Ethnicity and the Bible

Dan Beecher I don't know if you know this, no interpretation is required with the Bible.

Aaron Higashi Oh, man. I did not know that.

Dan Beecher I've heard it said many times that it just says what it says, and you don't interpret it.

Aaron Higashi Not what McClellan tends to say, but he's not here, so I can say whatever I want. You can say what- It's my show.

Dan Beecher True. Hey, everybody. You're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. I'm Dan Beecher, and there is no Dan McClellan today.

Aaron Higashi Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher In his stead, we've brought in someone possibly better. It's Aaron Higashi. You've been on the show a bunch of times. Hi, Aaron. How are you doing today?

Aaron Higashi I'm so happy to be here. Not better than Dan, but ready to combat misinformation nonetheless.

Dan Beecher And what a combat veteran you are. You've been here a few times. So, just so that the folks at home know, Dr. Higashi, you're currently operating as a nerd-in-resident at the Bible for Normal People. Is that right?

Aaron Higashi That's correct. I make content for them. I've written a couple of commentaries for them. I have meetings with them, Zoom meetings, the most serious kinds of meetings with them.

Dan Beecher The scariest of all the meetings.

Aaron Higashi Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And the least amount of pants of all of the meetings.

Aaron Higashi That's true.

Dan Beecher Especially- The Zoom meeting ...

Aaron Higashi in Phoenix, where it's 110 degrees.

Dan Beecher Good grief. Pants are for prayer. It is hot here, but I can't imagine what it's like in Phoenix. I'm very glad not to be there. Though, I would love to hang out with you.

Aaron Higashi Oh, yeah.

Dan Beecher But you are also the author, we had you on before, but to talk about your book, 1 and 2 Samuel for Normal People.

Aaron Higashi That's right.

Dan Beecher Which you did for the Bible for Normal People.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And you've got another volume for them coming out about 1 and 2 Chronicles.

Aaron Higashi That's right. Hopefully by the end of the summer, 1 and 2 Chronicles for Normal People.

Dan Beecher That's exciting.

Aaron Higashi 1 and 2 Chronicles, some of the most boring books in the Bible, but I try to make them- ... fun and interesting, and maybe even relevant to your life somehow, through the magic of scholarly interpretation.

Dan Beecher Amazing. No, I don't know if you know this, no interpretation is required with the Bible.

Aaron Higashi Oh, man. I did not know that.

Dan Beecher I've heard it said many times that it just says what it says, and you don't interpret it.

Aaron Higashi That's the common wisdom of the YouTube comments section.

Dan Beecher Yes, exactly.

Aaron Higashi Not what McClellan tends to say, but he's not here, so I can say whatever I want. You can say what- It's my show.

Dan Beecher True. All right.

Aaron Higashi Well, I've asked you to come here.

Dan Beecher Dan is off gallivanting, signing books or whatever. But you have graciously agreed to be our resident scholar for this week, and what we decided we would talk about, I'm excited. We've got a couple of different topics. The first one, we're going to talk about, what is that? And the what is that is going to be ethnicity as it pertains to the Hebrew Bible. And I think we're going to stumble on some interesting stuff in that discussion. And then in the latter half of the show, we're going to do, I haven't even come up with what we're going to call the segment, but we're going to do a second segment about practicing safe texts.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah ... that's going to be fun. Stay tuned for that. Maybe it's going to be more Pride Month stuff.

Aaron Higashi You can never have too much.

Dan Beecher Well, again, comment sections would disagree. But that's okay.

Aaron Higashi It's good for engagement.

Dan Beecher We're going to have a good time.

Aaron Higashi That's right.

Dan Beecher And I hope the haters stick around for the end of the show, and then just get furious with us.

Aaron Higashi The more furious, the better.

Dan Beecher But let's get to a what is that?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, ethnicity in the Hebrew. So, if I had to make a list of the top three things that Biblical scholars know about the Bible, or at least think they know about the Bible- Oh, okay ... that lay folks don't necessarily know about the Bible. I don't know what number one would be, but number two or number three, which is going to be our topic for today, would be that the Israelites are Canaanites.

Dan Beecher What? They have their origins- Minds blowing all over the country ...

Aaron Higashi all over, exploding. Biblical scholars, by and large, especially in the past 20 or 30 years, have come to a very common consensus that the Israelites emerged within the land of Canaan, that Israelite ethnicity is a subset of Canaanite ethnicity.

