Liberating Biblical Study

Scholarship, Art, and Action in Honor of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice

Laurel Dykstra, Ched Myers, Dykstra, Myers

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610974011
  9781498213950
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621891185
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Liberating Biblical Study is a unique collaboration of pioneering biblical scholars, social-change activists, and movement-based artists. Well known and unknown, veterans and newcomers, these diverse practitioners of justice engage in a lively and critical conversation at the intersection of seminary, sanctuary, and street. The book is divided into eight sections; in each, a scholar, activist, and artist explore the justice issues related to a biblical text or idea, such as exodus, creation, jubilee, and sanctuary. Beyond the emerging themes (e.g., empire, resistance movements, identity, race, gender, and economics), the book raises essential questions at another level: What is the role of art in social-change movements? How can scholars be accountable beyond the academy, and activists encouraged to study? How are resistance movements nurtured and sustained? This volume is an accessible invitation to action that will appeal to all who love and strive for justice--whatever their discipline, and whatever their familiarity with the Bible, scholarship, art, and activist communities.

Part 1

The Hebrew Bible

Section 1—Israel Emerges

This opening section brings together a group of community-based activists, an artist-educator, and two pioneers of sociohistorical biblical scholarship for a unique conversation on the subject of Israel’s emergence.

Norman Gottwald, who is the veritable dean of social-science scholarship in the Hebrew Bible, has produced an accessible and succinct encapsulation of his work on Israel’s anti-imperial origins, including implications for the American empire. This piece is a particular treasure because The Tribes of Yahweh, Gottwald’s groundbreaking and essential work on this subject, can be daunting reading for some.

Marvin Chaney, a respected Hebrew Bible scholar and another pioneer of social-historical criticism, has made a witty and modest contribution. His limerick (one of a collection of hundreds he has written on the Pentateuch) reinforces Gottwald’s analysis of class in the empires of antiquity, and exposes the way most North American Christians approach Scripture. We read the Bible as though the social and political location of its producers and players did not matter, and is if our own does not exist.

The next contribution is deceptively simple tool for popular theology that has been used in North America and Latin America. With illustrations and hand-lettered, plain-language text, pastor and educator Dan Erlander has made the work of Norman Gottwald, and others, including many feminist scholars, clear and appealing to a wide audience, including those with literacy challenges. His carefully researched work covers the same material as Gottwald—the exodus, the conquest, and the monarchy—and his pyramid illustrations vividly demonstrate Israel’s rejection of and subsequent embrace of social hierarchy.

The final contribution to this section brings scholarship to the streets. Hosted and led by members of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, and named for those politically marginalized, for rebels and disruptors of the status quo who were ancestors to some of the Hebrews, the Screaming Habiru affinity group took part in an action against police violence during the 2000 Democratic National Convention. This was a remarkable event because committed, longtime Christian activists drew a deliberate connection between their act of anti-imperial resistance and the work of social-historical biblical criticism. But the Screaming Habiru offer something back to the scholars as well. Their participation as one of many autonomous affinity groups in a “spokes council” decision-making process is one concrete and practical example of how “regulated anarchy” or decentralized social organization might have functioned during the tribal period of Israel’s early history.

These varied conversation partners engage in different ways with class structure, the nature of kingship, police violence, and anarchist decision making; but the unifying theme and the pressing question both ancient and modern is: How are the people of God to engage with hierarchy?

1

Early Israel as an Anti-Imperial Community

Norman K. Gottwald

Early Israel was born as an anti-imperial resistance movement that broke away from Egyptian and Canaanite domination and took the shape of a self-ruled community of free peasants. This often overlooked, revolutionary origin of Israel is a story that can be told by spelling out the sharp contrast between the vaunted empires of antiquity and the sovereign tribal life of early Israel, characterized by its unrelenting determination to provide dignity and livelihood for all members of the community.

The Political Economy of Ancient
Near Eastern Empires

Empires, ancient and modern, share the common feature of being systems of domination imposed parasitically on subject peoples. There are, however, major differences in the forms that empires have taken over time. The major distinction between ancient and modern empires is in the mode of production. Prior to the emergence of capitalism, imperial societies were sharply divided between a powerful centralized state (as in Egypt, Assyria, or Babylonia), which controlled vast stretches of land made up largely of villages engaged in agriculture and animal breeding. These villages contained up to 98 percent of the populace. There was nothing approximating a middle class, no mediating buffer between rich and poor.

Empires were built up as the more powerful states conquered other lands and imposed costly tribute in the form of precious metals, luxury goods, and agricultural produce. This tended to create a two-tier tributary system. For example, when the Assyrian emperors conquered the monarchies of Israel and Judah, they demanded tribute. Israelite monarchs were hard driven to raise the tribute. Since in an agrarian society the primary source of wealth was the peasantry, the recourse of kings was to increase the tax burden laid on their own subjects in order to cover both ongoing national expenses and the tribute due to the empire. Already hard-pressed peasants were abruptly required to yield tribute to two regimes—to both their native rulers and the Assyrian overlord. This was “double taxation” with a vengeance.

A closer look at the socioeconomic disparities in these empires reveals a ruling class that drew its wealth from the labor products of peasants and herders, craftsmen, and traders. This wealth funded a lavish lifestyle for the ruling class and its priests, scribes, and bureaucrats; provided for architectural investments in palaces, temples, fortifications, and other monuments; and at the same time mounted an army that could defend or expand the imperial conquests. A circle of merchants and absentee landlords, not technically a part of government, enjoyed state support and collaboration. To be a part of this ruling class establishment was to enjoy a comfortable and prosperous standard of living without the need to engage in any productive labor on behalf of society, and to entertain no obligation to those under rule other than to assure that underlings were able to produce sufficient wealth to sustain the class privilege.

Even in the necessity of maintaining a healthy peasant populace, ruling classes sometimes failed when their harsh rule drained the energy and morale of the populace, thereby contributing to the collapse of their regimes. As one reads Hosea, Jeremiah, and 2 Kings, it seems likely that the fall both of the northern and southern kingdoms (Israel and Judah alike) was facilitated in part by the exhaustion of its peoples, oppressed not only by the Assyrians and neo-Babylonians, but by their own leadership.

The life circumstances of those outside the ruling establishment were separated from their masters by an immense gulf. To be sure, the state granted “use ownership” of the land to the peasants, but it retained entitlement to tax the villages, first in the form of payments in kind and second in the form of conscription of labor for public works or military service. Often the tax quota was laid on an entire village, and the local officials had to raise the demanded amount. Internal corruption occurred when tax gatherers and village headmen took possession of goods and produce over and above the quota assigned them by the central government.

Many peasants, already living on the margin of subsistence in the semiarid Near Eastern environment, were further impoverished and driven into debt by these harsh annual exactions. They had little choice ...

Table of contents

• Liberating Biblical Study
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: The Hebrew Bible
• Part 2: Jesus and the Gospels
• Epistles