Race and Ethnicity
At the time of this writing, my wife and I (Brandon) just adopted our first child. We have learned a lot about ourselves and God and the Christian community through this journey. But one lesson that has been driven home time and again is how deeply entrenched racial prejudice is in the United States.
This fact was reinforced in our adoption training. Because we pursued a domestic adoption (i.e., a child from the United States) and were happy to adopt a child of any ethnicity, our licensing and preparation involved learning to be a “conspicuous” family: one that can’t hide the fact that a child is adopted because he or she is ethnically different than the adoptive parents. We’ve taken classes on how to respond to insensitive comments from strangers and family, such as: “Is that your real baby?” or “Does he speak English?” or “She’s so lucky to have you,” which implies that the child would be less fortunate to be raised by parents of her own ethnic background. We’ve even learned to anticipate the question “Is that one of those crack babies?” which implies that the biological parents of a minority child must be a drug addict. Because our son, James, is African American, we are prepared to be on the receiving end of racial prejudice for the first time in our lives.
Perhaps a greater outrage is the dollar amounts that are often affixed to skin color. At our agency, the placement fee is the same for children of all ethnicities. But in many places in the country, adopting a Caucasian child can cost almost twice as much as adopting a nonwhite or biracial child. This is because ethnic minority children are deemed “hard to place”—fewer families are willing to adopt them—and are thus considered less desirable. Often, the lighter skinned a child is, the more expensive he or she is to adopt. This is true even among Christian adoptive parents and at Christian agencies. The Bible says all humans are created in God’s image. There should be no 50-percent discounts. How, then, can Americans—even American Christians—tolerate a practice that deems some children to be “less desirable” than others?
The issues are really more complicated. It appears to be more socially acceptable in the United States for white people to adopt nonwhite children from outside the U.S. than to adopt minority children from within the country. There is only anecdotal evidence for this, of course. But it suggests that white Americans, at least, make a number of gut-level assumptions about and distinctions between people of different ethnicities.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that, in theory at least, Americans are not supposed to make such distinctions. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, culture-watchers began debating whether the United States had finally become a post-racial society. The logic runs like this: now that an African American has been elected to the nation’s most powerful position, the glass ceiling is shattered. The limitations and obstacles that once held back people of color are gone. The long-awaited dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that people will one day be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” has been realized. The United States is now officially colorblind. The wealthy and powerful hail from all ethnic backgrounds. In terms of policy, it is against the law for a company to refuse to hire an employee or for a university to refuse to enroll a student based on the color of her skin. It can be easy to believe that, at least on paper, the country has put racial discrimination in the past.
This topic is one on which majority culture and minority readers will have very different perspectives. It’s probably useful, then, that we acknowledge from the beginning that we primarily have majority culture, specifically white, readers in mind when we describe what goes without being said about race and ethnicity in the West. In general, minority readers will be considerably more sensitive to these issues. It is the unfair privilege of majority peoples to not worry about the difference ethnicity makes; it is not an important part of our everyday lives. So in the rest of this chapter, we will refer primarily to white male Westerners.
A word about terminology is in order here, too, before we proceed further. We have used the terms race and ethnicity somewhat interchangeably to this point. We’ve done this primarily because we suspect most readers are accustomed to discussing these issues in terms of race. We will use the word ethnicity for the remainder of this chapter, however, for a couple of reasons. First, race is largely an invention of the Enlightenment, intended to categorize the natural world into groups according to type. Race was believed to account for the difference between humans of different “kinds.” In nineteenth-century England, for example, one theorist writes, all people could be divided into “a small number of groups, called ‘races,’ in such a way that all members of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race. The characteristics that each member of a race was supposed to share with every other were sometimes called the essence of that race.”[1]
We reject this belief and the related implications—that some “races” are morally and intellectually superior to others, for example. We believe there is only one race, the human race, made in the image of God. Second, speaking in terms of ethnicity is a more precise way to account for the differences between people groups. Blanket racial terms, such as Caucasian and black and Latino, flatten important distinctions between cultures.
So what goes without being said—especially by white Western males—about ethnicity? First of all, many white Westerners feel that the worst thing they could be called is a racist. We know deep down that we’re not supposed to make value distinctions between people of different ethnicities, as if it’s better to be white or black or whatever. Because we’re hesitant to make value distinctions—and rightfully so—we’re often slow to make any distinctions at all. Thus it goes without being said for many that to be truly equal, everyone must be the same. This is what we mean by being colorblind: the belief that ethnic differences don’t matter. Of course it would be fine if what we meant was that everyone should be treated with equal dignity or enjoy the same rights. But we suspect what is commonly meant is that everyone should be treated as if they were the same—and by same, what is frequently meant is majority culture.