Dan Beecher So, if you want to- That's nuts, because I have read several passages in the Bible where the Israelites are not pleased about the Canaanites.

Aaron Higashi Yes. Huge chunks of the Bible are written specifically for the purpose of showing their displeasure for the Canaanites.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So no, you wouldn't get this impression, and this is why there's such a big difference between what scholars think about this and what everyday lay folks, Bible readers think about this, is because if you just read the Bible, that's not the impression you get at all. The Bible goes way out of its way to demonstrate, over and over again, just how different these two groups of people are.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi But this consensus has formed for a reason, and it gives us an interesting way to look at Biblical text, because now we can look at Biblical texts, and we can ask this question, what does this passage or this story or whatever have to say about Israelite ethnicity?

Dan Beecher Yeah, I guess we don't. So one of the things that we should talk about, and I saw you and I have been corresponding about this, you sent me some very good notes about it, and I saw in it one of the things that we need to talk about is what the word ethnicity means. Now, you used in your notes the word defined, and I think I'm banned from talking about definitions on this show because Dan McClellan is part of this show. But you're not banned from it. So maybe we should talk briefly about what do we mean when we say the word ethnicity? What is an ethnicity?

Aaron Higashi It's a good question. Maybe I can still make Dan happy by referring to several definitions so we don't seem like we're trying to overdetermine this word or anything, but it is an important... I mean, if we're going to talk about ethnicity for a long time, we should have some sense of what we're talking about.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And there are different ways to define ethnicity. Some that are going to be immediately relevant to this conversation and thinking about the Bible. One from Frederick Barth. He says here, I got a quote from him, "Ethnic groups are not defined by the cultural stuff they carry, but by the boundaries they maintain." So the kinds of boundaries that we draw around our community, that's a critical component of ethnicity. A second one here from Anthony Smith, "An ethnic group is a named human population with myths of common ancestry and shared memories."

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi So we think about on the inside of this definition are myths of ancestry and shared memories, true or not, and then on the outside are these really rigid boundaries that help separate the people who have those myths of common ancestry from everybody else. And then a third element- Okay ... that I want to bring in comes from a sociologist, Roger Brubaker, who says we should think of ethnicity not as a thing, but as a process. So let's put those three things together. Ethnicity is a set of shared stories.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You're going to have to help me with all of this.

Aaron Higashi Okay. We're going to make a sandwich here. We have myths of common ancestry for ourselves. We have boundaries drawn around those myths, and then we're working this all out together in a process. Those are the three key elements that we're then going to bring to biblical texts, and we're going to ask of these biblical texts, how do they contribute to these myths of common ancestry? How do they help us draw boundaries around this community? And how can we see this process change over time?

Dan Beecher Yeah. I think if nothing else, those three definitions point out how sort of slippery this concept actually is.

Aaron Higashi Absolutely.

Dan Beecher An ethnicity is not really a thing. Just sort of like when you hear sociologists and social scientists talking about race, and they basically say there isn't race. Races are just a sort of sociological or sometimes even ideological construct.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher What we're not talking about is anything that could be tested with DNA or there could be... There's no hard and fast scientific lines that we can draw that mean anything in the conversation about ethnicity. Is that fair to say?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. It's definitely the domain of the social sciences rather than the hard sciences, so we're not testing any of this in labs or anything like that. But it is nevertheless something that emerges from everyday life.

Dan Beecher Right?

Aaron Higashi As soon as people groups live, whatever they need, whatever kind of work they need to do to survive, whatever kind of art and culture and food they produce, you're well on your way to an ethnicity. And then this really comes to a head when that group encounters another group, and they start to understand the differences.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi We live our lives this way. You over there live your lives that way. And that's when that boundary element starts to come in. And then you can really start talking about these two distinct ethnicities. But I do have to say, ethnicity, I think, and perhaps this is because of my experience as a mixed race person, but I think ethnicity is more real than race.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi I think ethnicity is more organic than race. Ethnicity just emerges from interactions between different people groups, but race was really invented for a specific reason, to classify people, to really facilitate imperialism and- Right ... colonialism, and to facilitate racism. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a great quote that racism is the parent of race, not the other way around. It's racism perceived. There was first a desire to be racist- Right ... and that's what gave rise to the concept of race.

Dan Beecher I think that that's a valid distinction to make, that racism was a motivated idea.

