Questioning Difference

It was my first semester teaching in a liberal arts college. As we were discussing the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, one student raised her hand and asked, "On what day were Hispanics created?" I was caught totally off guard by the question and horrified. (I confess that it did cross my mind to suggest facetiously that "Hispanic" would alphabetically precede "Norwegian," the ethnic heritage of the questioner.) But I was, and remain, grateful for the question. This young woman wanted to know how the Bible accounted for the diversity she observed in the world. That started me thinking how the biblical accounts might help students reflect critically and respond constructively to diversity in society. My student's question rose from her experience growing up in California in a community divided between Anglos and Hispanics.

The Bible, of course, has played a major role—negative and positive—in questions of difference. Today's college juniors were in fifth grade when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa; their parents were in fifth grade when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Students are deeply moved by reading and hearing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Tutu. They recognize the Bible's influence in uniting (and dividing) Jews and Christians, people of different economic means and racial backgrounds, in local communities and around the world in the struggle for dignity, freedom, justice, and opportunity. They are overwhelmed by the witness of a nation publicly, painfully, and hopefully seeking truth and reconciliation. My students—predominantly from the upper midwest region of the United States—share the hope of rainbow unity and equality expressed by citizens in South Africa. A liberal arts education should help them match this hope with information and skills equipping them "for active participation in the private and public sectors, in a diverse democracy, and in an even more diverse global community." [1]

Within the field of biblical scholarship there is a burgeoning collection of books and articles exploring race, ethnic identity, nationality, boundaries of inclusion, and patterns of exclusion in the Bible—particularly in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. [2] These studies represent a variety of methodological approaches. Many connect the ancient texts to contemporary constructions of nationhood, the politics of identity, and post-colonial realities. Most exceed the knowledge, skill level and focus of a college religion course. [3] Nevertheless, they are crucial to the development of critical and theoretical approaches to the study of difference in the liberal arts curriculum that are consonant with the academic study of religion and preparation for responsible citizenship in a pluralistic society.

Development of Difference

It may appear strange to turn to the Bible as a lens for questioning difference. After all, the Bible makes exclusive claims and asserts a unity among adherents to those claims that ultimately transcends gender, national, and linguistic distinctions. But in its opening chapter the Bible invites reflection on difference, not as a matter of inclusion and exclusion, but as fundamental to the design for a flourishing life. The transformation from watery chaos to inhabitable universe in Genesis 1 starts with the introduction of difference and is sustained by the grand diversity of plants and creatures that fill it. Humans are "alike" in that they are in the "image of God," yet they differ in gender and—given the generous variety detailed in the plants and the animals—are likely to be imagined diverse in other ways too. Genesis 1 was not written for a twenty-first century audience but contemporary readers are free to ponder how "difference" factors into their view of the world and whether diversity is critical to that design.

College students generally find the genealogical passages of the Bible "boring" and "confusing," but they manage to recognize in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 the presentation of a common family lineage developing through human agency into distinct languages, families, and nations (10:5, 20, 31). What they discover is that, as constructed, the branches of humanity's "family tree" mix categories of city, empire, residence, ethnicity, and kinship, so that neither the unity nor the distinctions represented in this tree are based on any one feature of human "identity." Obviously more than Genesis 10 is required for college students to comprehend the complex diversity of contemporary language, land, and social groupings. However, the view adopted in Genesis 10—that portrays such distinctions as the outgrowth of unity and not the consequence of separation, alienation, or domination—can be a starting point for examining contemporary ideologies associated with the construction of identities.

The genealogy in Genesis 10 changes the way students read the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. It is now impossible to miss the opening assertion that "the whole earth had one language" (10:1) and the construction of the tower as an attempt to avoid being "scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth" (10:4). Students, like commentators, divide on whether the confusion of language and the dispersal are punishment for the construction of the tower or prevention against future projects, but they recognize how the divine intervention reverses the ability of humans to construct a destiny based on linguistic unity. The text notes that it is the unfinished city, intended to preserve homogeneity and accomplish self-promotion, that bears the name "Babel"/"confuse." Whether or not this chapter served as a polemic against Assyrian policies of assimilating conquered peoples and using them in imperial building campaigns, the preference for linguistic diversity in this story is counter-intuitive and a challenge to both contemporary balkanizing and globalizing constructions of unity. [4]

Construction of Difference

Any discussion of "identity" and "difference" in relation to biblical texts must acknowledge their distance from and lack of symmetry with contemporary constructions and uses of the categories of "race," "ethnicity," and "nationality." Genesis 1, 10, and 11 depict diversity as part of the orderly goodness of creation without assigning an order to human distinctions (except as humans have dominion over the earth and creatures). Moreover, difference is a feature of the development of human community, not the essence of individual or collective identity. The Book of Esther exposes the folly of an essentialist construction of identity and an "orderly" abuse of categories of difference.