Consequently, we are trained to assume that ethnicity is unimportant and that prejudice on the basis of ethnicity is an impossible motivation for behavior. We avoid making an issue “a race issue” unless there’s no way around it, because we have convinced ourselves that ethnicity is no longer a factor in social situations. This leaves us somewhat schizophrenic, because we all know that we carry latent prejudices privately while we are trained to pretend publicly that we don’t.
As Christians, we are firm in our convictions that all ethnicities are equal in value: “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile” (Rom 3:22). As authors we are deeply committed to and convinced of the fundamental equality of all peoples. We also believe that to understand a culture, you must be aware of ethnicity and especially the prejudices that may exist within a particular culture. To ignore them is naïve and can result in serious misunderstanding.
Consider this example. Let’s suppose a Korean missionary decides to move to Birmingham, Alabama, to start a church.[2] He notices that a lot of the people are dark-skinned. He asks you, “Is there a difference between blacks and whites?”
In our piety, we might answer, “No, everybody is the same.”
It is certainly true that all are equal, but our pious answer is misleading in several ways. First, we are likely setting our Korean missionary up for trouble. He will be blindsided by the first racist he meets, and he will surely meet one. Second, he will notice some differences among the locals in worship and dialect and perhaps even in dress and cuisine. Third, he might assume that the majority culture of his neighborhood is representative of the majority culture of North America. Just as ignorance about ethnicities can lead to misunderstanding in our daily lives, so too it can lead to misunderstanding of the Bible.
We are conditioned culturally not to make generalizations about people based on ethnicity. We know better than to say, “He does such-and-such because he’s Latino.” We affirm that instinct. But being oblivious to ethnicities can cause us to miss things in the Bible. The biblical writers and their audiences were more than happy to make such generalizations. “He does such-and-such because he’s a Jew” was a perfectly legitimate argument for first-century Romans. Consequently, we may read the Bible ignorant of ethnic differences in the text that would have been obvious to the first audience. Or we may naïvely believe that those differences don’t matter anyway because first-century Rome must have been post-racial, like we supposedly are. Other times our deeply ingrained racial prejudices influence our interpretation so that we assume the ancients held the same stereotypes we hold.
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. And also like today, ancient peoples had a number of ways of distinguishing between locals and out-of-towners, friends and enemies, the elite and the marginalized. Prejudice comes in all varieties, yesterday, today and tomorrow. From time immemorial, humans have held prejudices against others based on their ethnicity, the color of their skin or factors such as where they’re from and how they speak.
While it may be comforting to know that other cultures, including the biblical ones, have prejudices, there is another reason to note them. Since these usually go without being said, in the text of Scripture we are left with gaps in the stories. In Genesis 27:46, for example, Rebekah exclaims her frustration with Esau’s wives, not because he had more than one, but because of their ethnicity: “I’m disgusted with living because of these Hittite women,” she says to Isaac. “If Jacob takes a wife from among the women of this land, from Hittite women like these, my life will not be worth living.” Rebekah’s comment is heavily laden with ethnic prejudice. There was something about Hittites that sent her up the wall. Most of us don’t know what; it went without being said. And, as we’ve said before, we are prone to fill in such gaps with our own prejudices. This gives us lots of opportunity for misunderstanding. We may assume an issue is due to ethnicity when it isn’t, assume it isn’t when it is, fail to recognize an ethnic slur when it’s obvious or imagine one when it isn’t. Consider these examples.
Paul had started churches in the southern regions of Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the towns of Derbe, Lystra and Iconium. Acts tells us that on his second sortie into the region, Paul attempted to go into the northern area: “When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to” (Acts 16:7). This northern region was known by the Romans as Galatia, a mispronunciation of the word Celts, the name of the people group that had settled in the region generations earlier. They were considered barbarians, a term that referred to someone who didn’t speak Greek. The word barbarian was more or less the Greek equivalent of us saying “blah-blah-blah” to ridicule someone’s speech. Since Greeks equated speech with reason (as in the word logos), someone who couldn’t speak Greek was considered stupid. While the entire region was technically Galatia by Roman designation, the inhabitants of the southern region preferred their provincial names, a practice Luke knew: “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia [i.e., not ‘Galatians’], Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome” (Acts 2:9-10). They did not want anyone confusing them with those uneducated barbarians in the north. When the churches in this region act foolishly, Paul writes to chasten them. He addresses them harshly: “You foolish Galatians!” (Gal 3:1). This is roughly equivalent to someone in the United States saying, “You stupid rednecks.” Paul is employing an ethnic slur to get his readers’ attention. We might assume Paul would never do such a thing; he’s a Christian, after all! Yet that instinct proves the point. Our assumptions about ethnicity and race relations make impossible the prospect that Paul might have used ethnically charged language to make an important point about Christian faith and conduct.