Aaron Higashi Yes. Very much so.

Dan Beecher Or race was a motivated idea, and ethnicity sort of arises out of a cultural experience.

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi I think that's a great description.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, let's talk then about Israel and Canaan and sort of what we're talking about when we say those words. It's funny because you gave me two scriptures that are very interesting. Can we talk about Genesis 10, where we're talking about sort of the lineages of Noah's sons, right?

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Is that what that is?

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then we'll jump to Ezekiel 16. So talk briefly about sort of what Genesis 10 says and why we think it might say that.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. So, this is part of the reason why just casual Bible readers are going to assume that the Israelites and the Canaanites are very distinct people groups. And part of the reason, there are a lot of reasons, but part of the reason is because in Genesis chapter 10, we have the table of nations, and this is where we have these big lists of all these eponymous ancestors. That is, ancestors who are named after the people group that will descend from them.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Aaron Higashi So we have on this list people named like Egypt and Canaan and stuff like that, who are named after their eventual descendants. But we have all these ancestors on this. And one of the things that's really interesting about the table of nations is that Canaan, the ancestor of the Canaanites, is grouped alongside Egyptians- Mm ... and grouped alongside several Mesopotamian groups. So one, that's weird because Egypt and Canaan and Mesopotamia are not anywhere near each other.

Dan Beecher Right. It does seem like the Israelites are surrounding themselves.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. It is kind of strange. But this reflects, it's an argument almost that the Israelites are these people groups who have spent a lot of time dominating them, who have spent a lot of time- Right ... in conflict with them. They're all related. But then Genesis 10 locates the Israelites in an entirely different family- Right ... descended from an entirely different one of Noah's sons. So all those groups are similar, the Egyptians, Canaanites, Mesopotamian, they're all related, but the Israelites are different. They're set apart. They're not like the Egyptians. They're not like the Canaanites. They're not like the Mesopotamians. And so that's part of the reason why, as just a casual Bible reader, you're going to make the assumption, well, they're their own group. They have nothing to do with these other groups.

Dan Beecher Does it feel at all to you like, and this is me speculating obviously, but one wonders if they chose these groups and grouped them together, Canaanites, Egyptians, Mesopotamian, whatever, they just picked all the bad guys in their stories- ... and just said, "They all came from the same lineage." That suspicion I think rings true.

Aaron Higashi Okay.

Dan Beecher There is no other reason.

Aaron Higashi They have no language in common. They don't have any geography in common. They're not overlapping in power at any given time, and they're competing against one another. So they have no genetic relationship. So there's nothing that actually ties them together except that from Israelite perspective, they are frequently antagonists.

Dan Beecher They're jerks.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, that is the common thread- ... for these different groups. But no, in real life, one is a northeastern African country, and one's way over here and one's...

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So, no.

Dan Beecher All right. I like it. The ideology for all the people I don't like.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher For all the people I hate.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. That's a good point.

Dan Beecher Okay. So, what is an Israelite? Maybe help me understand, because here's another trick, and maybe you can help me understand this too. There are words that I encounter a lot, because I don't know if you know this, I do a whole podcast about the Bible- I've heard that ... and I don't know much about it, to be perfectly honest. And I get confused by words like Israelite, Hebrew, Judahite.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And they all seem to be referring to us, like there's an us group in the Hebrew Bible.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I keep struggling to figure out what is meant by what these groups are. Are they distinct?

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Are they the same?

Aaron Higashi I don't know. Yeah, and your confusion is totally reasonable because even different Biblical texts will use them in different ways. So even if you just looked at the Bible and said, "Bible, tell me what these terms mean"- ... you're going to run into trouble sometimes because sometimes they do mean different things. So, anything that's related to Judah is primarily going to be a geographic description- Okay ... of people who live around the region of Judah. But that region is produced by a kingdom occupying the space in southern Canaan. So there is a kingdom there. It becomes synonymous with the region. Later, it's a Persian province.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi Even later still it becomes a province under Greek rule and then Roman rule. And each time the boundaries change a little bit, and so there's a lot of flexibility there. But Israelite is first defined Biblically, if you're reading the Bible left to right in sort of the order that it presents itself- Or right to left if you're in Hebrew, but either way.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Are defined as the sons of Israel, and Israel is- Right ... who Jacob is renamed to. So ostensibly, these are all people who they're part of the same family, who were originally in Canaan, who went down into Egypt, and then in the famous Exodus story, came back out again 400 years later to resettle in the land of Canaan. So the Israelites are the people who had that experience.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi The experience of going down into Egypt and then coming back out again. They're related to one of these 12, 13, 14 tribes, depending on exactly how you count them. They're one of those people.

