of natural promulgation of Jewish ethics, they were already the cultural norm. To go against these laws was to be a social outcast thus, simple social shunning was frequent until the situation was rectified. Is revenge ever justified in the Old Testament? It is never justified for man to take revenge on someone if the Commandments are broken, God speaks of taking vengeance (Dt. 32:35) but it is justified. The Apostle Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God: for it is written,” (Rms. 12:19). By separating man from God in justification, we understand that enforcing the commandments for the sake of vengeance is never justified.

During the class on Tuesday, we discussed slavery and the Bible.  Now, the word has a bit of a different connotation to what we know as American slavery, however I still feel like it is a bit problematic to just sweep it to the side.  We know slavery as the buying and selling of people against their will, that’s what happened more modern-day and that’s what the current definition is.  However, slavery back then was more of indentured servitude – people working to pay off their debts when say, a year of crops goes bad and they can’t make money back.  This is vastly different from the slavery we know, the times were completely different and this doesn’t constitute the Bible “promoting” slavery.  However, if it is so different than slavery we know now, why are we not using a separate word in the translations is my question?  We know what they mean through context and through discussion, but had I never listened to the discussion on Tuesday I probably would not have come to the conclusion that it was indentured servitude to pay off debts, and not the form of slavery that we’re more familiar with.  Of course in the grand scheme of things it does not mean much, but I do find it interesting that even though slavery back then was different, since the word and connotation has evolved we haven’t changed anything about how it is worded/printed.

In class we discussed slavery within the Bible. Many people seem shocked when realizing that even the Bible speaks and shows slavery throughout history. An important part that I’m glad was brought up was the thought of how slavery was most likely more indentured servantry rather than colonized slavery. As can be seen through the past within the United States, slavery was ownership. Slaves were bought and sold. They were treated as farm animals. The Bible is most likely talking about repaying debts with servantry. I enjoyed the conversation that we had about how people would pay their debts. You can’t just kill someone so what do you? I didn’t realize that people would give their child to work as a slave/indentured servant if they needed the money to survive. This was very interesting and sad to me.

Today in class we talked about Slavery in the bible. We talked about it in context of the times. We brought up the he Egyptian Empire and the Greek Empire, whom at the time relied on slaves and servants. At the time this was a common thing. Today we do not view it the same way. We look at it from the idea that all people are equal. However the realization of slavery at the time was normalized.When looking at this through historical and cultural contexts this may have effected the authors of the Bible and their viewpoints. Additionally We talked about how slavery in the Bible differed from US. One of the major talking points bout slavery during the time of the bible was that it was more of an indentured servitude. This was very different from slavery we were taught. US slavery consisted of humans being bough, sold, and treated as objects and property. These people had no choice or say in what happened. However he people in the bible would become slaves because of finical problems among other things. These indentured servants would work to pay off their debts and eventually be let free. Over time it is concerning to see how viewpoints and actions on the same subject can change, especially when it comes to human life.

Slavery was seen as something that was commonly seen in the Bible. So much so, that Christian slaveholders in early America used the Bible as an free-pass to have and hold slaves. But does the Bible actually condone slavery?
There are many parts of the Bible that people have questioned over the years, but I think that one of the biggest arguments is whether slavery was condoned in the Bible, or if it wasn’t. Well, firstly we can say the slavery worked differently that some might think. In the New World, or early America, slaves were generally people who had been taken captive and were forced into slavery. However, in the Bible, slavery could come from many different ways. People who had no money could sell themselves into servitude or they could have even been criminals working in servitude to justify their sentence and appease God. There were, of course, those forced into slavery, but it was not as simple as that most times.
Do I think that the Bible directly condoned slavery? No, I don’t. I think that slavery was an awful that happened in many different cultures and that lead to the spread of it in the future. People like to pick and chose what they want the Bible to say. I think that if a person wants to use the Bible to condone something as serious as slavery, then they should really take a better look at some of the other “rules” the Bible has. 1 Timothy 2:9 states that women shouldn’t braid their hair, own gold, or wear expensive things. Leviticus 19:27 states that a man should not trim his beard, and 19:28 says that a person should not make any cuttings into their flesh, aka, have tattoos. I think the moral of this story is that there are a lot of things in the Bible, but just because they’re in the Bible, doesn’t mean you can twist them to your own standards.