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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
The Bible was written within collectivist cultures. When Westerners, immersed in individualism, read the Bible, it's easy to misinterpret important elements—or miss them altogether. In any culture, the most important things usually go without being said. So to read Scripture well we benefit when we uncover the unspoken social structures and values of its world. We need to recalibrate our vision. Combining the expertise of a biblical scholar and a missionary practitioner, Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes is an essential guidebook to the cultural background of the Bible and how it should inform our reading. E. Randolph Richards and Richard James explore deep social structures of the ancient Mediterranean—kinship, patronage, and brokerage—along with their key social tools—honor, shame, and boundaries—that the biblical authors lived in and lie below the surface of each text. From Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar to Peter's instructions to elders, the authors strip away individualist assumptions and bring the world of the biblical writers to life. Expanding on the popular Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, this book makes clear how understanding collectivism will help us better understand the Bible, which in turn will help us live more faithfully in an increasingly globalized world.
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PATRONAGE, HONOR, AND
SHAME IN THE BIBLICAL WORLD
For my daughter-in-law
Savanna, who brings
such joy to our family.
—Randy
For my amazing wife, Judy,
and our two children,
who continue to teach me
the importance of family.
—Rich
Contents
PREFACE
THERE IS A LOT OF INTEREST these days in how the East is different from the West. There is always a need to read the Bible better. These two topics intersect for students of the Bible, since the Bible is an Eastern book.
One of the big differences between East and West is that modern Western (a.k.a., American and European) societies are individualist. Almost all Eastern and African, as well as most Middle Eastern and South American, societies are collectivist. Collectivist? Here we go. We have already gotten technical and the book hasn’t even started. We will try to avoid technical terms. When we do need to use a term, such as collectivism, we’ll work to explain it and—more importantly—to illustrate it until you are comfortable with it. If Western culture can be generalized as individualistic, then Eastern culture can be generalized as collectivistic. The rest of this book will unpack a few key aspects. We think to understand ancient Mediterranean (and most modern Eastern) collectivist cultures, you need to understand six basic ingredients: kinship, patronage, brokerage, honor, shame, and boundaries.
Like an earlier book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, this book is a guide, an introduction, to some foundational aspects of collectivist cultures. It is not another one of those tired books that bash the West, meaning mainly criticizing America and England. We’re sick of those books, and not just because one of us is American and the other is English. Both the West and the East are God’s creation—warped by the fall, sure, but God’s hand is evident in all the cultures. There is plenty of room around God’s table for all of us and that every believer deserves an equal seat at the table. We think the West has contributed much to the work of God’s kingdom (and we’re not done); the East is where it began. It is not an either-or but a both/and. Which wing of an airplane is more important? The challenge for many of us is that one side doesn’t understand the other well.
This understanding gap is important because the Bible arose in an Eastern, collectivist context. Although it is God’s Word, an essential element of an orthodox (or evangelical, if you like) understanding of inspiration is that the personalities and cultures of the writers still come through. Jesus spoke with a Galilean accent (Mt 26:73); Paul got angry, and God used his anger to fuel a letter such as Galatians.1 Jeremiah wrote like an eighth-century Hebrew-speaking prophet, while John wrote like a first-century Greek-speaking evangelist.
Rather than highlight those differences, though, we want to dig further down to the more basic elements that tie Jeremiah with John: ancient Mediterranean culture. In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth over old age. Those values just go without being said. Yet to the discerning eye, they are in the undercurrents of billboards and commercials and even influence our everyday decisions. In Paul’s world, there were also things that went without being said. Caesar promised peace and security.2 When Jesus said he didn’t bring peace like the world did (Jn 14:27), he didn’t need to connect the dots. It went without being said what he meant. Caesar promised peace, but so did Jesus. They were kings offering competing kingdoms.
It can be helpful to take what goes without being said and place it up on the table for examination. This book examines some unspoken foundational social structures and tools used in the biblical world. Since they operated in the background, they aren’t clearly printed in Scripture. They were obvious to the original audiences. Everyone knows that. Yet we don’t. These dynamics are not obvious to modern Western readers. That’s why some of the biblical stories seem confusing, as if some essential piece were missing. Often pieces are missing, because some cultural aspects go without being said. We think collectivism is a major piece, a key cultural given, and that understanding it better will help us understand the Bible better. Moreover, we hope that understanding the Bible better will help us live more faithfully as Christians in the world.
A preface should introduce the authors. You have noticed by now that we use the word we. Two good friends, Randy and Rich, joined together to write this book. Randy has studied the topic from a technical, anthropological, and biblical perspective, and Rich has studied it from an experiential, practical-ministry perspective. Randy has written or cowritten other books on related topics, including Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, and Rich has lived about a decade in the Middle East. He is fluent in Arabic and has a keen interest in how collectivism works in modern Middle Eastern societies and how that intersects with the biblical narrative.
Don’t look, though, for which chapters or sections Randy wrote versus the ones Rich wrote. We did not collect independently written essays. One of us began a chapter by jotting down some ideas, then the other tossed half of them out, rearranged the rest, and otherwise began to mold the clay that became each chapter. We wrote on top of each other. We discussed every section and each paragraph, and sometimes argued over words in video conferences and debated in personal visits. We rewrote together endless times. Thus, the book is in the end an inseparable weld of both of us. We would not be able to separate out who was responsible for the wording on any given sentence.
Our modern stories are often based on real people and real events. We often changed names; sometimes we simplified events or conflated stories to protect the person or to make the illustration simpler, but we believe we maintained the integrity of the cultural story. An illustration from the Middle East usually began with Rich, while stories from the Far East began with Randy, but we decided not to try to clarify which author first told that story. This book isn’t about us but about helping you to read the Bible better.