Dan Beecher Okay. And that- grouping that you just used does seem to mesh very well with the idea, with the sort of the definitions that we talked about of ethnicity.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Which is to say we've got this common ancestry myth idea. They are a group. They are sort of self-contained. They have their boundaries. So, I guess that makes sense, right?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. The difficulty is that, the exodus is a huge part of that myth of common ancestry, that going down into Egypt and coming back out again, except, of course, the exodus never happened.

Dan Beecher Right. And I'm sure- That is a bit of a sticky wicket, isn't it?

Aaron Higashi Yeah. So the exodus as it's described in the Bible, did not happen. We have good archeological evidence that it did not happen. The Bible describes more than two million people coming up out of Egypt to resettle into Canaan. Those are impossible numbers.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi It doesn't look like that number of people or even a tenth that number of people ever migrated from Egypt to Canaan at any of the times that the Bible says that is supposed to have happened. And the Bible contradicts itself on when that was. So, that's an additional problem. So then the question is, well, if this story didn't happen, then what is Israelite ethnicity? If that's the defining feature- Right ... if that's a big part of what's separating Israelites from the surrounding people, what happened instead? And this is where that scholarly consensus comes in.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi That did not happen. Instead, Israelites emerged more gradually, coming into their awareness of themselves as Israelites over the course of several centuries, starting around 1200 or so, at the end of the 13th century BC, and then taking really several centuries beyond that, to establish themselves as self-conscious Israelites who are different from the Canaanites that they grew out of.

Dan Beecher So, yeah. So coming out of the Canaanite ethnicity- Mm-hmm ... but then eventually becoming sort of sworn enemies or whatever of the- Yeah ... of the group from which they emerged. Do we have a sense of how that would've happened or what that would've looked like? I'm guessing what we have is, as you say, a sort of a fictionalized story about being in bondage in Egypt, but- Yes.

Aaron Higashi I mean, that's the big part of it. Remember, again, this is a process and for the ancient Israelites, a big part of that process was the text they produced.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So when we look at the earliest stories in the Hebrew Bible, they go a long way towards helping define who the Israelites are. I'm sure Dan has mentioned before, but the earliest parts in the Hebrew Bible, scholars generally consider to be Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, which is a version of the Exodus story, escaping from Pharaoh, God defeating Pharaoh with waters that have been supernaturally manipulated, and then coming up into or around the region of Canaan, passing by all these other people, right? The text goes out of its way, Exodus 15 goes out of its way to mention these other groups who are in the land who the Israelites are not. They're not the Edomites that they pass by. They're not the Philistines they pass by. They are not the Moabites. They're not Canaanites. They're somebody else, and they've been brought into this land by God, to serve God. So, this is sort of the story, that myth of common ancestry that the rest of the Bible is based on. Now, it's not true archaeologically, we know that this did not happen, at least, in a way that involved a lot of people. But it's a powerful story. And it's such a powerful story that people can then build an identity off of.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I remember the concept of the promised land.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And that was sort of Canaan, right?

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So it seems like at some point that mythos must have come from something, right?

Dan Beecher This idea that we weren't from here, but we took it over. It seems unlikely to me that that came from nothing, that they just made that up out of whole cloth. Do we have any other sources that can shed light on whether they actually did come from somewhere else or go somewhere else and come back to that land or do we have anything on that, or is it just...

Aaron Higashi Part of where it might come from is, and this is kind of a minority opinion amongst biblical scholars, but, it is popular amongst those that I like the most.

Dan Beecher Yeah, the good ones.

