In a hastily written diary, Theologians Against Empire, I highlighted and at the same time took for granted a central insight of recent biblical scholarship. The Bible is a product of people who lived under the constant threat and recurring reality of imperial conquest. Because, in college, I simultaneously honed my political views by participating in various anti-imperialist groups and took classes with one of the scholars who has been active in bringing the highlighted insight to the forefront of biblical studies, that basic statement has been the primary way in which I understand the Bible for some time. A recent book discusses some of the issues at stake.
The book in question is In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance, a collection of essays by various biblical scholars who have used ancient imperialism as the primary way to understand the Bible. As such, it offers an excellent introduction to a major movement in biblical studies that challenges some deeply-held assumptions about the Bible. Read in this way, the Bible can either function simply as a historical resource for understanding various dynamics of anti-imperial strategies or as a challenge to religious communities for whom the Bible is a sacred text to take the demands of people suffering under imperial domination seriously and to repent of imperialist arrogance.
A simple look at a map of the Ancient Near East shows that ancient Israel was wedged between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. This basic geographical fact is the starting point for a reconsideration of biblical texts as responses to various forms of imperial violence. Of course, the subsequent history of the Bible has been since the conversion of Constantine largely the history of a text of imperialists, rather than counter-imperialists. The imperialist reading has generally been dominant in American history. The introduction to the volume begins with history of the dual phenomenon of the United States as frequently informally self-identified as a "Christian Nation" and as an imperial nation. Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, cites one blatant example of how these strands have come together in American history:
[President] McKinley explained to a group of clergymen just how he arrived at his decision on American policy: "I walked the floor of the White House at night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night it came to me this way - that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianise them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly."
Between 200,000 and 250,000 Filipino civilians died as a result.
Of course, this fusion of imperial and biblical ideologies was particularly egregious during the Bush administration. Thankfully, we no longer live under an administration that blatantly celebrates imperial ventures, as we did for most of this decade. However, as President Eisenhower warned, the dynamics of the military-industrial-congressional complex have a weight that goes beyond the differences between the two viable political parties. Empire is a fact, with dizzying ethical implications, with which we will have to grapple for some time. This is one reason I think taking a very long view of imperialism is helpful for pushing questions out of the immediate framework of the day-to-day political machinations we react to around here. What the authors of this volume assert is that the Bible, read in its ancient context, is one source for understanding that long view.
Norman Gottwald on Early Israel
In his 1979 book, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of Liberated Israel, Gottwald theorized, based on archeological evidence, that the foundational event of early Israel was not the departure of a group of slaves from Egypt, as recounted in Exodus, but rather a peasant revolt in the Judean highlands. According to this theory, the historical kernel preserved in the Bible would not be the books of Exodus and Joshua, but the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges, "The peasantry ceased in Israel, they ceased until you arose, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel" (Judges 5:7). The feminist cultural critic Mieke Bal, in her book Murder and Difference provides another angle for suspecting that Judges 5 is a subversive core by showing how the revolutionary poem in which a woman, Jael, goes into direct battle is preceded in Judges 4 by a more tamed prose account of the same events, in which Jael defeats the enemy with a ruse. Bal's account shows how a story of female military power in the context could not be simply erased, but was downplayed by providing a frame that literally domesticated that power.
Gottwald does not simply cherry-pick a single biblical verse as historical over against other texts he deems mythic. His main source is an Egyptian diplomatic correspondence known as the Amarna letters, in which there is frequent mention of a rebellious group called the abiru; Gottwald cautiously argues for a connection between this rebellious tribe and the later Hebrews. He furthermore hypothesizes that the Exodus stories arose out the successful overthrow of Egyptian rule in Canaan, an experience which was projected onto stories of deliverance out of Egypt. Based on biblical texts and archeological evidence, Gottwald furthermore asserts that this original revolutionary society managed to sustain egalitarian practices, which were maintained as ideals later in Israelite history as state centralization introduced new social and political hierarchies.
Walter Brueggemann on Israel and Assyria
With this essay, we both move forward in time and shift to a more explicitly theological perspective. Where Gottwald describes anti-imperial strategies from a sociological perspective, Brueggemann upholds the Bible as a template for "faithful imagination," a sense of spirituality conscious both of projection as the basic religious impulse (imagination) and of the ideals that shape and discipline that projection (faith). The ideals to which Brueggemann urges faithfulness are precisely those engendered by anti-imperial struggle. Where most liberals see the violence of tribalism, Brueggemann sees resistance to the violence of imperialism. Brueggemann is dependent on Gottwald for many of his views, but the contrast between the two writers shows how both secularizing and religious readings of the biblical text can emerge from reading the Bible through this anti-imperial lens.
Brueggemann's historical focus is on responses to the Assyrian empire. He notes three moments of direct conflict between Israel/Judah and Assyria: 1. An alliance between Israel and Syria, in which the southern kingdom of Judah did not participate, formed to resist the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III in 734-2 BCE; 2. The assault of the Assyrians under Sargon II in 724-21, which obliterated the northern kingdom of Israel; and 3. an attack by Assyria on Judah, in which Jerusalem withstood a siege, in 705-1 BCE. The two main actors Brueggemann considers in their responses to Assyrian imperial violence are Israelite kings and prophets. Brueggemann contrasts the kings Ahaz and Hezekiah - the former pursued a largely accommodationist policy vis a vis the Assyrian empire, and the biblical writers judge him harshly. Hezekiah, on the other hand, attempted to maintain independence from Assyria and tensions emerge in the biblical authors' assessment of him, given his stand and its ultimate futility. Brueggemann's ultimate sympathy, however, lies with the prophets who denounced imperial violence. Several of his essays exploring prophetic perspectives can be found in A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel's Communal Life.