Authors often end their prefaces by thanking their spouse. In this instance, we need to offer extra appreciation to Stacia Richards. Randy was leading a Bible conference in Istanbul when he met Rich. Stacia, who was also there, kept insisting, “You should get Rich to write that honor-shame book with you.” I pointed out that someone living in Florida who happened to bump into someone living in Beirut during a conference in Istanbul would likely never meet again. After bumping into each other in a chance encounterdivine appointment in another location far from both our homes, Stacia said, “See!” I am often amazed at how frequently God speaks in a soprano voice.
We are thankful to InterVarsity Press for accepting the idea, to various conferences for inviting us to speak on the topic, and to Kevin Boyle, a promising young scholar, for the arduous task of tying up loose ends and preparing the indexes. Last, I (Randy) am thankful to my dear friend and oft cowriter, Brandon O’Brien, an accomplished theologian and skilled wordsmith, for giving the manuscript a thorough scrubbing. It is a much better book because of him.
Does an understanding of the unspoken social systems of the ancient Mediterranean help us to read the Bible better? We think so and invite you to read the book and to decide for yourself. Come explore with us the collective biblical world of kinship, patronage, brokerage, and honor.
INTRODUCTION
“IT’S WRONG TO SHAME SOMEONE!” the student asserted, with clear pain in her eyes. Just to be clear, I hadn’t done anything, but she seemed to be talking about some personal experience. “Is it always wrong to shame someone?” I asked. “Absolutely,” she and some others insisted.
Well, in my college student’s defense, shaming is almost universally condemned in modern Christian discussions. Terms such as body shaming, mom shaming, pet shaming, and others leap to mind. The clear implication is that shaming others is sinful.
Yet Jesus practiced shaming. Jesus shamed those who objected when he healed a suffering woman: “When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame” (Lk 13:17 NRSV). It was Jesus’ goal to shame them. At least twice, Paul shames the Corinthians to urge them toward proper actions. We know he intended to do this because he says so—“I say this to shame you” (1 Cor 6:5; 15:34). Wow, even God does it: “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).
Shame can be used to do a lot of harm. But it can also be used to do good. We need to deepen our understanding of how shame is used (and abused) by people today. According to the New Testament, shaming others (appropriately) was a virtuous thing to do. Is it possible that our modern practice is the misuse of shaming? Shame was a powerful tool in the biblical world. Sometimes it was used well and restored. Other times it was abused and hurt. We can overlook the positive uses of shame, or misunderstand them completely, when we read the Bible as members of individualist cultures. The biblical cultures were just very different from ours.
In fact, there are multiple aspects of collectivist cultures that are often misread by modern Western individualists (like me). Remember, the most important things in a culture usually go without being said. Since the Bible was written in a collectivist context by writers who were all collectivists, I am at risk of misreading Scripture with my individualist eyes. We’ll explain what we mean about collectivist and individualist culture soon, but first let’s see another example of how collectivists are different.
“So how long have you been married?” asked the taxi driver as we sat in the usual Middle Eastern traffic. “About three years,” I said. He smiled. “How many kids have you got?” I replied, “Oh, we don’t have any children yet.” He looked sad. “We had the same problem,” he said. He opened the glove box and shuffled through all his papers. “I know a really good fertility doctor. I think I have his card here somewhere.”
My wife and I waited a few years before having children. I hadn’t said we had problems conceiving, but the taxi driver “knew” that’s what I meant. My wife and I had similar conversations with a number of people. After all, in Middle Eastern culture, it went without being said that people marry to start a family. Whenever I went on to explain that waiting was a choice we had made, they were totally confused. “Why did you get married, if you didn’t want to have children?” Why choose to leave your family to start a new family and then not try to have children? It seems bizarre, like registering for college with no intention to attend, or buying groceries with no intention of cooking.
Not every single Middle Easterner thinks like that taxi driver did, but his perspective is very common. I like to say that generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful. This general statement is itself a great example. When we try to lump together the various societies of the modern or ancient Mediterranean world and draw some conclusions, we must generalize. Just like the West, the Mediterranean is made up of many cultures and languages. There is a lot of diversity. This was also the case in the ancient Mediterranean world. Yet, it will still be helpful to generalize because the foundational unspoken values are often so very different from our own unspoken modern individualist values.
“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about sixty-five years old—a long way from a contestant for Miss America.1 As Christians, we like to say, “Everyone is beautiful.” Yet Miss America beauty pageants aren’t filled with senior adults. Right or wrong, clearly our society has defined beauty by associating it with youth. If we had seen Sarah (in the days before dentists, braces, makeup, and hair products), it is unlikely we would have described her as a beautiful woman. Why did people then? There is not just a different view of beauty from ours but something else is going on.
There is scarcely a story more foundational to the Bible than the story of Abraham. He leaves his homeland to start a family but has no children. So Sarah, his wife, offers to let Abraham sleep with her servant to produce a child. Western readers find this arrangement unthinkable, yet this is the part of the story the Bible assumes we all understand. This is one of the “obvious” parts that are supposed to explain the mysterious parts about God. The writers of Scripture assume we share the same values. So, there are things he left unsaid because “everybody knows that.” Understanding these values will help us understand the story, which will then help us to understand God.