On another occasion, Paul was arrested by the Romans during a riot in the temple, but the Romans didn’t know who Paul was. They thought he was an Egyptian who had been causing trouble elsewhere (Acts 21:38). Why in the world would they think that? We might assume the Roman soldiers were comparing the modus operandi, since that’s how we might go about it. Two riots in recent days? Must be the same guy who instigated both, we might think. But this was not likely their reasoning. They more likely made their judgment on the basis of Paul’s appearance. Jews and Egyptians looked nothing alike. But at the time, Paul was taking part in a purification rite and had a shaved head, as was common in Egypt (Acts 21:24). And to a Roman—well, you know, all “those people” look alike. The prejudice ran even deeper. Jews were often included in the list of barbarians. 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! Earlier in Paul’s ministry, Paul had run into trouble with Philippians who were boastful of their own Roman citizenship. It had never occurred to them that Paul, a Jew, could have boasted the coveted citizenship, too.
It should be clear from these examples that our ignorance about the ethnic stereotypes in biblical times can cause us to miss undercurrents in the biblical text. As we will see in our next example, sometimes our own prejudices can lead us astray.
Of course there is more to ethnicity than skin color. But when we’re reading, we can’t even see skin color in the text. So we often find it difficult to detect the ethnic dimensions of a situation in the Bible, even when the author is trying to make it plain. Luke, for example, sprinkles ethnolinguistic markers throughout the account of Paul’s time in Jerusalem in Acts 21: “Jerusalem . . . Gentiles” (21:11); “Cyprus” (21:16); “Trophimus the Ephesian” (21:29); “Do you speak Greek?” (21:37); “Aren’t you the Egyptian?” (21:38); “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia” (21:39); “in Aramaic” (21:40 and 22:1); “a Jew born in Tarsus of Cilicia” (21:39); “Jerusalem . . . Gentiles” (22:17, 21). Prejudices based on ethnicity and geography inform the drama of these events and crescendo with Paul’s surprising news that he was born a Roman citizen (Acts 22:28).
Another example may strike closer to home. Many Americans fail to note that the problem with Moses’ wife was her ethnicity, even though the author states it plainly and repeats it: “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite” (Num 12:1, emphasis added). But even once we’re made aware that the issue is indeed a “race issue,” we’re still prone to misinterpret what’s really going on. Indeed, in this case, because we don’t know what went without being said for the original audience, we may fill in the blanks and suppose a negative prejudice where the original audience assumed a positive one.
All we know about this wife of Moses is her ethnic identity—Cushite—but that’s enough to irk Moses’ siblings. It’s clear that her ethnicity is the source of the siblings’ disapproval. From there, making sense of this passage requires a bit of detective work. You may not know who a Cushite is or where Cush was located. A peek at an atlas or the notes in your study Bible may tell you that Cush was in the southern Nile River valley.[3] That means the Cushites were dark-skinned Africans. What goes without being said for many Western readers is that Africans were a slave race; even though we no longer (or should no longer) consider people of African descent inferior, we may nevertheless assume that the ancient Hebrews would have assumed that the Cushites were their inferiors. Western scholars have made this mistake for generations. Older commentaries frequently assumed that dark skin denoted inferiority. J. Daniel Hays has shown that the assumption that Africans are a slave race has influenced the way we read every reference to Cush and the Cushites in the Old Testament. In his commentary on the books of Samuel, nineteenth-century scholar H. P. Smith writes, “Joab then calls a Negro (naturally, a slave) and commands him . . .” [4] The text (2 Sam 18:21) never says or even hints that the person was a slave, merely that he was a Cushite. We might not be surprised that writers in the nineteenth century made this sort of mistake. But even into the twenty-first century, commentators have followed this assumption about the supposed inferiority of the Cushites, against evidence to the contrary.[5]
If we don’t know what went without being said for the ancient audience, we might supply what goes without being said for many Westerners and conclude that Miriam and Aaron were upset with Moses because he married a black woman and therefore married below himself. This would be a mistake. Remember that although Westerners may have once considered Africans a slave race, in the Nile River valley of ancient Egypt, the Hebrews were the slave race. We should know that simply from reading the Bible. It wasn’t too long ago in the story that Moses and the Israelites left the bondage of slavery in Egypt. So what was it about the Cushites that went without being said in the ancient Near East? The Cushites were not demeaned as a slave race in the ancient world; they were respected as highly skilled soldiers.[6] It is more likely that Miriam and Aaron thought Moses was being presumptuous by marrying above himself. That makes sense of the tone of the passage. “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” they whined. “Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” (Num 12:2). In other words: Moses is not the only prophet here. Who does he think he is?
