Image: “The Flight of the Prisoners” by James Tissot, 1896, a painting of the people of Judah being driven from Jerusalem to Babylon, a Biblical “Trail of Tears.”
Americans love the Bible. We print Bible verses on our tee shirts and coffee cups, stencil them on our walls, bumper-sticker them on our cars. The Bible is part of post-war Americana, like baseball and apple pie. We love the Bible—and we should! But we must recognize that the Bible is not the story of a well-fed middle class. These people don’t live in a house in the suburbs with two kids, a dog, a privacy fence and a well-trimmed lawn. The kids don’t play tournament sports, Mom doesn’t drive a minivan, and Dad doesn’t work a forty-hour week with paid vacations, health insurance, and a 401K.
We love the Bible. But to understand it, we must face the bleak, often painful lives of the people in its pages.
The Biblical record has little in common with American prosperity, but strikes parallels with some of the seamier sides of the American story.
The Hebrews spending four-hundred years as slaves in Egypt? An easy parallel to the four-hundred-year American slave trade. (Though the slave trade on these shores was surely more brutal.)[1]
Can you identify with American slaves? Can you read the Bible from their perspective?
And what about the Biblical accounts of refugees and fugitives, huge groups of people forced to live on the road? First comes the Exodus—a million Hebrews leaving Egypt for a forty-year walk in the desert. They were excited at first. “ROAD TRIP!” But within days they were overwhelmed by fear and worry, and the anxiety would stay with them for four decades.
Can you relate to these displaced, arguably homeless people? God took care of them every day, but being forced to live a nomadic existence with a fuzzy destination and timeline must have been excruciating. I think of the Pilgrims, English Protestants choosing to sail across the ocean to a land of forbidding forests and unpredictable tribes, rather than remain in a home that would not recognize their freedom of religion. Half would die the first year.
Can you identify with the Pilgrims marooned on a lonely beach? Can you read the Bible from their perspective?
Then there were the caravans of exiles being driven from Jerusalem to Babylon, 700 miles away, not to return for 70 years. That was Ancient Israel’s “Trail of Tears,” a massive resettlement program not unlike the American exodus created by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. That law caused the “forced displacement of about 60,000 people from the ‘five civilized tribes’ between 1830 and 1850.”[2] They suffered exposure, disease, and starvation, and thousands died before arriving at their destination in the Oklahoma Territory. Some call this resettlement genocide, others call it ethnic cleansing. We’re not talking wagon trains to California. The Anglo settlers who decided to “Go west, young man!” had a choice. The Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations did not have a choice. The move was forced upon them, as it was forced on the Hebrews marching to Babylon.
What would we learn if we could read the Bible from the perspective of the head of a Cherokee family traveling on the Trail of Tears, struggling every day to feed and shelter children, babies, and two or three elders?
Finally, consider Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. The tiny family was forced to run for their lives when Herod wanted to kill Jesus. Soon they found themselves living as fugitives in the land of Egypt. Prophecy would be fulfilled upon their return. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son” Hosea 11:1.
God had a plan for Mary and Joseph, and I’m sure they never doubted that. God had a plan for all his people. When the Hebrews entered Babylonian captivity, God told them they would not be there forever. But it would be a long time—they would serve Nebuchadnezzar “and his son, and his son’s son” Jeremiah 27:7.
God’s plan was to punish his traitorous, idolatrous people. He sent them to Babylon, but it would not be forever. “Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live” Jeremiah 27:12. The people would learn to submit themselves not only to God’s unpleasant plans, but to the rule of a pagan king from a foreign land, foreign language, foreign culture. God was teaching his people to honor him and to be humble and obedient—even when it was humiliating.
Driving on a modern interstate highway, with an air-conditioned car and a sound system Beethoven could not have imagined, it is easy to forget how difficult it would be to walk twenty miles a day while caring for small children and the elderly. Where would you obtain food? And how would you prepare it if you could acquire it? Traveling in such conditions was so brutal as to be torturous. Yet these are the people of the Bible. These are the lives they lived, the difficult path they walked.
If we hope to understand the Bible, we must understand the difficult lives endured by so many of its people.
A.Ω.
[1] American slavery was more brutal than that practiced in Ancient Egypt if only because America’s multiple owners meant slave families were frequently and cruelly split up, whereas in Egypt the Pharaoh appears to have been the owner of the vast majority—to the extent the concept of “ownership” was even used—and thus, Pharaoh was content to allow the Hebrews to go home together each night to the Land of Goshen and then return to work for him each morning. Families, clans, tribes, and many aspects of the Hebrew culture would have remained intact.
Household Words: 