Hitzonim | Outsiders

This post is my stake in the ground. This post introduces you to the tentative and fallible assumptions that serve as the foundation of my study and writing about the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Scriptures.

What?!

To be more clear: Here I am drawing tentative conclusions from my study and engagement with mostly secondary academic sources examining Biblical texts and the communities who told these stories thousands of years ago. This newsletter is what you see when you pinch your fingers on the smartphone of my brain and zoom out, with an open admission that within any line of study with so much complexity, the scholarly community is bound to be wrong about at least some of the details, and I am certainly wrong about many!

Of course, those doing the work of religious history (how we report on the past), historiography (the study of historical methods and politico-cultural influences on the study of history), Biblical source criticism (the study and disentangling of sources of the Biblical texts), and its application to theology have got a lot of things right, too. But we are quick to tack our findings to the cork board, not chisel them in a rock. Admission of mistakes and commitment to learning is a core value in academic work.

In this moment of deep disenfranchisement with religious affiliation (for good reason), coupled with the continued grip of alt-right politics on the Church and the rise of Christian Nationalism, replete with unchecked antisemitism, I mean it when I say it: This effort is my stake in the ground.

This space is my attempt to articulate a counter narrative to American-style Christianity and religious thought that traffics in greed, power, and certainty. Of these values, when they carry Biblical precedent, it is in the form of the antagonizer. Mutual aid, compassion, care of creation, reparation, communal ritual, justice, trust, vulnerability, being accountable to our ancestors and holding our ancestors to account, abiding law codes to enhance our life, not obligating ourselves to them at the expense of our lives, and finding the sacred in the mundane are the values I find when I look to the historical communities of the Bible.

Did communities then, and do they now, meet those ideals? No.

Are these ideals worth study and pursuit? Yes.