Abraham was born and raised a polytheist. In Abraham’s world, people believed there were many gods, who were each good at certain things. Some sent rain; others ensured flocks multiplied. People believed these gods often lived in and governed a certain region. This is the context for the beginning of Abraham’s story. Leaving one’s homeland meant leaving one’s god(s) behind. Abraham is following a new, unnamed god. How does one even refer to a god with no name? Well, he’s called Abraham’s god, Isaac’s god, Jacob’s god (Ex 3:15). That’s not much of a name, but it was all they had at the time. What is this god good at—a god of rain, a god of healing, a god who keeps bread from burning, a god of a particular river or mountain? He initially describes himself as none of those. This new, unnamed god has promised to give Abraham an heir. We need to be careful not to read the Bible backwards. We know he is the God of the universe, Creator, Sustainer, Savior, and so on, but Abraham didn’t know any of that. There was no Bible yet.
What was obvious and went without being said to those who believed in multiple gods was that Abraham’s previous god(s) had not provided Abraham with an heir. When Abraham’s family is introduced in Genesis 11, the reader is told about people and their children. It is noted, however, “Now Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive” (Gen 11:30). While as a modern Westerner, I might read past that detail as just another piece of information about the family, the author expected us to find this standalone sentence dramatic.2 Abraham’s marriage was a failure.
In much of the world today, people get married to have children. This is counter to our individualist culture, in which individuals marry because they are “in love.” Love rarely had anything to do with ancient marriage. When we read the biblical story, we assume Abraham and Sarah loved each other. I don’t know whether they did—I kind of hope they did, since I am a good individualist. But we certainly shouldn’t superimpose our motives back onto them. Ancients married in order to have children, to cement alliances, and to gain strategic relationships. When Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 7:8), it wasn’t because they had fallen in love at some royal ball. When we superimpose our values back on these ancient characters, we will miss something in the biblical story, sometimes the main point of the story. The Bible has a clear purpose for telling us Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter. We will get to that story later.
Men married to become fathers. Abraham would have been seen as the father of the group he was leading; yet, he wasn’t really a father. This would have been shameful to him. Sarah had failed to give him children; this would have been shameful to her. This unnamed god had offered them an heir, a source of joy and a way out of their shame—but at a high price (leaving their homeland and gods). They decided it was worth it to take this unknown god’s offer. When no child came, their shame probably increased. Abraham had seemed so confident. In this context, Sarah offers her servant Hagar to Abraham. This is potentially a way out of shame for herself, a way to share the blame with Abraham, a way to satisfy the hopes of the rest of their group for someone to care for them, and a way to build a family for herself. There is no absence of strong cultural reasons why Sarah would do what she did. It would have made sense to people in her culture. No one would have scratched their head wondering why she did it.
Obviously, there is a lot going on in the story that we are expected to know. For many Western readers, this story can be somewhat puzzling. “What kind of wife offers to let her husband sleep with the maid?” We might wonder, “Was that okay in her culture?” More than that, if the goal was for Hagar to get pregnant, then why in the world is Sarah angry when it happens? These are the parts of the story the original readers were expected to understand without explanation—which is why the Bible doesn’t explain it. The problem is not with the Bible. It was inspired by God and written by people in a culture. It was clear to the original audience. But we live in a very different time, in a very different culture. There are cultural gaps between the biblical world and our own. We are puzzled because we don’t have the right cultural pieces to put in the gaps. Worse, when we don’t understand, we often automatically fill the gaps by trying to squeeze in pieces from our culture, where they don’t fit. Recognizing these cultural gaps and the pieces that go into them helps us to understand the Bible better. This helps us to apply it to our lives and our culture better. We hope this book will provide you with a few pieces of ancient culture to help you fill in some of these cultural gaps.
TREES ARE TREES, RIGHT?
Perhaps it is helpful to think of culture as being like a tree. Just as different trees produce different fruit—you don’t get apples from orange trees—different (often unspoken) cultural values cause people in different cultures to act in different ways. Too often people in one culture judge the way other people dress, talk, and act, without thinking much about the culture that shaped them and certainly not the deep values that shaped the culture. We view their behavior as if those people are just branches off our same tree. In other words, we note the behaviors are different but assume the parts we haven’t noticed are the same between “us” and “them.” We often act as if deep down inside, everybody is the same. Deep down inside is where people are the most different.
The difference between collectivist and individualist cultures is not a surface value, such as “some people eat more rice than we do.” Individualism and collectivism describe two very different ways people relate, interact, and live together, but much more too, such as how they view themselves, the way they think, the emotions they feel, the way they make decisions and why, and what motivates them to behave the way they do.3 Let’s picture these two cultural worldviews like apple trees and orange trees; they are really quite different. They are not technically polar opposites.4 They are better described as different kinds of tree.
Just as individualist societies are not all the same, likewise with collectivist cultures. Not every orange tree is identical, either. There are multiple kinds of oranges: Navel, Cara Cara, Valencia, blood, clementine, and so many more, without even discussing the other kinds of citrus. Similarly, when we compare one collectivist culture with another, we can see all kinds of differences between them.5 A Far East Asian and Middle Eastern culture can both be collectivist, but there are significant differences between them.6 The United States and Britain are individualist cultures. Let’s say they are both apple trees, but they are not the same. What’s more, not everyone in the United States is the same! They may all be apples, but there are dozens of varieties, including Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Gala, McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Cortland, and more. When a country is multicultural, like the United States, then different ethnicities complicate the formula.7 Nonetheless, we can still speak in general terms of an apple or an orange, and more importantly we can say that oranges and apples have significant differences. The same is true of collectivist and individualist societies. We will say it again: generalizations are always wrong and usually helpful.