Even the most casual reader of the New Testament notes the tension between Jew and Gentile. And we likely attribute this animosity to theological, not ethnic, differences. It may come as a surprise to some, even though it is clear in the biblical texts, that the Jews made ethnic distinctions even among themselves. This point is probably obvious to readers of ethnic minority status. White Westerners have a habit of lumping diverse ethnicities under large and imprecise blanket terms. We use the term Latin American or Latino for anyone of Central or South American descent who speaks a Romance language (Spanish, Portuguese or French). But the people who fall under those broad designations—such as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans and Brazilians—are likely more aware of their ethnic and cultural differences than their similarities. In any case, we tend to assume that Jewish was primarily a theological or religious designation for Jews of the first century.[7] People of Jewish ethnicity, however, were quite divided. These divisions threatened the unity of the early church even before Gentile Christians entered the picture.
Acts 6 offers an explicit example of ethnic divisions among Jews challenging the integrity of the early church. The first five chapters of the book of Acts record the remarkable growth of the Christian faith in and around Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection. In Acts 6, Luke records the church’s first major internal obstacle. The “number of disciples was increasing,” and the needs of the people risked outgrowing the church’s ability to serve everyone in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, some of the Grecian Jews were “being overlooked in the daily distribution of food” (Acts 6:1), while the Hebraic Jews were receiving what they needed as usual.[8] The Hebraic Jews were likely those from Palestine who spoke only Hebrew or Aramaic, whereas the Grecian Jews were probably from the Diaspora (meaning they were raised and/or lived outside of Palestine) and spoke primarily or only Greek.[9] To the Hebraic Jews, these Diaspora brethren were second-tier Jews. We might not recognize the significance of the regional prejudice. After all, a Jew was a Jew, right?
No. Fortunately the apostles recognized the potential for disaster. They called together all the disciples and directed them to choose seven men from among the factions to oversee the food distribution. It is significant that of the seven, at least five have Greek names. In order to ease tensions among the Grecian Jews, the early Christians recognized that the distribution of food should be overseen by Grecian Jews. What goes without being said in Western culture is that to be equal, everyone must be the same; therefore, we sometimes think that the worst thing the church could do is to make ethnic distinctions. We would fear turning the issue into a racial issue. Fortunately, however, the apostles saw the situation for what it was and approved the appointment of an ethnically diverse team of deacons.
This is an obvious example of how ethnic divisions among Jews posed a problem for the church, and it should remind us to be alert to other situations in which prejudices among the Jews might play a role in the story. There are other types of prejudice that we are not likely to see, because we are slow to attribute problems to such distinctions.
One’s accent can often give away where one was raised. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that negative stereotypes are often associated with certain accents. In the United States, for example, a Southern accent may strike you as refreshingly genteel and charming. But you’re just as likely to assume that the person who adds syllables to words and drops their g’s (I grew up huntin’, fishin’ and campin’) is uneducated and slow. If I speak with a British accent, I am smart; with an Australian accent, I am cool; with a Jersey accent, I am ill-tempered. I (Brandon) got so tired of negative stereotypes related to my native accent that I’ve worked hard to neutralize it. During the semester I spent abroad, I encountered another prejudice. Scotland is small enough that natives can determine what city or town someone is from based solely on her or his accent. When I was studying in Edinburgh in 2002, the United States was just revving up its war on terror. And Europeans were not pleased. People snubbed me frequently when they heard my American accent. I soon learned that folks would treat me more kindly if they thought I was Canadian. So I learned to adapt my accent yet again.
