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1. Pieces of a Whole » Blog Archive » So, you wanna date a who?? on 19 Aug 2006 at 8:15 pm

   […] Just as sad as the racism is the lack of biblical knowledge in one trusted to teach Scripture. Hat tip to the always informative “Mixed Media Watch” for this story. […]

Comments

1. Jeremy Pierce wrote:

   Moses wasn’t the only righteous Hebrew who married into the line of Ham. The genealogy of Jesus includes Rahab as an ancestor. She was a Canaanite. Canaan was a son of Ham. Joseph’s wives were Egyptian, also descendants of Ham.

   Ruth was accepted into the Israelity community because she was willing to follow the God of Israel. This was despite the command not to marry Moabites (she was a Moabite). This means the probibitions that you do find are not about ethnicity but about religious belief. The Hebrew Bible does forbid Hebrews to marry those who don’t follow the God of Israel, and the Christian Bible gives reasons why it’s a bad idea for a serious Christian not to marry someone whose basic values oppose the most important and fundamental beliefs of Christians, but that’s not the same thing.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 7:25 am ¶

2. eric wrote:

   I have very strong opinions on this topic, but all I’ll say for now is this is a very common phenomena still to this day. Much more common then people seem to realize I think

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 9:00 am ¶

3. Charlette wrote:

   My response is to Jeremy Pierec’s claim that it wasn’t about ethnicity then. Well, logic dictates that because they lived in proximity to each other and knew that all of them came from the same god or cluster of gods they were all swarthy in color but the most important difference was the religious aspect unlike the phobic people in america who say they are christians but we all know what the christians did in the name of God.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 11:28 am ¶

4. Biyi wrote:

   Jeremy, your argument of alluding that the “line of Ham” was black has no credibility at all. The argument was first put forward by Mormon Church as well as the Jeovah Witness movement in their interpretaion of Genesis 9 and even though it has been debunked over and over again, it is still being propagated by a mentality that seeks to justify slavery and racism.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 12:32 pm ¶

5. Anony wrote:

   Biyi, “Ham” and “hamitic” had been used by Europeans to refer to black people for a long time before either the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses existed.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 2:44 pm ¶

6. April wrote:

   Hahaha, I love it! Good for her.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 4:23 pm ¶

7. Brad wrote:

   Anony:

   The only reason Ham was used to refer to Africans is because Ham was cursed; and the Europeans perceived black skin as a curse, allowing them to enslave, demean, and brutalize Africans and their mixed-race descendants. However, the whole Ham story is a load of crap.

   That said, the people in the Bible were not blond and blue-eyed. Come on, anyone who thinks that Moses was the first Jew to marry a black-skinned African is either naive or purposefully ignorant. The Jews were in Egypt, a land where people from all over the Ancient world gathered, for centuries.

   Moreover, people continued to move around the world and intermarry afterward. As genetic tests have shown, one of Moses’ brothers made his way to South Africa where he and other Jewish merchant travelers married local women creating the Lemba tribe.

   Finally, I do love the young author’s sister perplexing her racist Sunday school teacher. It would have been nice if the author told her would-be date to go frack himself.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 10:40 pm ¶

8. Kaonashi wrote:

   Um, I know some JWs (some being in my immediate family) and the teachings that Ham was Black in that community is unheard of. Not sure where you are got that piece of misinformation from.

   Posted 15 May 2006 at 10:58 pm ¶

9. Anony wrote:

   Brad:
   I was correcting Biyi’s incorrect attribution of the first use of “hamitic.” Of course its racist psuedo-biblical hogwash, but its very old racist psuedo-biblical hogwash.

   And of course modern racial views have no bearing on the peopling of the Fertile Crescent. Linguistics, archaeology, and population genetics show that lots of very important interaction and intermarriage was going on between the populations of northeast Africa and southwest Asia from prehistory into the modern era.

   Posted 16 May 2006 at 3:50 am ¶

10. Biyi wrote:

    To all:

    Obviously, institutionalized slavery and racism has always used all forms of intellectual arguments to support the “natural reality’ that is slavery and racism. However, I was trying to address the underlying assumption in the article’s statement that Moses married a black woman and as Jeremy alluded to this was because she was a descendant of Ham (Can someone please explain how given linguistic and archeological evidence to support that their skins tone were not that different there are those who still think Moses was white and Mariam was black?). The logic goes Mariam is black descended from Canaan son of Ham who was cursed by Noah, cursed with “blackness” and “servitude”. Some of the earliest Christian argument were published in the late 19th to early 20th century to counter the growing Christian movement against slavery. As I stated these arguments were outlined in the doctrines of Mormons and JW (almost all the other christian denominations subscribed to this perspective but few were as well documented as part of doctrine). These articles are

    Bruce McConkie, Apostle of the Mormon Council of 12, Mormon Doctrine, p. 554, 1958.

    The Golden Age, The Watchtower (now called Awake!), p. 702, 24 July 1929

    A lot of similar misrepresentations are well documented in Fred Price’s Race, Religion and Racism. You can also do a google search for similar slavery-supporting Christian apologetics.

    Lastly, that folks understand that I am equally beef against the other two Abrahamic religions - Islam and Judaism- and their condoning slavery in one fashion of the other… but that is another argument for another day.

    Posted 16 May 2006 at 4:20 pm ¶

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