Thus, we are not proposing some overly simplistic approach to cultures, today or in the biblical times. We are well aware that the culture of Galilee differed considerably from that of Corinth. Nevertheless, we can speak of the orange trees of ancient Mediterranean culture when comparing it to the apple trees of modern Western culture. The biblical cultures of the Mediterranean world were all collectivist societies and, as we shall see, had a lot of foundational elements in common.
WHY LEARN ABOUT THESE FOUNDATIONAL SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BIBLICAL WORLD?
When we tell a story, a lot goes without being explained. For example, I might say, “After I finished speaking, I looked at the audience. They were all smiling. Someone in the back shot me a big okay.” If you are from my culture, you would conclude the speech went well. The exact same response in Indonesia signals a disaster. They smile when embarrassed. Our okay symbol is obscene in Indonesia. Same words, but what goes without being said differs. It is the standard cultural gap. It’s the fun (and mischief) of crosscultural travels. Jayson Georges illustrates this well:
Consider the meaning of these words: He whistled at her, and she winked back. This sentence probably brought to mind an image of two people flirting. Your mind intuitively used cultural assumptions to interpret the facial gestures as innuendos. But depending on your cultural context, winking could mean something entirely different: in Asia, it is an offensive gesture; in West Africa, parents wink at children as a signal for them to leave the room. Interpretation is based on cultural assumptions, so we must recognize that the cultural gap between the biblical world and us may cause different interpretations . . . Every writer assumes the reader can “read between the lines,” so there is no need to state the obvious. . . . But when people from two different cultures try to communicate, meaning gets lost in translation. This explains why readers today might misinterpret aspects of the Bible—we don’t share a common culture.8
Add to that cultural gap thousands of years and a jump from collectivism to individualism, and we have real potential for misreading the Bible.
The Bible is a series of books and letters written by people in collective societies, about the lives of people in collective societies, which they intended people of collective cultures to read. This is part of the beauty of the Bible, and an important part of the doctrine of inspiration. The authors assumed their audiences would see collective social systems in the texts. It was the air they breathed. Rarely are they mentioned, and even more rarely explicitly noted and explained. Yet, these values are there in the background, influencing the actions and decisions of the characters. Some of these values include loyalty based in blood, collective decision making, reciprocity, obligation, inequality, hierarchy, dependence, shame, and the enforcing of cultural boundaries. These are hardly the values of our individualist society. They are the fruit of a different tree.
In this book, we are going to explore what went without being said. That some things go without being said should not make us feel uncomfortable. We should not take it as a sign the biblical writers failed. Such feelings would be the result of another cultural value we hold. We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good communication to spell things out. Not everyone thinks this way. The Bible was written in high-context cultures. People in these cultures assume there’s a high level of shared information between them and their audiences. This means they don’t feel the need to state everything explicitly. They take it as a given that everyone knows how things worked—and at the time, they did. This is not a sign they were bad low-context communicators, but rather that they were very good high-context communicators.
In part one, we will explore some of the deep-level social structures of cultures in the biblical world: kinship, patronage, and brokerage. In part two, we will examine some of the key social tools collective people used to maintain, enforce, and reinforce their societal values. These structures and tools are foundation stones buried deep in collective cultures. They are in the background of much of the biblical texts. But we can miss them and some of the significance of what the biblical writers were saying in their culture. In part three, we will apply these things to our individualist lives.
To help you grasp this, we are going to do two things throughout. First, to try to help you see how these aspects of collective culture work, we will bring illustrations from how people live (and think) in collective cultures today. We will share examples from South American, Asian, and most often Mediterranean cultures. But we are not suggesting for a moment that these cultures are somehow the same as the biblical world. There are many differences, and we cannot simply read the Bible on the basis of how collectives think today. We are wary of people simply reading modern Middle Eastern cultural values into the biblical text and saying, “That’s what Paul meant.” Sometimes a modern collective pattern seems to have ancestors in the biblical text, but often it does not. So, perhaps there is a parallel, but we should not simply assume it. You will see that when we exegete (explain) the biblical text, our exegesis comes from standard hermeneutics (methods to interpret) and is based in what the texts say. We use stories from the culture around the text at times to help explore what they meant by what they said. These are taken from the language and culture around the time of the Bible, not today. We also use an awareness of how our individualist culture could be leading us to assumptions—to fill in the gaps with pieces of our individualist culture—when there is a gap because something from collective culture was assumed by the writers. As you have already seen, we tell modern stories to add color and help you grasp the way collectives think, and to see these things are about real people, not just theories. We do, however, want to underline that these modern stories are illustrations and not the basis for our exegesis.
Second, to help you see how these collective values work in the text, these deep cultural values will be separated out, disassembled, and explained, with lots of stories to illustrate them. We will show how they work in some modern collectivist cultures and then in the biblical world. We will then show how these provide more context and help us read some biblical passages even better. The more individualists understand the Bible was about collective people, the better we will read it. We hope these illustrations will cause an “Aha!” or two when you read the biblical text.
For example, in my culture there is an American success story. It often goes without being said explicitly, but it is common in our movies and our literature. The plot is usually like this: A small-town boy leaves home (alone). He moves to the big city and after lots of plot twists eventually strikes it big, but he never forgets his small-town values. If we can add to the story that the boy was forced to leave town, overcame lots of adversity, and his family ultimately admires his success, then it is even better. The story of the patriarch Joseph (with his multicolored coat) has a lot that went without being said. Since many Western readers don’t know that culture, we tend to fill in the gaps. The result is that we can inadvertently turn the Joseph story into the American success story. I grew up as an individualist and thought the pinnacle of Joseph’s story was when he became second only to Pharaoh. The small-town boy had made it big. I also admired Joseph for actions that the biblical author expected me to be appalled over, as we’ll see in the next chapter. Let’s start our exploration of the social systems of the biblical world.