The Bible gives us clues that the ancients also discriminated on the basis of how people sounded. Because we can’t hear accents when we read (unless we’re reading Mark Twain), we can miss this form of discrimination in the Scriptures. In Judges 12, Jephthah rallies the men of Gilead to battle the Ephraimites. Ethnically, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites were related. Both tribes were Semitic, and they shared Joseph as a common ancestor.[10] The text suggests that they would have been physically indistinguishable. So after the battle, the Gileadites developed a clever way to identify which survivors were friends and which were enemies. They guarded the fords of the Jordan River leading to Ephraim, and when a survivor tried to pass through, the soldiers made the men say the word shibboleth. The trouble was, Ephraimites couldn’t say the word correctly because they couldn’t pronounce the “sh” sound. If an escaping soldier said sibboleth, they were killed on the spot. That’s pretty serious discrimination.
Our Lord was also easily identified by his accent. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but most folks didn’t know that. He was raised in Nazareth (Galilee). Since his accent was Galilean, no one considered the possibility he might actually be a Judean (Jn 7:41-43). When Peter tried to deny his association with Jesus after the arrest, his accent gave him away as a Galilean (Mt 26:73), and Judeans just assumed that all Galileans would be supporters of Jesus the Galilean. Jewish travelers from all over the empire could identify the apostles as Galileans based on their accents as they preached the gospel during Pentecost: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?” (Acts 2:7).
Closely associated with the issue of speech are prejudices based on geography. We distinguish among Americans in this way. The terms Yankee and redneck both conjure concrete images and arouse feelings of disdain among certain groups of people. But visitors to new cultures have a difficult time identifying these kinds of distinctions and their attendant presuppositions. I (Brandon) was once with Austrian friends in a pub in Salzburg. At a corner table sat some very loud, obviously inebriated merrymakers. They were white, like me and my friends, and they spoke German. I assumed they were Austrian. I was wrong. One of my Austrian friends saw the rowdy crowd, made a disgusted face and said, “Ugh, Germans! They’re worse than Americans!” That made me feel special.
If visitors to a foreign culture have a hard time detecting ethnic stereotypes based on geography, we have an even harder time detecting the same issues in the Bible. We are unfamiliar with the geography of the Near East, as well as the prejudices that adhered to certain locations. Sometimes they are made blatant. We grew up singing a hymn that began with the line, “I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene.” But Jews in neighboring areas seldom found anything amazing about Nazarenes. When Nathanael found out Jesus was from Nazareth, he was unimpressed; “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” he replied (Jn 1:46). Those of us accustomed to referring to our Savior as “Jesus of Nazareth” don’t have a negative association with the place.
Sometimes we do have certain prejudices associated with locations in the Bible. But very often, we have the opposite associations from those of the original audience. It is easy for us to assume, for example, that Jerusalem was the center of the action in the ancient world. The city was certainly important to the Jews. It was at the center of their eschatological hope. One day everyone would come to Zion, the City of David, to worship the Lord. Because it was central for the Jews, everyone went “up to” Jerusalem, no matter which direction they were traveling from.[11] To us, Jerusalem and its environs comprise “the Holy Land.” During the Crusades, Christians spent much money, many years and countless lives to reclaim the city from Muslim invaders (even though the Crusaders were actually the invaders).
But Jerusalem was insignificant in Jesus’ time. Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23-79), a famed Roman philosopher, statesman and soldier, traveled extensively and described the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day as “the most illustrious city in the East.” That was actually faint praise. We must note well the qualification: that it was the greatest city on the eastern fringe of the empire. This statement might compare to a New Yorker saying, “the nicest town in the backwaters of Louisiana.” The importance of Palestine was entirely geographic. The taxes were not enough to influence the Roman budget. Palestine was not known for anything except trouble. But that region controlled the only land route to the breadbasket of Egypt and all of Africa. It was important that Rome controlled the land, but the activities that took place there were rarely of Roman interest. Pilate was more the main finance officer or tax collector than anything else. The events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, so important for Jews and Christians at the time, were marginal events in a nothing town on the edge of an empire with more important matters to consider. If we fail to recognize this, we can fail to recognize just how remarkable the rapid growth of the early church really was. For the first couple of centuries, Roman writers often referred to Christians as “Galileans,” indicating how nominal and provincial they considered the early Jesus movement to be.
Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians with a plea for unity. “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, . . .” he writes, “that all of you agree with one another . . . and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought” (1 Cor 1:10). We might ask ourselves what caused the divisions in Corinth. All we know is what Paul tells us: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ’” (1 Cor 1:12). What likely goes without being said for us is that the church was divided either theologically or over devotion to different personalities. These are two common causes of church divisions in the West. We tend to fall out along doctrinal lines or because we are drawn to one charismatic pastor over another.