Aaron Higashi So it's not the consensus, but, there was a biblical scholar named Norman Gottwald who had this idea that it was really lower class Canaanites.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi So they didn't come from somewhere else, but the idea of Canaan as a promised land flowing with milk and honey that is replete with natural resources just waiting to be used, was the dream of a lower class within Canaan, that was able to essentially revolt against wealthier city states and then take possession of the rest of the land of Canaan. And this helps us sort of explain that idea of this idealized Canaan that these people are coming to inherit. Now they're not coming from outside, but they're coming from relative poverty.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi And this actually does match some of the archeological data a little bit, because while we do have an Israel, something called Israel by the end of the 13th century, starting in the 12th century, we have this just a huge number of relatively poor highland villages that get settled in the middle of Canaan from, if you have a map in front of you, from the middle of the Jezreel Valley down to Hebron. So in that, kind of in the spine of the territory up in the mountains, more than 100 villages over the next couple 100 years, couple centuries are settled, but they're poor villages. Not a lot of people in each of them, certainly not the kind of numbers that get talked about with the Exodus. But there is a redistribution of the population from away from wealthier city-states, down closer to the coast to these highland villages. So there is a social transformation that's happening there, and Norman Gottwald really capitalizes on this and says, well, the best explanation for this is that people with this Israelite identity, who worship this heretofore unknown god, Yahweh, which doesn't appear to originally be a Canaanite deity, they developed a new way of life and separated themselves from the Canaanites. And a lot of it was predicated on this idea that this land of Canaan can be a land flowing with milk and honey, not just for a small group of people, but for all of us.

Dan Beecher Wow, okay. That's interesting. I like that. I guess one of the things that we should talk about is other ways that Israelites sort of differentiated themselves from Canaanites or were different from Canaanites and sort of where those boundaries were drawn, not just physical boundaries, not just geographic boundaries, but like sort of ethnic boundaries.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, and this is where a lot of the laws in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible come in. Many of these laws seem to have roots in a desire to draw very strict boundaries around the Israelite community.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Aaron Higashi So time and time again, in fact, throughout all the major law codes, we have these, "Do not do what the Canaanites do."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Aaron Higashi Exodus 23:24, "Do not follow in their practices."

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi Deuteronomy 18:9, "Don't even ask about their practices."

Dan Beecher Oh.

Aaron Higashi In Leviticus 18, "Do not do as they do." And that's before some of the more famous laws against incest and then against homoerotic practice that gets quoted a lot by people. But the motivation behind a lot of these laws is, don't do what the Canaanites are doing. Be different from them. And what scholars have kind of reasoned that this is sort of an instance of the lady protesting too much, right? You wouldn't need to spend so much time and energy saying, "Don't be like them," if there was a clear distinction between you and them.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi It's in these instances where the slippage between you and them is so possible, so likely.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi You're so accidentally to step over and suddenly become a Canaanite, and that's because there's hardly any difference between these two groups of people.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi Interesting.

Dan Beecher So, it's funny because I've heard Dan say many times on our show that a lot of the laws that are laid out in these passages were not for practice.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher They were there as some sort of marker point.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But they weren't there as a day-to-day enforceable law.

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher And I never really had much sense of why that would even be a thing, but this is a really good reason. Just to create a distinction between us and them.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher We do this, even if we don't do it, but on the books at least- Exactly ... this is a difference between us and them.

Aaron Higashi Right. The on the books is the important part, right?

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi These are primarily priestly groups and scribal groups, so people in positions of relative power, the makers of culture.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And when it comes to it, the enforcers of culture on occasion. So it is important for them because they're the ones who are manufacturing, again, it's a process, it's not a one-and-done thing, but over the course of centuries are manufacturing Israelite identity, and you can do that in a relatively secluded place. You can create these texts, and you could teach these texts to the next generation of scribes and priests, and then anytime these upper-class people interact with lower-class people, in sacrificial practice, for example, they'll remind them, "You are engaging in the sacrifice in the way that you do because you are an Israelite and not a Canaanite."

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi Right.

Dan Beecher "Don't do it."

Aaron Higashi So even without the laws ever necessarily being enforced, their existence amongst producers of culture still has an impact on everyday people. In fact, even some laws that are very difficult to understand at first glance make a lot more sense when we consider them in this way. So, people may be familiar with the law, "Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk."

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi Which is sort of a famous example of a weird-sounding law. What exactly is it getting at? It's often interpreted by Jewish communities today. They go so far as to not have any meat and dairy together at all- Right ... in an effort to avoid having even accidentally boiled a kid in its mother's milk. But there is some reason to think that this was a Canaanite fertility practice of some kind. So this law exists, don't do what the Canaanites did.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Aaron Higashi They did this thing, you don't do that.

Dan Beecher So the Canaanites would have, "Oh, well, if we need to get pregnant, get some of the mother's milk and boil a kid." And kid, in this case, just to be clear, is a baby goat.