PART 1
SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF THE BIBLICAL WORLD
EVERYONE LOVES THE STORY of the patriarch Joseph, with his multicolored coat. I as an individualist often think of the story as if it were all about Joseph. Potiphar’s wife and Joseph’s brothers (and later his fellow slaves) are just supporting cast in the background of the play. The way we often tell the story goes from Joseph-in-Jacob’s-tent to Joseph-in- Pharaoh’s-palace. There are some crazy details about cups and contraband. People come and go, and after a long and protracted process Joseph’s dad shows up and then dies. The later chapters, when Joseph is ruling in Egypt and his brothers show up, feel like a kind of epilogue. They are so anticlimactic to us. I was stunned to learn these are the chapters my collectivist friends love the most. Those chapters are not anticlimactic; they are not an epilogue but the grand finale. To my Mediterranean friends, this is where the story really gets exciting. They are on the edge of their seats.
This is because the entire story of Joseph is actually about Joseph’s family and how God reconciled them. For collectivists, it is not a story about how God advanced Joseph’s career. It is not an urban-migration success story. Rather, Joseph angered his brothers, who respond badly, and Joseph becomes estranged from the family. Some collectivists might say it is Joseph’s fault. He should have known better than to anger his brothers. My Mediterranean friends who are careful readers of the Bible place the blame somewhere else. Not on the brothers, not on Joseph. To them, most of the blame lies squarely with their father, Jacob. He is the father of all the brothers. As the head of the (ancient) household, it would have been his job to sort out disagreements and tensions like this one. Joseph is young. Fathers are supposed to correct arrogant young sons. The brothers were angry. Jacob should have raised his sons to care for one another even when Joseph was arrogant. Did Jacob even notice the problem? He could, and should, have reconciled the tensions. Instead, he exacerbates them. He gives Joseph a special robe and allows him to stay home while the others have to work. There are a lot of problems in the family. But, never fear, God overcomes (all their) sin. The end of the story is good, because it is about how Jacob, Joseph, and all the brothers are reconciled.
My individualist culture constantly gives me signposts that point me to focus on individuals and their interests. I often miss or underplay collective groups and their collective interests. These same individualist signposts can also cause me to misread the story of Joseph. I easily assume the whole story is about him, almost turning it into a fable about how a young man left home, overcame adversity, and found success. Worse, the way I read the story had the Bible reinforcing capitalism and the American dream. When I do this, I miss a lot of what the Bible is saying. I think I know the story. Joseph is Jacob’s favorite son, and Jacob gives him a gift. Right there, I have focused on two individuals. This is actually a kinship (family) story.
Jacob has two wives, Leah and Rachel. At this point in Genesis, we know Jacob prefers the younger wife, Rachel. The Bible tells us the story of Rachel first. Jacob asks (inappropriately) to marry Rachel when her older sister is still unmarried (Gen 29). This matches a pattern in Jacob’s behavior of not respecting relatives, including his own brother (Gen 25:29-34). For Laban to arrange the marriage of the younger before the elder sister might doom Leah to spinsterhood. Jacob ends up married to both sisters but loves only Rachel (Gen 29:30-33). Things get worse. Leah, the older sister, bears sons aplenty, but Rachel “was not bearing Jacob any children” (Gen 30:1). As a modern individualist, I see this as a personal matter, perhaps a personal tragedy, because whether one has children is an individual matter. Every part of my last sentence contradicts the values of the ancient Mediterranean world. Children are not a choice. Children are not an individual, personal matter. Children determine inheritance, who owns the flocks. They are a gift and a blessing from God (to the family).
Eventually, God helps Rachel give birth to a son of her own, Joseph (Gen 30:25). As an individualist I note (with a proper frown) that Jacob plays favorites and prefers Joseph over his brothers. I fail to note, though, very important kinship factors in the story. All the other brothers in the story are sons of Leah. When Jacob gives the multicolored coat (or full-length robe) to Joseph, this isn’t just a matter of Joseph getting a nicer Christmas gift than the other brothers. It isn’t merely Jacob showing he loves Joseph more. Jacob is indicating who will be the heir. Reuben is the oldest son—but the oldest son of Leah. Joseph is the oldest son of Rachel. Jacob is indicating that the inheritance will run through Rachel’s side of the family, the wife he loves. The Bible states it plainly, albeit in ways that go without being said. Joseph is given higher status. We note that Jacob keeps Joseph home with him while the other brothers are out shepherding in the field (Gen 37:12-14). What went without being said is that Jacob is giving Joseph more than just an easier job. Joseph is in the manager’s office, while the brothers are on the factory floor. Jacob even sends Joseph out to give instructions to the older brothers.
Couldn’t the other brothers have just gotten on with their own lives? Inheritance wasn’t just a father-son relationship issue. If Joseph inherits, then the sons of the noninheriting wife are out. These sons, Joseph’s half-brothers, have their own families to consider. What will happen to them and their children? In the ancient world, the noninheriting counted on the inheritor. Joseph’s brothers should be able to count on their brother. Joseph should look after them and treat them fairly. They are, after all, family.
Well, one would expect a man to treat his brothers well. Yet, Joseph’s attitude about inheriting has already been made clear to them: “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it” (Gen 37:6-7). If God gave him that dream (which the Bible doesn’t say God did), Joseph is under no obligation to share it with his brothers. Yet, his attitude has already been made clear. Joseph has already tattled on them (Gen 37:2), and now he is bragging he will lord it over them, flaunting that he is to inherit and not them.
