People, Places, and Cultures

            The bible was written a long time ago, in a place thousands of miles away, and in a cultural setting very different from our own (or foreign to us now). Modern readers must never underestimate the impact such differences have on interpreting the bible today. Passages like the golden rule are easy enough to understand, but stories about a good Samaritan or Babylonian captivity are hard to make sense of unless you know some history.

            Many of us have learned basic aspects of biblical history, like knowing that Samaritans and Jews hated each other, and that’s why Jesus chose a Samaritan as the hero of a story about overcoming racism. Other pieces of historical information, however, are not as well known, and we can’t always grasp the full meaning of a text without that information. For example, in the well-known Christmas story of the magi visiting the newborn Jesus, the gifts they bring are less important than their ethnicity. The magi were Zoroastrian priests from modern-day Iran, which means they were Gentiles. This is surprising since Matthew’s gospel was written for a primarily Jewish audience. Matthew is therefore telling his Jewish readers that God became flesh not only for them but also for non-Jews, bringing salvation to all people.

            Being aware of the historical background of these texts helps immensely, but sometimes that information is hard to come by. Once in a while biblical authors make veiled references to people or customs that require some detective work to figure out. One of the most famous examples occurs in the Book of Revelation, where the writer warns of a villainous “beast” marked with the number 666. Speculation about this number has been rampant over the centuries, as some have tried to identify the beast with everyone from the prophet Muhammad to Adolf Hitler. The original author, however, never intended 666 to serve as a special code that someone could decipher many years later but used it to refer to an actual person from the first century: the Roman Emperor Nero. In antiquity, numbers were often represented by letters, which can still be seen with Roman numerals today. When the Romans wanted to indicate the number four, they used letters to do so: IV (a combination of the letters “i” and “v”). The same is true in Greek and Hebrew, and if you take the numerical values of the letters that spell “Caesar Nero” in Hebrew, they come out to 666. Nero was one of the cruelest rulers of the Roman Empire and persecuted the Christians severely, torturing and killing dozens of them. The author of Revelation can’t mention the emperor by name (otherwise the Roman authorities would discover this and persecute the Christians even more), so he used numbers to represent his name, knowing that his audience would be able to figure out whom he’s referring to.

            A similar thing happens in the Book of Genesis. The opening chapter describes how God created the world and every living thing in it. Then, on the sixth day, God made man and woman “in the image of God.” Theologians have explored the rich meaning of this concept in various ways, understanding the image to refer to our intellectual capabilities, our moral virtue, or our immortal soul (among other possibilities). All of these are good interpretations, but the expression “image of God” would have meant something very specific to the ancient Israelites. Many of the neighboring nations such as Egypt or Mesopotamia used that same expression to refer to their king. The full name of the Egyptian pharaoh King Tut (“Tutankhamen”) literally means “living image of the god Amun,” and many other kings of the ancient world also thought of themselves as the image of their god. When the author of Genesis 1 uses this term to refer to all humanity, he is making an important statement about the inherent equality of all human beings. God creates each and every one of us in His image – not just the most powerful among us – meaning we all exhibit this aspect of God’s nature equally, whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s one of the options listed above, like intelligence or virtue, but no matter what connects us to God and is reflected in our very nature as human beings, it’s true of all of us. This was a revolutionary claim in ancient times, and it’s an important reminder to us today that all people bear God’s image equally, no exceptions.

            Places are also significant in biblical texts, and the setting of a story can often affect its meaning. There’s a strange episode in the gospels where Jesus encounters a naked man possessed by many demons (Mark 5:1-20). Jesus heals the man by casting out the demons and sending them into a herd of thousands of pigs, and they rush toward the sea and drown. Jesus then encourages the healed man to tell his neighbors what has happened to him, which is astonishing since Jesus swears everyone else to secrecy after healing them. The reason for this exception is clear when considering the setting of the tale. The presence of the pigs means that Jesus is in Gentile territory, indicating that the healed man and his neighbors are non-Jews since Jews are forbidden to eat pork. Jesus’ identity as the messiah is a thorny issue among the Jews, and they will eventually clamor for his crucifixion for this very reason, but this is not a problem among Gentiles who have no concept of a messiah. Thus Jesus allows this Gentile man to proclaim the good news about him among his Gentile brethren, making him one of the first preachers of the gospel.

            Probably the most important historical information for understanding the bible has to do with culture. The customs of ancient peoples were often very different from our own. Marriage is a perfect example. Today we meet someone we like, date them for a period of time, get engaged to them, and then eventually get married. The process was quite different in the ancient Near East. Most marriages were arranged by a person’s parents (sometimes while they were still children), and this meant you could become engaged to someone before even meeting them! The reasons for getting married were also a bit different. Most people today marry out of love, but in ancient times the primary reason was to produce children. That meant that fertility was extremely important, and if a married couple struggled to have children, it was common practice for the husband to have intercourse with another woman (a “concubine”) so he could produce an heir. Even stranger by modern standards is the custom of marrying someone who is related to you by blood. Brothers and sisters were thankfully off limits, but marrying a cousin was not only permissible but sometimes encouraged. Stories in the Book of Genesis are full of many instances of such marital customs: Abraham arranges his son’s Isaac’s marriage, Abraham has intercourse with his servant Hagar since his wife Sarah is infertile, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all seek out near relatives to be their wives.

            These different marriage practices reflect another important cultural difference: community. Independence is a defining characteristic of American culture today, and we value individualism to a very high degree. Teenagers in the U.S. yearn to become adult someday and pursue their own dreams, and living with your parents when you’re thirty years old is often considered shameful. In ancient Israel, the opposite was true. You would often live with your parents until they died, raising your own family in the place where you grew up and taking care of your parents when they became elderly. That’s because kinship ties were very strong, and people needed one another not only to survive but to flourish. This cultural value helps us understand Jesus’ strategy when he begins to call his first disciples. A personal relationship with Jesus is wonderful, yet Jesus does not approach isolated individuals but calls them in pairs. In fact, the first men he chooses are pairs of brothers. He summons Peter and Andrew to join him in his ministry, and he offers the same invitation to James and John shortly thereafter. Jesus then seeks to form a new community with these chosen disciples, and after he dies, the early Church follows this model by creating a close-knit group of people centered around their life in Christ. Paul will set out to become the Church’s greatest missionary but makes sure to create a network of people to help him, such as Barnabas and Phoebe, and he addresses people in the new churches he establishes with the language of family: “brothers and sisters.”

Now try out this method on the story of the Prodigal Son.