Aaron Higashi Yeah. Not a human being. We're not on the episode about human sacrifice, I think Dan already covered that.

Dan Beecher Yeah, we've done that one. We'll probably do it again. But yes.

Aaron Higashi No, as a way of preparing an animal for- Right ... for ritual consumption, yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay. Yeah, that makes way more sense than just as a bizarre food prohibition.

Aaron Higashi Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And we also know the prohibition against eating pork. Sometimes we're able, archaeologically, to identify Israelite sites versus Canaanite sites because of the prohibition on pork.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Aaron Higashi So they've created this almost arbitrary restriction on themselves just for the purpose of differentiating themselves- Oh ... from the Canaanites.

Dan Beecher That right there is a great reason to stay Canaanite, frankly.

Aaron Higashi With bacon as the...

Dan Beecher I'm a huge pork fan myself. I like the pigs. So I suppose, but Dan talks about costly signaling all the time. I guess that's it.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's what we're talking about here, is we don't do X because we are not they.

Aaron Higashi Yes, exactly.

Dan Beecher It does have a very defensive position, doesn't it? Like a posture of just like, "We're not..." Yeah, it feels defensive to say, to craft your entire legal structure based on not being somebody else.

Aaron Higashi Yeah, and there's always tensions here, right? So much of it is designed to draw a sharp line between the Israelites and Canaanites. At the same time, there are whole sections of these law codes that are drawn from other ancient Southwest Asian law codes. In particular, the code of Hammurabi. They'll just copy and paste laws.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi So, there is this weird, we are going to take some of these from other cultures whole cloth, but then these other laws are going to be created for the purpose of... So, there are several motivations operating all at once, and that's- Yeah ... one of the reasons why we have multiple interpretive lenses for these texts, because no one lens is going to capture all this at the same time.

Dan Beecher Of course. So, and some of the laws, there are the silly food laws and whatever, but there were also rules about how Israelites are allowed to interact with Canaanites.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Including marriage and that sort of thing. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, about interethnic marriage?

Aaron Higashi Yeah, so again, something that we find in all the legal codes is a prohibition against intermarriage with Canaanites. Usually also buttressed by commands to commit genocide against the Canaanites, to wipe them all out once you get there.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Fortunately, the Israelites were never actually in a position to commit genocide against the Canaanites. That's not how that actually went down historically. So, hopefully, it looks like this didn't happen in actual practice. Nevertheless, the rhetoric in the texts is very aggressive.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Kill them completely and be sure you don't intermarry with them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi And that intermarriage is another way of creating a boundary around your community. Now, this one's especially difficult. There's always going to be some leakage here, right? Because, again, in actual life, the line between the Israelite and the Canaanite is so very thin, and so it's a very difficult sentiment to enforce. And so all throughout these texts, we have Israelites marrying other people. Famous marriages even, between Moses and Zipporah, who's a Midianite, or David and Maacah, who's from an Aramean city state. So you have all these marriages that are interethnic marriages in the actual narratives of the texts. But the law codes are all very clear, do not intermarry with them, because then you're going to commit idolatry.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi If you intermarry with them, you're going to commit idolatry. And idolatry doesn't really feel like a super relevant concern for us today, but if the primary difference between Israelites and Canaanites is the worship of Yahweh, then to commit idolatry is to stop being an Israelite.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Aaron Higashi To commit idolatry is to become a Canaanite again.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And so there's a lot more riding on this than just preferences of religious practice. There's a lot more riding on this, it would seem to them at least, than just who you happen to marry. This is a desperate, and as you kind of indicated, an embattled attempt to preserve an ethnic distinction- Yeah ... that is so hard to preserve exactly because it's so artificial.

Dan Beecher It gets violent.

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Even though, as you say, there's lots of examples of the interethnic marriage.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher There's also prohibitions that involve death or that have pretty horrific consequences, theoretically.

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Theoretically, yeah. So, you see a lot of those in the Book of Joshua, for example, in these conquest stories where you have the wholesale slaughter of populations like Jericho and Ai.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi And it comes up later in 1 Samuel with the slaughter of the Amalekites. It comes up in Numbers with the slaughter of first the Moabites in Numbers 25, and then it sort of becomes the Midianites in Numbers 31. So yeah, there are a lot of these.