Alienating his brothers is a bad idea. The ancient world had no police force. Your family was the one to protect you from wandering caravans. Yet, Joseph’s brothers don’t protect him. Instead they are the very ones who sell him to the caravan. They very likely reason that removing the favored son of Rachel will ensure that Reuben will inherit and thus guarantee a better future for all their families. Later Jewish texts emphasize this by saying that the brothers use the money to buy shoes for their families.1
Yet, with all this family dysfunction, God still fulfills his promise to Abraham. God watches over Joseph; God does not abandon those who sin. Joseph is not sold to some unknown farmer. He ends up at a country estate of a high-ranking Egyptian official, Potiphar, the captain of the guard.
At this point, a bit of Egyptian history will help us—another thing that went without being said. Egypt had been ruled by Egyptians (of course). But in the 1700s BC a group of Asiatics from the region of Canaan and beyond moved into Egypt and began to seize land. By 1720 BC they had established a capital in the eastern Nile Delta at Avaris. These rulers were called the Hyksos (Rulers of Foreign Lands).2 These Hyksos were of the same general ethnic group as Joseph. If the Pharaoh was Hyksos, then likely Potiphar was as well. His wife’s family may have been Egyptian. Her marriage to a high-ranking Hyksos would help provide security for her family and the estate in those turbulent days. When we read the story carefully, we can see she makes racist comments about Joseph: “She called her household servants. ‘Look,’ she said to them, ‘this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us!’” (Gen 39:14). She aligns herself with the slaves against this outside Hebrew—an ethnic marker. This is us versus them language. All cultures have racism, but us-them language strikes a particular nerve for collectives, as we will see later.
We return to the story. Potiphar’s wife—note that she is never named, because this part of the story is about Joseph and Potiphar—takes a shine to Joseph and invites him to bed. Joseph refuses. Good for him, but we should note why. (There aren’t Ten Commandments yet.) Joseph states: “‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?’” (Gen 39:8-9). Joseph states he is the greatest person in the house and Potiphar has put everything (including her) into Joseph’s hand. We are supposed to notice that Joseph has placed himself above her as well as above all the other slaves. They are his new household unit, but the same arrogance he had with his brothers he has here.
Of course, Potiphar is going to know what happened. Slaves see what’s going on, and someone will pass the word to Potiphar.3 She lies to Potiphar and says that Joseph tried to seduce (or rape) her. Potiphar is enraged. We should be careful not to simply read our modern individualist values into this story. We have no idea whether Potiphar loved this wife, but he would have cared about the dishonor and the lack of loyalty shown to him by either his wife or his favored servant. He has two choices:
1. He publicly supports his wife’s story: a slave has attacked her. The punishment was routine. The slave would be executed.
2. He publicly supports his head slave and disgraces his wife. The result was routine. He would divorce her.
It seems that whatever Potiphar decides to do, he loses. He clearly doesn’t believe his wife’s story, because Joseph isn’t executed. But if he sides with his wife, then he loses the best estate manager he has ever had (Gen 39:2-3). An honest and successful manager was hard to find. Jesus told several parables about lousy servant-managers on estates (Lk 12; 16). On the other hand, if he sides with Joseph, then he must divorce his wife. Since she hasn’t committed adultery (at least according to the story he got), if he divorces her the bridal price, almost certainly the estate, will go back to her family. Thus, Potiphar can keep the estate and lose his manager, or he can keep the manager and lose the estate. Potiphar is furious that Joseph has put him in this mess.
Potiphar decides to keep the estate his wife. But we are to notice that not only is Joseph not executed, but he is placed in the best prison in Egypt, the one where the king’s servants are placed. We think of prisons as solitary places, but Joseph is given a new community. Yet again, Joseph rises to prominence in his community. But something is different. This time, for the first time, Joseph doesn’t alienate his new community. He hit rock bottom, but he has at last learned how to live as a member of a community. Finally, Joseph is ready to be used by God to be put in charge of another community: Egypt.
But this is not the climactic end of the story. This is only part one in the restoration story. The happy ending where we celebrate the saving work of God comes at the end, when Joseph and his brothers and father are restored (Gen 45). Joseph uses his status to care for his family. He provides for all his brothers’ families as he should have done at the beginning. More than that, they are relationally restored as brothers who care for one another (Gen 45:14-15). The dysfunctional family is restored. Sin is overcome.
Clearly, kinship plays a very important role throughout the story. It starts with a family and ends with a family. The part that is all about Joseph on his own is not the good part but the bad part. We haven’t highlighted it, but Joseph was also supposed to be his brothers’ patron, someone expected to use his status to protect and care for others. Joseph fails to fulfill this role initially, but then he does at the end. Potiphar was Joseph’s patron, as was Pharaoh. (If you don’t understand the term patron now, don’t worry. We’re going to explore this important social structure in chaps. 3–5). Several times, we see a broker—a middleman or a mediator—working to join two parties in the story. Reuben attempts to mediate or broker several times for Joseph with the other brothers. Someone may have been able to mediate with Potiphar or his wife. Joseph asks the cupbearer to broker for him with Pharaoh.
