“The limb is mightier than the thumb,” quipped Claudette Colbert when, by extending her shapely leg into the street, she gained what Clark Gable’s thumb could not: a ride. In the classic screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, Gable blithely assumes he is the hitchhiking expert of the pair—only to be humiliated by Colbert’s far more effective method.
I, too, have been prone to rash assumption while hitchhiking. During a summer in Florence, my husband and I had just attended an opera performed under the stars in the ancient Roman theater in Fiesole, a hill town overlooking Florence. It was after midnight and the promised buses never came. “Quick,” said my husband, “Let’s hitchhike!” Thumbs extended hopefully, Clark Gable style, we waited for a car to stop. Instead, the drivers revved past us, hurling out uncordial-sounding words. Finally, fortunately, one car slowed to a stop. Our rescuer was a young Italian who spoke excellent English—learned, he told us, while working in Greenville, South Carolina. Only later did we learn what our young driver was too polite to tell us, and why the other Italian drivers had been so openly hostile to two hapless academic types. In Italy, the American hitchhiking thumb gesture means what the extended middle finger does in the United States. We made the mistake of assuming that everyone in the world hitchhikes the way Americans do. Disaster was averted only because our hero was bicultural. He understood that we were hitchhiking “in American.”
As L.P. Hartley warned in his 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently from us.”1 In Italy they hitchhike differently from us, and in ancient Israel they did things and thought things differently, too. A conscientious Bible reader must always remember that the Bible’s world is a foreign country and try, in the spirit of my Italian Good Samaritan, to be bicultural as to present and past.
Whatever our personal culture—Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and their myriad variants, whether feminist, evangelical or other—we do the Bible a grave disservice when we try to impose our 21st-century assumptions of what scripture should say on a text from thousands of years ago. All sorts of troubling doctrines have been and continue to be derived from the Bible by readers unwilling to approach the Bible on its own terms as a foreign—that is, ancient—text. Arguably the most egregious example in the United States was the justification of slavery in the 19th century and segregation in the 20th by recourse to “Noah’s curse”: “Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers …” (Genesis 9:25). In truth, Noah was only cursing one of Ham’s sons, named Canaan, in a story told to justify Israel’s dispossession of the Canaanites.2
By the same token, we need to recognize that the Bible contains precepts that we find troubling today, but that make perfect sense within their historical context: God’s call for genocide of the “Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites” in Deuteronomy 20:16–18, for example, would have been understood as a reference to an idealized rather than an actual holy war. Jesus’ pronounced anti-family values in Mark 10:29 (he promises rich rewards to those who leave “house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children”) must be understood in the context of apocalyptic expectations; that is, if the world is about to end, family and property fade to insignificance. Jesus’ outright racism in Mark 7:24–27 (a Gentile woman asks Jesus to cure her demon-possessed child, but Jesus initially refuses, stating: “Let the children [that is, the Jews] be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs [the Gentiles]”) reflects an early challenge faced by the post-Easter Jesus community—namely, whether Gentiles were welcome in the group. Confronted with this woman’s breathtakingly bold assertion of faith, Jesus adjusts his own sense of mission.
Years ago Phyllis Bird, the eminent biblical scholar and feminist theologian, reminded us that “the task of the biblical exegete [interpreter] in enabling meaningful conversation with an ancient text is first of all to articulate as clearly and carefully as possible the message/intentions of the ancient author or authors.”3 A scrupulous 054scholar, Bird is deeply respectful of the integrity of the biblical text. (She has felt compelled to demonstrate the inaccuracy of less careful readings of the Bible by fellow feminists—no matter how attractive these readings may be to her personally.)4 Hers is a good example to keep in mind when we seek to “appropriate the biblical message”—or to figure out what the Bible means to us personally.
Without time-travel, our attempts to understand the Bible in its world can never wholly succeed, but the effort is worth making. We must not ignore the steady stream of discoveries and insights provided us by biblical scholars, archaeologists and historians. The better prepared we are to accommodate the rules of its culture, the more likely we are to “get a lift” from the Bible.
“The limb is mightier than the thumb,” quipped Claudette Colbert when, by extending her shapely leg into the street, she gained what Clark Gable’s thumb could not: a ride. In the classic screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, Gable blithely assumes he is the hitchhiking expert of the pair—only to be humiliated by Colbert’s far more effective method. I, too, have been prone to rash assumption while hitchhiking. During a summer in Florence, my husband and I had just attended an opera performed under the stars in the ancient Roman theater in Fiesole, a hill town overlooking Florence. It […]
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Hartley’s words inspired the title of David Lowenthal’s influential book, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
2.
A recent study of this interpretive tradition is Steven R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002).
3.
Phyllis A. Bird, “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation,” Harvard Theological Review 74:2 (1981), pp. 129–159 (quotation from p. 156).
4.
Today, Bird continues to believe in the possibility of what she calls “meaningful conversation” with the Bible, although she has been disturbed by a tendency she has detected among fellow feminists to read into the biblical text ideologies that are not actually there. For example, Bird’s scrupulous scholarship compelled her to demonstrate, on the basis of ancient Near Eastern texts and art works, that the phrase “image of God” in Genesis 1:26–7 is a “royal motif.” The phrase more likely refers to human sovereignty over the earth and not primarily (however much she might personally wish otherwise) to a divine nature that encompassed the masculine and feminine.