It is possible, though, that the divisions among the churches in Corinth were not theological. We may be failing to note ethnic markers that Paul sprinkled all over the text. Apollos was noted as an Alexandrian (Egyptian) Jew (Acts 18:24). They had their own reputation. Paul notes that Peter is called by his Aramaic name, Cephas, suggesting the group that followed him spoke Aramaic and were thus Palestinian Jews. Paul’s church had Diaspora Jews but also many ethnic Corinthians, who were quite proud of their status as residents of a Roman colony and who enjoyed using Latin. This may explain why Paul doesn’t address any theological differences. There weren’t any. The problem was ethnic division: Aramaic-speaking Jews, Greek-speaking Jews, Romans and Alexandrians.
How do we uncover what goes without being said about race and ethnicity? A first—and difficult—step is making a thorough and honest inventory of your assumptions about people who are different from you. Take time to prayerfully consider your prejudices. Do you harbor bad feelings for members of a particular ethnic group? Or people from a certain sociopolitical group? If you feel brave enough, consider asking your close friends or family whether they hear you make statements or tell jokes about certain people or groups. Carefully consider why you feel the prejudices you do. Does it have to do with your upbringing? Is it economic—that is, do you make judgments about people based on their appearance or perceived status? Think through the categories above (geography, accent and place of origin). Do you have preconceived ideas about people based on these? Your increasing awareness about your own ethnic prejudices will help you be more attuned to them in the biblical text.
Additionally, read Scripture with a Bible atlas handy. Biblical authors don’t often tell us how they or their audiences felt about specific people groups, but they do give us clues by telling us where people are from. We do this today. Commenting that someone is from “rural Arkansas” or “the south side of Chicago” or “the West Coast” is often intended to communicate more than mere geography. Identifying places on a good atlas can help you detect when the author is making judgments based on geography and ethnicity—and when the writer expects us, the readers, to be doing the same thing.
Finally, let the Bible be your guide. First of all, the narrator may clue you in through repetition that the ethnicity of a character is an issue. This was the case with Moses’ wife in Numbers 12. The book of Ruth provides another example. Ruth is repeatedly identified as “Ruth the Moabite.” That detail lets us know that Ruth’s ethnicity is important for the story. Note the way the story is told: Boaz confronts the kinsman to ask if he intends to purchase Naomi’s land and is told, “I will redeem it.” Boaz then notes, “On the day you buy the land from Naomi, you also acquire Ruth the Moabite” (emphasis added). The man immediately declines the offer: “I cannot redeem it.” He cites inheritance rules, but we suspect his real motivation is ethnic prejudice.[12] By contrast, Boaz buys the land and states, “I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, Mahlon’s widow, as my wife” (Ruth 4:4-6, 10, emphasis added). Next, see if Scripture can shed light on the issue. The Bible is a good resource for determining what the biblical authors and audiences thought and felt about their neighbors. The fact that the Moabites, along with the Ammonites, originated from an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters (Gen 19:36-38) may help us understand why Ruth’s ethnicity is an issue in her narrative. Furthermore, the Moabites hired Balaam to pronounce a curse on Israel (Num 22), and Moabite women seduced the men of Israel in Numbers 25 and encouraged them to sacrifice to idols. For these reasons, the Lord declared, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation” (Deut 23:3). In light of all this, it is truly remarkable that Ruth, a Moabite, is held up as a model of faith and fidelity.
We have been pointing out the prejudices of biblical characters, but please bear in mind that we are not endorsing prejudice. The Christian message is clear: ethnic prejudice is morally reprehensible. It is wrong. The Roman world was filled with racism. The interior of Anatolia (modern Turkey) was filled with tension between the Romans, the locals and the immigrants (Jews in the south and Celts in the north). Nonetheless, Paul tells a church caught right in the middle of that mess, “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col 3:11). This was a radical claim in the first century. It is no less radical today, even in a country in which people have been fighting for equality for decades.
The radical nature of the multiethnic body of Christ is sometimes lost on those of us who believe we have put prejudice behind us once and for all. Columnist Jack White once observed, “The most insidious racism is among those who don’t think they harbor any.”[13] His point is that those of us who leave our ethnic stereotypes unexamined will inevitably carry them forever, perhaps even pass them on to others. We would add that failing to come to terms with our assumptions about race and ethnicity will keep us blind to important aspects of biblical teaching.