Kinship, patronage, and brokerage are key social structures in the story. The author assumes his intended audience knows these social structures. They surely did; they were collectives and lived in such cultures. They would have recognized how these values were at play. Equally important (or perhaps even more so), the audience is expected to notice when these values should be in play but are not. To ancient hearers (and many modern collective ears), it is obvious that Joseph’s arrogance played a role in his being separated from his community, as did his father’s passivity and his brothers’ fear and jealousy. Collectivists recognize immediately that this is a story about a family (as are all the patriarchal stories). When Joseph needs his community’s help, it often doesn’t come. The plights of Joseph were the obvious consequences for someone who cut himself off from his community. Thankfully, salvation is a family matter in the story. God has promised much to Abraham and his descendants (Gen 12:1-4). Despite the broken family and failings, God is faithful. He is the star of the story.
ME VERSUS WE
We have been tossing the word collectivist around. What do we mean? Doesn’t everyone else basically think the same way I do? Actually, like we said above, deep down is where we are the most different. One of my biggest shocks from living abroad came when I realized other people’s way of thinking about a topic was just completely different from mine.
Allow me a favorite story to illustrate. I was teaching in Indonesia. I was surprised by how many students left test questions unmarked, even multiple-choice questions. As I handed back graded exams, I commented to a student, “Why didn’t you select an answer on question number three?” He looked up and said, “I didn’t know the answer.” “You should have at least guessed,” I replied. He was appalled. “What if I accidentally guessed the correct answer? I would be implying I knew the answer when I didn’t. That would be dishonest!” Now it was my turn to be surprised. Blessedly, before I responded, I realized I was about to argue him to a lower standard. My American pragmatism had urged me onward. My Christian standard of honesty had remained oddly silent. Somehow, honesty had not seemed to apply in this situation (when clearly it did). My seminary students today initially don’t enjoy this story—because they still want to guess answers. Nonetheless, after I share this story in class I often see exams with unanswered multiple-choice questions, sometimes with a smiley face next to them.4
Many things in our cultures are so deep down that we never even think about them. In fact, the most important things in our cultures are usually buried the deepest, way below anything we are really aware of and yet influencing everything above them. The collectivist and individualist distinction is one of these things. We are usually not aware of it, and so in both collective and individualist cultures, this orientation almost always goes without being said. In Britain, it’s more and more common to hear people grumbling about individualism. Yet, while we may grumble about some of the effects of individualism, we rarely talk about the core assumptions that underpin them. I don’t grumble that I think of myself as an “I.” I don’t even think about it. Likewise, collectives can grumble about their cultures. It’s common to hear collectives grumbling, “People always think they have a right to get involved in my life and give me their opinions,” or, “I always have to follow the expectations of others in my family, not what I want to do.” But, I haven’t heard them grumble about seeing themselves as “we.” This is because it is buried very deeply.
We all assume it is simply the way the world is. While we don’t like some of this, we can’t imagine another way of thinking about it. Even if we can sometimes see some fruit (both good and bad) in our cultures, we rarely imagine there is another tree entirely.
Naturally then, when we see other cultures acting differently, we assume our culture is the norm, the baseline, the standard. This makes their way different and quite strange. We Western individualists might be surprised to learn that our modern Western culture is the less common view. Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede measured individualism and collectivism across people from fifty-three nations. He found the three most individualistic nations in the world were the United States, Australia, and Great Britain. Their scores weren’t just the furthest left of the global norm; they were actually more than double it.5 In other words, the global normal or the baseline, the standard, is more similar to the ancient and modern Mediterranean cultures than our Western culture.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
This is nothing to panic over. Western culture is not a plague on the world. We are just a different tree. I can go through life quite successfully as an apple tree without needing to know anything about orange trees, unless I interact with one. I don’t have to know anything about how my culture compares with ancient biblical cultures unless I want to read the Bible better. Our Scriptures arose in a collectivist world, a world of orange trees, so it would help us to learn a bit about collectivist cultures. Collectivism is so deep in the culture of the biblical writers that they rarely say so directly. It goes without being said, so we can miss it. To exacerbate the scenario, we often fill in what went without being said in their world (collectivism) with what goes without being said in ours (individualism).
We saw how this plays out in the Old Testament story of Joseph and his family. Let’s look at a briefer illustration from the New Testament. In this one, collectivism is clearly stated, but I read my individualism right over the top of it. In the modern Western world, I write letters (or emails) as an individual. I sit alone and compose my letter. We often assume New Testament writers did the same. Thus, we assume Paul as an individual wrote his letters. In fact, I grew up calling them “Paul’s letters.” But the Bible actually tells us differently. The opening of the letter to the Thessalonians tells us: “Paul, Silas and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you” (1 Thess 1:1).
As a Western individualist, I immediately dismiss this. Paul couldn’t really mean that they worked together to write the letter. Western scholars suggest that it just means Silas and Timothy are sending their greetings. Yet, when Timothy sends greetings, it is at the end of a letter: “Timothy, my co-worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason and Sosipater, my fellow Jews” (Rom 16:21). Other scholars suggest Paul is just being humble. Yet, why wasn’t he humble to the Romans, Galatians, or Ephesians?6 For Western individualists, coauthorship isn’t even considered an option. The thought never occurred to us. We read “Paul, Silas and Timothy,” but we never really see it.
Likewise, as an individualist, I think the Bible was written to me. I “forget” that the opening of the letter tells us it was written to a group of people: “Paul, Silas and Timothy, to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and Peace to you [plural]” (1 Thess 1:1).
I grew up reading the letter as if Paul (an individual) were speaking to me (an individual). Thus, at the end of the letter, when Paul writes, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess 5:16-18), I imagine Paul telling me to do those things. I sit in my bedroom (alone) and think about how to apply those commands to my life. Yet the you in the passage is plural; the commands are plural: you all rejoice. Since the church would have been assembled and listening as a group to Paul’s letter as it was read aloud to them, they most likely discussed together how Paul’s command for them (as a group) to rejoice, pray, and give thanks should shape their community life. Why does this matter? We think that recognizing the collective nature of the biblical world helps us to be better readers of the Bible, and crucially, better able to apply it to our lives and to help each other apply the Scriptures to our lives.
