Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Race and Ethnicity

In Chapter 2 of Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, the authors focus on the issues of race and ethnicity in the Bible.

There were so many "WHOA" moments for me in this chapter that I'm going to make it two posts, and even then, I won't hit it all. (Basically, every Western Christian needs to read this book).

The title of this chapter is "The Bible in Color", and wow—they did a GREAT job of showing this in just a few pages. I want to read a whole book just on this topic! On page 56, they state the reason for this chapter: "Being oblivious to ethnicities can cause us to miss things in the Bible.... Like the world we inhabit today, the worlds of both the Old and New Testaments were ethnically diverse and richly textured by an assortment of cultures, languages, and customs."

Ethnicity goes beyond skin color and national boundaries... it touches lingual, regional, and cultural significance as well.

It's easy to read the Bible and miss the mentions of ethnicity because we weren't alive then (and don't live there now), and as the authors convinced me, to do that would be to miss SO MUCH. 

Example #1: For instance, the authors give an example how in the time New Testament, anyone who didn't speak Greek were (from a Greek and Roman perspective) considered uneducated barbarians, because the Greeks equivocated speech with reason. "Barbarian" comes from the sound they made to imitate out languages... the equivalent of English speakers today saying, "blah, blah, blah" when imitating non-English speakers today.

So, in Acts 21, when the Romans were looking for Paul, they didn't know who he was—and when they caught him, they assumed he was Egyptian. Why? Because he was undergoing a purification ritual and had shaved his head. To a Roman, all of "those barbarians" looked alike. "The Roman who arrested Paul was surprised he could speak Greek (Acts 21:37). He never imagined Paul, a barbarian, might be a fellow Roman citizen." (pages 57-58)

Example #2: Here is another example they give: Moses married a Cushite woman and his brother and sister were upset. Why? Cushites were from the southern Nile Valley and were dark-skinned Africans. But the difference in skin color and cultural practices were not why Aaron and Miriam were upset. 

The authors point out that the Israelites had just left Egypt after 400 years of slavery. There were a slave race. "The Cushites were not demeaned as a slave race in the ancient world they were respected as highly skilled soldiers. It is more likely that Miriam and Aaron though Moses was being presumptuous by marrying above himself" (pages 59-61). There was a distinctive class system at play here that modern Western readers can miss because we don't understand the dynamics at play—Moses, from a slave race, married a woman from the people who enslaved the Jews. 

Example #3: Here is a final example, another one from Paul's world. On page 66, the authors point out how Paul, in talking to the church in Corinth, placed ethnic markers in the text, for example, "Apollos the Alexandrian Jew" or calling Peter by his Aramaic name, Cephas. The authors say Paul isn't addressing any theological differences between all of these people. Why? "There weren't any. The problem was ethnic division: Aramaic-speaking Jews, Greek-speaking Jews, Romans, and Alexandrians". 

How do these three examples impact how you read the Bible? How can we, as Western readers, be more aware of the influence of ethnicity in the Bible?