Promised Land

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Last summer I took part in a seminar sponsored by the Native Ministries Consortium of Vancouver, British Columbia. This was my first experience teaching the Bible to native peoples from Canada, the United States and other countries. Walking in their moccasins, so to speak, and trying to see through their eyes gave me a new appreciation of the difficulty and challenge of interpreting the Bible in the modern world.

In one study we considered the theme of the promise to the ancestors of Israel: the theme announced in the opening verses of Genesis 12 and developed in the remainder of the Pentateuch. One aspect of God’s promise is the promise of land (Genesis 12:1, 7). In the story of the burning bush, Moses is assured that God will deliver the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and bring them “to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” This promise will be realized, however, by dispossessing the indigenous peoples: “the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” (Exodus 3:8).

I must confess that before the conference, I had concentrated on the promise and had not thought too much about its consequences for the native peoples. Those ancient peoples flourished for a while in a small corner of the world and then disappeared from the historical scene, though some of them—for example, the Hittites—have been rediscovered by modern archaeologists. However, in the presence of native Americans who lost their land to invaders, I took a new interest in those forgotten peoples.

The problem of the native peoples is exacerbated in the Book of Deuteronomy, which picks up the theme of the promise of land. In his valedictory address to the Israelites, as they are on the verge of crossing the Jordan and ascending the West Bank, Moses announces that the land is God’s gift and declares that they are to take it by force from the native inhabitants, “seven nations mightier and more numerous than you.” In strong language, the invaders are told to “make no covenant with them and show them no mercy”; rather, they must “break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and bum their idols with fire” (Deuteronomy 7:1–5).

To be sure, some powerful reasons for this negative attitude are given. The Mosaic sermon warns that the Israelites may be “ensnared” by aspects of native culture (Deuteronomy 7:25); further, they are told that God is dispossessing the native peoples not because of the Israelites’ “righteousness” but because of “the wickedness of these nations” (Deuteronomy 9:4). Nevertheless, it is easy to see how native peoples of North America, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands or elsewhere, who feel the hurt of loss of land and destruction of their culture, would be turned off by the theme of the Promised Land. Moses’ exhortation could be used as a justification for taking land and destroying native culture, as has happened again and again since Columbus’ arrival in the New World.

While reflecting on this difficult problem, I found much help in an essay by Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land”— the title essay of a collection dealing with ecological and agricultural subjects.¹ Berry is an essayist, novelist and poet—not a professional biblical scholar; and for that reason his essay is peculiarly refreshing and challenging. He proposes to turn to the Book of Deuteronomy as a way of developing a biblical basis for ecological responsibility. “The giving of the Promised Land to the Israelites,” he writes, “is more serviceable than the story of the giving of the Garden of Eden, because the Promised Land is a divine gift to a fallen people.”²

In speaking of a “fallen people,” Berry is using traditional language. What he means, I believe, is that any people—not just ancient Israel—receives God’s gifts in a historical situation where self-interest and human pride tarnish them. The theme of God’s gift of land to a people, he says, “sounds like the sort of rationalization that invariably accompanies nationalistic aggression and theft”; and he draws attention to “the similarities to the westward movement of the American frontier.” Early American pioneers, as we know, believed that they were marching into the Promised Land. Berry observes that whereas the movement into the American frontier produced an ethic of greed and violence, the Israelite conquest of Canaan from the very first was informed by an ethic of responsibility based on the view that the land is God’s undeserved gift. To quote the essay once again: “The difficulty but also the wonder of the story of the Promised Land is that, there, the primordial and still continuing dark story of human rapaciousence, ness began to be accompanied by a vein of light which, however improbably and uncertainly, still accompanies us.”³

The story of the promise to Israel’s ancestors pertains to a people of the past—ancient Israel. The story is, as we say, “historically conditioned.” It was not intended to provide a divine mandate for other people in other times and historical situations to engage in territorial expansion at the expense of native populations.

Moreover, the story is about an ancient people who—like every people and nation from time immemorial—has been inescapably involved in what Berry calls a “dark history” of struggle for power and for 014land. Hence, the formulation of God’s promise to ancient Israel has an ideological coloration. Just as the promises of grace to David provided the justification for the Davidic throne (Psalm 78), so the promise of land to Abraham and his descendants provided a theological rationale for the conquest of Canaan.

However, in the perspective of the faith of Israel, God works through the sufferings, dislocations and tragedy of human history to achieve a purpose that ultimately will benefit all peoples. Indeed, Israel—represented by Abraham and Sarah—is summoned to a special task that, in some sense, will yield blessing to “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3; compare Isaiah 49:6). Perhaps native peoples, who have been overrun by invaders, may one day say in retrospect that some good came of it after all. In Vancouver I discovered, however, that the hurt is still too great for people to say in the words of Joseph, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20). As a black student observed, such positive statements are more easily made by the oppressor than by the oppressed.

Last summer I took part in a seminar sponsored by the Native Ministries Consortium of Vancouver, British Columbia. This was my first experience teaching the Bible to native peoples from Canada, the United States and other countries. Walking in their moccasins, so to speak, and trying to see through their eyes gave me a new appreciation of the difficulty and challenge of interpreting the Bible in the modern world. In one study we considered the theme of the promise to the ancestors of Israel: the theme announced in the opening verses of Genesis 12 and developed in the remainder […]