THE COLLECTIVE SELF: WHO TELLS ME WHO I AM?
When I introduce myself to someone, I usually say my name and occupation. In the collective culture of the Middle East, I can sometimes talk to someone for over an hour before they ask me my first name. The first question they ask is, “Where are you from?” They ask about my job, my family, my age, my children, and my religion. That tells them a lot more about me than my first name. I am the sum of my group. To know me means to know who my group is, or more accurately said, to know my group is to know me.
Collectivism and individualism primarily describe the way people identify and think about the self.7 People in individualist societies, such as me and most likely you, think of ourselves as an individual person: I am me, and the rest are they. Members of an individualist culture such as me think of my identity as comprising my individual attributes, personality traits, and what I have achieved in my life. As an individualist, these things define the way I see myself as a person and how I see others. I focus on fulfilling my own potential. I was taught in college I should want to be self-actualized. I should seek to be independent and autonomous, and only be expected to look after myself and my immediate family.8 I can hear my dad saying, “Be your own man. Don’t follow the herd.” My old anthropology professor worked as an American in a collectivist culture. They nicknamed him “Man Who Needs No One.” His mom would have been proud, but they didn’t intend it as a compliment. I make independent decisions for myself and bear the responsibility alone. We in individualist societies see ourselves this way. This is very deep down and often goes without being said. As an individualist, nothing struck me as odd when A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh, had Piglet say, “The thinks that make me different are the thinks that make me ME.”9
Collectivist people find Piglet’s statement confusing in more than just grammar. Collectivist people define who they are in relation to others. I might say, “I’m an honest guy.” A collectivist friend would reply, “Says who?”10 As an individualist (from Texas), such a reply sounds to me like a challenge, maybe even fighting words. My collectivist friend was just wondering who decided that I was an honest guy. If the community that thought I was an honest guy was a community whose opinion my friend valued, then I would be accepted by him and his community as honest. And it wouldn’t just be token acceptance. The community would be willing to entrust valuables to me because I was proven honest. In my individualist culture, I might need to demonstrate my honesty individually or get a personal reference (by an individual he knows).
Individualist societies tend to think of community as being the sum of the individuals. We bring our individual identities, characteristics, values, and talents, and the sum of this becomes our community. Individuals gather to make a community. In collectivist societies, however, the individual is the sum of the community. The community identity, characteristics, values, and talents form the identity of those who all belong to that community. Collectives are defined by the things they share with others, things such as shared blood, shared interests, shared history, shared land, and shared loyalty. They define their core identity as being part of a group, in distinction to other groups.
This is what we mean by collectivism. Collectivist people understand their identity from the group they are part of. It is about identity, which is why people in collective societies live their lives oriented toward their group. They seek to make personal decisions in the interest of their group. They value interdependence, social harmony, and the group welfare. They make collective decisions as a group. To an individualist, that may sound dreadful or disempowering, but there are upsides. Responsibility is shared corporately. It is never just my fault. In fact, I admit that many times as an individualist I have asked others to help me make a decision. I wanted their wisdom, but I also wanted to socialize blame. Yet, this was my (individual) strategy. Collective people do it because they think they are the group. They don’t see themselves as an individual in a group. Given that people in collective societies see themselves this way, they also see others this way too.11
COLLECTIVE DECISIONS: WE WILL HELP YOU DECIDE
“I’d like to buy a set of curtains, please.” One of my British friends was moving into a new apartment in Beirut. Before she went to the curtain shop, she spent some time carefully measuring her window and thinking about what color fabric suited the room, and then went to the shop. Her new landlord, his wife, and the staff in the curtain shop looked shocked when she gave them the dimensions. “Those dimensions aren’t right,” said the shopkeeper. “They are too short. You need full-length curtains.” My friend politely said that actually she preferred window-length curtains because she had placed a dining table beside the window. The shopkeeper replied, “No.” Surprised, my friend looked to her new landlord for support to deal with this uncooperative shopkeeper. Instead, the landlord replied, “He’s right. You want full-length curtains.” When she objected, saying she had made the decision already based on the table, both he and his wife replied, “We know best. You don’t know. You’re not from here.” The shopkeeper joined in, saying, “Everyone does it this way.” After fifteen minutes of trying to object, with them responding more and more strongly, our friend finally had to accept. She got full-length curtains and had to pay the price for them too. She was upset because she felt that no one had listened to her. She didn’t get what she wanted. Actually, it was deeper than that. She believed she had the individual right to choose her own curtains for her own house. They had not respected her right. She had expected to be able to make the decision based on what she preferred. The community, however, was frustrated. She hadn’t listened to wisdom. They expected her to make the decision based on what the community preferred. After all, she wouldn’t want every guest who entered her house to think her curtains were too short, would she? It was their responsibility to make the decision for her, as her new landlords, neighbors, and friends. Everybody was oblivious to what was really going on. It wasn’t really about curtains. That was the surface symptom, but all the real activity was occurring deep down in the social structures of their cultures.
These social structures are foundational to the biblical worldview. In order to explain them, we will need to oversimplify. Worse than that, we will treat these social structures in collective cultures—kinship, patronage, and brokerage—as if they were separate or distinct from one another. Like most of life, it is never so neat and clean. Often these roles overlap or are mixed, muddled, or switched partway through a story.