Even sophisticated juniors and seniors enjoy reading the Book of Esther aloud, hissing at Haman and aahing at Esther. Having grown up watching "The Simpsons," they readily recognize the book's satirical critique of human pride, fear, claims to legitimacy, and defense of "good order."

The crucial question of what it means for Jews to be Jews is never discussed in the text. Instead Haman selects one feature of Mordecai (Jew), associates it with one behavior that infuriates him (Mordecai's refusal to bow to Haman), and projects his hatred on all Jews ("Mordecai's people"). Though Jews live as neighbors alongside the other citizens of the kingdom ("scattered and separated among the peoples in all the provinces"), Haman presents them as "different," disobedient to the king, and, hence, appropriate targets for collective elimination. Haman secures royal legitimacy for his petty prejudice as it unquestioningly becomes the law of the land.

The twists and turns in the plot that leave Haman hanging at the end of chapter 7 are comical, but the villain's demise and the subsequent elimination of his ten sons do not resolve the difficulties in how "difference" is constructed in the Book of Esther. A new decree is issued permitting Jews the right to defend themselves against any who would attack them; again, the identity of a "Jew" remains ambiguous as "many of the peoples of the country professed to be Jews, because the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them" (8:17b).

Esther and Mordecai succeed in defeating Haman's depiction of "the Jew as Persian national identity's quintessential negative image, the one divergence in an otherwise homogeneous, harmonious whole (Esther 3:8)." [5] Such homogeneity was an illusion; each royal decree circulated throughout the kingdom is addressed "to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language" (1:22; 3:12; 8:9). The problem in the Book of Esther is not the presence of diversity in the land, but the power to construct and eliminate the "different." Any difference re-presented as a threat to the harmony of home or kingdom will do. In the first chapter Queen Vashti is removed for her refusal to be brought "before the king, wearing the royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the officials her beauty" (1:11), because this will stir rebellion among the "noble ladies of Persia" (1:18) and undermine the position of every man as "master in his own house" (1:22). Students typically defend the king's authority to exclude Queen Vashti while chuckling over the outrageous claims of harm supplied as reason. The implications of defending the logically indefensible are only later revealed.

Value of Difference

The Book of Esther and other biblical texts invite reflection not only on how difference is constructed but on the value placed on that difference. Today's college students face the challenge—locally and globally—of participating in the reordering of political, social, educational, and theological systems that have privileged some differences while suppressing, marginalizing, and eliminating others. The study of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament texts can be an entry point and a source of wisdom in preparing to meet that challenge.

Elna K. Solvang is Assistant Professor of Religion at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, and author of A Woman's Place Is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and Their Involvement in the House of David (Sheffield, 2003). She received support for research on the topic of difference from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion.

Notes

[1] "Chapter 3: The Learning Students Need for the 21st Century," in Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002), 25. The full report is available at http://www.greaterexpectations.org

[2] With apologies to the authors of works not included on this list; examples of such studies include Mark G. Brett, ed., Ethnicity and the Bible (Boston: Brill, 2002); Cain Hope Felder, Race, Racism and the Biblical Narratives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002); Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002); R. Christopher Heard, Dynamics of Diselection: Ambiguity in Genesis 12-36 and Ethnic Boundaries in Post-Exilic Judah (SemeiaSt 39, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001); Ilana Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997); Kenton L. Sparks, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel: Prolegomena to the Study of Ethnic Sentiments and Their Expression in the Hebrew Bible (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).

[3] There are exceptions to this generalization. I used Mark G. Brett's Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 2000) in a seminar for religion majors on "Scripture and Difference" during Spring 2003. Students produced an anthology of articles, Writing on Identity: Conflict, Construction, Connection, for use in the liberal arts classroom. Their work appears online at http://www4.cord.edu/religion/journals/identity/Default.htm

[4] A proposal offered by C. Uehlinger, Weltreich und "eine Rede": Eine neue Deutung der sogenannten Turmbauerzählung (Gen. 11, 1-9) (OBO, 101; Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1990). Cited in Frank Crüsemann, "Human Solidarity and Ethnic Identity," in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Boston: Brill, 2002), 57-76 [72].

[5] Timothy K. Beal, The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation, and Esther (London: Routledge, 1997), 112.

Citation: Elna K. Solvang, " Teaching Difference: College Students and the Bible," SBL Forum , n.p. [cited Feb 2004]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=224