Dan Beecher Sorry, are all of these groups, the Moabites, the Midianites, blah, blah, blah, are all of them considered Canaanites? Is that an umbrella term, or?

Aaron Higashi They could be. Strictly speaking, the Moabites are a little bit southeast of Canaan.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi But a lot of the thinking about Canaanites still ends up applying to the Midianites regardless.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi So there's, again, the boundaries between here are very thin. There'll even be places in the Book of Ruth, for example, where Moabites are incorporated into the line of David. So some of David's ancestors are Moabites. So we're crossing these boundaries all the time. But I think technically the Moabites and the Edomites and some of these other groups, they're outside Canaan proper.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Aaron Higashi But they get treated in some of the same ways.

Dan Beecher Oh, man. We could go on and on about this, but I did promise that we had another segment. So, help me wrap this up just in a way that, is there any takeaway for today from all of this? Because we have seen how many people use some of these passages about no interethnic marriage or all of these things. They could be used in pretty horrific ways in modern times. What are your thoughts? What's a takeaway that we can apply to now?

Aaron Higashi Ethnicity is a very powerful idea. Some of these texts against interethnic marriage were quoted by people who supported bans on interracial marriage in the 20th century. So there's that element to it. A takeaway could be that ethnicity is a very powerful thing and much more complicated than it appears. And there have been some news articles lately that I think really attest to how complicated ethnicity can be. If you've been watching the news the past couple of months, a number of stories have appeared in which people who are voting for Trump, and very harsh immigration policies, have then had their loved ones, their spouses, or their children, arrested by ICE for some number of weeks. And a lot of the comments are about, "Well, how could you possibly vote against your own interests? How could you not know that this was going to happen?" Ethnicity is much more complicated. The person who you depend on, who's inside your boundaries, who you share stories with and shared memories with, those people never seem foreign to you.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi And so the way that the state, in the exercise of its power, is going to define ethnicity is probably going to be different than the way that you define ethnicity. So you think foreigners are people way over there who have very different lives from you, and you think the people in your household who you love and who you depend on, they're natives, they're domestic, they're here with you.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi They're the same ethnicity. So, ethnicity is much more complicated than that.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I don't want to hit the ICE thing too hard, but I have a friend whose family is Cuban, in Florida, and literally their whole thinking was they were Trump fans because they thought that they were immune from what was going to happen to the Venezuelans and to the Mexicans or whatever, because they were Cubans. In a way that I thought, I don't think that Trump and his cohort are actually making the same distinctions that you're making. You're brown in the same way that those people are brown. And I think we're learning that who's drawing the lines makes a big difference in all of this.

Aaron Higashi Yes. Ethnicity is flexible enough that you can have multiple definitions at play at the same time.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi I don't know if we have time for this. There's an instance where this happens in the Bible. I'll try and do this as fast as possible. But I have to talk about it because that's what I did my dissertation on.

Dan Beecher Okay. I like it.

Aaron Higashi In Ezra, chapter 10, there's this terrible incident in which we're later in history now, where the people of Judah, after they've come back after the captivity, have resettled. They've rebuilt Jerusalem. But all these men, these Judean men, Jewish men, have intermarried with foreigners, the peoples of the land. And they see this as a big problem. Ezra thinks this is a threat to the community. And this guy comes to Ezra, this guy named Shecaniah, he comes to Ezra, and he's like, "We need to divorce these foreign women. We need to do it fast. We need to kick them out, and we need to kick out any children that have been had by these foreign women." And then unfortunately, very sadly, this happens then. Ezra forces more than 100 couples to get divorced, and that's what the bulk of Ezra, chapter 10 is, is just a big list of people that he's forced to get divorced. But ironically, Shecaniah's father, a man named Yahiel, he is on that list.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi So Shecaniah has accidentally advocated for his own deportation from the community.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Aaron Higashi And so if this story is to be believed, his father, Yahiel, married a foreign woman. He was found guilty of intermarriage. He was forced to divorce her and send her away with Shecaniah, who is his son.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi So this is a biblical example, a biblical parallel of this thing that we see happening today. There are different definitions of ethnicity in play at the same time, and if you get on the wrong side of the one that the state defines, the one that's going to have the power to discriminate behind it, the bad things can happen.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher It is fascinating to see... I guess that's the danger, right? Because it's a nebulous idea. Because these ideas, there's no solidity to them whatsoever.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The idea can be deployed- Mm-hmm ... in ways that are welcoming and fun and good and- Yes ... and create community and create a sense of shared responsibility.