Amazingly, the book does not have a chapter on the Babylonian empire and its destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 587. Especially odd given that the largest prophetic books, Deutero-Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all were responses to the Babylonian conquest.
Also missing at this point is a consideration of various ways in which biblical writers succumbed to fantasies of an Israelite empire - either through the stories of conquest in the book of Joshua or the reign of Solomon.
Jon Berquist on the Persian Empire
The Persian Empire is especially important for biblical studies, because it is the context of Ezra and Nehemiah, the scribes who first compiled the biblical sources into the collection that would later become fixed as the Bible. Berquist cites a book in his explanation of the violence of Persian religion that looks particularly intruiging: Bruce Lincoln's Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib. Berquist notes how the reconstruction of the Temple and the consolidation of the scriptures were both ambivalent responses to the Persian power, involving layers of collaboration and resistance.
Astonishingly, the book also does not have a chapter on the Hellenistic Empire and the Maccabeean revolts. These omissions tilt the emphasis of the book toward the New Testament - I'm leaving out discussion of three chapters on Matthew, Paul, and Revelation.
John Dominic Crossan on Roman Imperial Theology
As with the ancient imperial forces mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, what the presence of Roman imperialism means is that anything a New Testament writer says about government is not in relation to a democratic system, but to an occupying power. The shift to this context begins with an analysis of Roman theology as the legitimizing ideology of this imperial venture.
Crossan summarizes the Roman imperial theology with the phrase Peace Through Victory, or the sequence Religion, War, Victory, Peace. He shows how the Roman imperial program is specifically theological in the "constituent elements" of Virgil's Aenaeid: the heavenly decree of Rome's rule, its ancient lineage, the prophetic promise, its manifest destiny, and the victorious divinity. Crossan analyzes the material culture of ancient Rome - from coins to architecture - to show how the Roman empire surrounded subjugated peoples with this particular theology. What this imperial theology shows is that it was impossible to speak of any kind of "church/state separation" in the Roman empire, a fact often overlooked when examining New Testament attitudes toward the state.
Roman imperial theology also provides a completely new meaning to such titles as "Son of God" for Jesus:
Before Jesus the Christ ever existed and even if he had never existed, these were the titles of Caesar the Augustus: Divine, Son of God, God, and God from God; Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World. When those titles were taken from him, the Roman emperor, and given to a Jewish peasant, it was a case of either low lampoon or high treason. Since the Roman authorities did not roll over in their togas laughing, we may presume that Pilate, acting for them, got it precisely correct. He publicly, officially, and legally executed Jesus for nonviolent revolution against their imperial power.
Crossan is a prolific writer, his life work is probably best summed up in God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now.
(NB: Crossan was the professor I mentioned in the intro paragraph.)
Richard Horsley on Jesus and Empire
Richard Horsley, the editor of the volume, has long done research on ancient forms of social and political resistance movements as the primary context for understanding the ministry of Jesus, which he first presented in his 1993 book Jesus and the Spiral of Violence. Using cross-cultural resistance studies as his starting point, he shows various forms of passive resistance, perfectly consistent with other resistance movements in the Roman empire, to be at work in the gospels. Many of the miracle stories, in this context, are explained not as evidence of supernatural intervention, but as cultural responses to situations of powerlessness.
Attention to informal forms of resistance to imperial occupation gives a new way of looking at the story of Jesus saying "render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." This statement is recorded as a response to the question of payment of taxes - and remember that this is very much an issue of taxation without representation. Rather than being a story that shows that Jesus approved of social cooperation with imperial powers, Jesus's answer to the question shows a double meaning. To the imperial ear, it sounds like a statement stressing obedience to imperial powers. However, the statement is subversive because everything is God's, not Rome's. Subjugated people often use such double-coded statements to communicate messages to their fellows, while not drawing attention to their passive non-cooperation.
Brigitte Kahl on the Acts of the Apostles
This chapter shows most clearly that the Bible does not (ever, on anything, really) speak with a single voice, as the Acts of the Apostles tries very hard to show that the early Christian movement was not a threat to the imperial status quo. Furthermore, as Acts comes before the letters of Paul in the canonical ordering of the New Testament, it provides a conservative lens for reading Paul, skewing perception toward a more pro-imperial stand than his letters warrant.
Nevertheless, Kahl is able to pin-point tensions within Acts that at least weaken its accommodating stance to the empire. She draws a contrast between the ways in which Acts writes early church history and the historian Eusebius, who wrote a history of the church for the newly converted emperor Constantine. Using Eusebius as an example of a pro-imperialist history of the church, she differentiates Acts from that stance, labelling it a proto-imperialist history of the church. Where Eusebius enthusiastically fuses Christian history and imperial power, Acts simply goes out of its way to present the early Christians as compatible with the empire. Kahl also notes how in the course of showing the early Christians to be in line with Roman power, Acts deflects many problems onto Jewish communities, providing a seed for later theological anti-Semitism. In stark contrast to Acts, Revelation is the most explicitly and uncompromising anti-imperial text of the New Testament, discussed in the final chapter of the book.
While the questions as to (a) whether any of the various solutions the biblical authors proposed in relation to imperialism are viable, (b) whether the use of the Bible by dominant political powers from the conversion of Constantine forward has compromised the Bible's ability to witness to anti-imperialist hopes beyond repair, (c) the details of any historical reconstruction of a context for a biblical text, and (d) the sacred status of the Bible in the present are all open to debate, what I think is indisputable is that attention to the imperial context of biblical texts is crucial for understanding what the biblical authors were up to. Because the Bible records the hopes and fears of a people under constant threat of occupation, whatever ambivalences the biblical authors have on the matter, the Bible remains a witness to anti-imperial struggles, a witness co-opted by imperial power.