Faith in the Face of Empire by Mitri Raheb

Author:Mitri Raheb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbis Books
Published: 2013-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

Who Is My Neighbor?

The fact that Palestine was often controlled by different empires simultaneously and that it was often divided between north and south, or between the sea versus mountain culture, which was different from the culture of the desert, meant that the people of the land developed diverse and often contrary identities and subcultures. The unity of the land was threatened not solely by various empires but by the divisions of the people inhabiting the land. In such a context it is all too easy for a neighbor to become an enemy and for a fellow countryman or countrywoman to become a stranger.

In many theological writings, especially in the Old Testament or in Jewish studies, there is a tendency to talk about a triangle of God, land, and people. This closely resembles a religious nationalism discourse. A glance at Palestine and its history reveals that there is often more than one “people” inhabiting the land and multiple identities coexisting side by side developing adversarial identities. Yet little attention if any has been given to studying this biblical phenomenon.

I argue that “who is my neighbor?” is the second question found throughout the Bible and up to the modern history of Palestine. The Bible, from Genesis 4 to Revelation 21 can be seen as a collection of narratives on land, peoples, and identities.

The story of Cain and Abel (Gn 4:1–16) is a tale of two prototypes representing the Cenites in the Hebron area in relation to the Jerusalem monarchy. The story of the flood, later in Genesis, concludes with Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Gn 10:2–32)—representing three groups of peoples with distinct identities. Babel is the attempt to reverse this diversity and to pervert those orders into a uniformity of one people with one culture, an empire project that ended with confusion (Gn 11:1–9). In the stories of the patriarchs there is a continuing process of election and rejection projecting different notions of relationships among the peoples in the land. Three different traditions from three regions (Abraham in the Negev, Isaac in Beer Sheva, and Jacob in Bethel and Samaria) are unified in a single story of three generations, while a process of selection is undertaken distinguishing Isaac from Ishmael, Jacob from Esau, and Joseph from his brothers, each representing a distinct group. The Exodus story is about a people liberated and led to enter the Promised Land only to find other groups already living there. Joshua and Judges deal with the relations of this group of people to the other peoples of the land. Ruth is about the relationship of that group of people to their neighbors in Jordan, the Moabites. The books of Samuel deal with the desire to have a state, such as their neighbors have, relating a success story of David unifying the whole land with its diverse peoples and Solomon expanding those boundaries to include more peoples (a unification that did not last longer than forty years), which also divided the south and the north similar to the situation before David).

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