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Or they can be deployed as a way of excluding and as a way of making sure of... Yeah, it can be a bad thing. It can be used to harm.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think that's the real danger.

Aaron Higashi Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Thank you for that. That was fascinating. I want to keep talking about it forever. Anyway, let's keep going. Let's move on to What Is That? And this What Is That? We're going to take as our jumping off point, a book by one of your teachers. Is that right?

Aaron Higashi Yes.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi Teacher and advisor.

Dan Beecher Talk to us about this book and sort of what it's talking about and what we're talking about here.

Aaron Higashi So I wanted to bring a text into this conversation called "Practicing Safer Texts" by my advisor and professor, Ken Stone. And it's a wonderful book in its own right. But it's about food, sex, and also in one of the chapters in particular about ethnicity and how discussions about food practices and sex practices relate to ethnicity. We've already seen that a little bit in our conversation about Pentateuchal laws and how laws about food and laws about who you can and cannot have sex with get used by Israelites to help them maintain this boundary between them and Canaanites. But "Practicing Safer Texts" by Professor Stone is mainly in response to people who would say that while the Bible does talk a lot about food stuff- Mm-hmm ... when it talks about food stuff, that stuff doesn't really matter anymore.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi It'll tell us what we can and cannot eat. It'll create elaborate laws about food practices. But that stuff is culturally relative. That was specific to them back then. That doesn't matter now. We don't need to do that stuff now. But who will also say the Bible talks a lot about sex stuff. It talks about the kinds of sex we can and cannot have, about the kinds of relationships we can and cannot have. But that stuff still matters.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So you'll find lots and lots of everyday Bible readers, and conservative evangelicals in particular, who know full well that the Bible talks about both these topics, but will only keep one. They don't keep- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher the food stuff.

Aaron Higashi They keep the sex stuff.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Make no mistake. The Bible uses pretty strong language about the food stuff. You know what I mean?

Aaron Higashi Absolutely. The strongest of language.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We're talking about it's an abomination to eat shellfish or whatever. You know what I mean?

Aaron Higashi Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then it uses that same word about some sex act, and like you say, modern readers are more than happy to down shrimp as they're writing a comment about how much they hate Pride Month on- Right ... the internet.

Aaron Higashi Yeah.

Dan Beecher It seems clear to me why these are parallel, but do you have a sense of why the food stuff was able to be jettisoned, but the sex stuff persists?

Aaron Higashi There's a lot of layers to it. One is we start to see some reinterpretation of both these things in the New Testament.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Aaron Higashi But people notice the reinterpretation of the food stuff more.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Aaron Higashi So, there are passages in the New Testament, for example, which really call into question the necessity or maybe the efficacy of some of these food prohibitions. So in Mark 7, there's Jesus, there's a famous saying, "Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from the outside can't defile them?" In reference to a conversation about food, which seems to indicate that you can kind of eat whatever you want. And then, there's a famous vision in Acts chapter 10, where Peter sees all these foods, all these animals, and God says, "Anything that I make clean can't be made unclean." Now, Peter sort of takes this as an encouragement to incorporate Gentiles into the church, but a lot of people who read this take this as a, oh, we can eat anything we want.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi And then you have the big council in Acts 15, which is all these early Christians sort of deciding what parts of the Mosaic law they ought to keep, and they jettison most of the food laws and only end up with a handful, like don't eat foods sacrificed to idols. And don't eat blood or animals that have been strangled, which takes like 100 laws down to three.

Dan Beecher Right.

Aaron Higashi So, we see some of this reinterpretation in the New Testament. So people sort of stay on that tact, right? And because it would be inconvenient for people to continue to take these food laws seriously, they just drop them. They take a lead from what they see in the New Testament, what they perceive to be in the New Testament, and they continue on that tact. They don't notice the way that the New Testament is reinterpreting some things having to do with sexuality. There's a very strong preference for chastity and singleness in the New Testament that often goes unnoticed. People, and by people, I primarily mean straight folks, spend a lot of time romanticizing and finding in the New Testament the celebration of heterosexuality. When in point of fact, there's a lot more celebration of singleness and chastity. Jesus was obviously single. Paul spends a lot of time exhorting singleness and chastity, and preferred that people would be unmarried their entire lives.