The People, Not The People
Last week I wrote a little bit about the way Biblical covenant communities work. The heads make an agreement with God and everyone in his group, from then on, abides by that agreement. This happens for those who have no idea what is going on as much as for those who know exactly what is going on.
This past weekend, I was thinking about another area where I tend to think the way everyone around me thinks rather than the way things have been thought of historically, or even globally. That is in the area of family ties or when families get larger, tribes and other kinds of cultural groups.
In the Bible, there are lists of sons who became whole nations. For example, each of the twelve tribes of Israel were originally sons of Jacob, who was a son of Isaac, who was a son of Abraham. Also, each of the other sons of these men fathered sons who went on to become nations. Esau, son of Isaac, became known as Edom (Gen 25:30). From Edom came the nation of Edom that we see later in the OT (Gen 36:16, 17, etc.).
The thing is, most, if not all of the nations in the Bible started this way. Not only that, but I would submit that all nations in the world, before some time in the 19th century, started this way. In Europe, for example, all of Europe is dotted with castles on mountains. These castles housed Lord and ladies who oversaw the people who lived around them. When another group attacked, everyone took refuge in the castle and was protected by the lord of the castle. In what we call Germany today, there were lots and lots of small family units that governed and ruled their own little Germanic states of people. Some were larger than others and these carried more weight than the smaller groups. Others were fiercer and everyone kept their eyes on those guys. In the end, it was the most powerful German state of Prussia, in the late 1800s, that united the smaller states into what we might call Germany today. Even then, because of these smaller family states, the borders continued to shift and move depending on who was in charge and what they wanted. The same is true of all the “nations” in Europe even to this day.
This family group dynamic works in every area of the world and in all of history. In the geographic area, we call China, there are so many different little tribes or ethnic groups that Communist China has had a dickens of a time unifying all of China and making it one nation. The problem is not only because the people are different ethnically, but part of that is that their languages are different, and their histories are different. Other than being genetically Chinese, there is nothing in common, and they don’t necessarily like one another.
The thing where they don’t like one another reminds me of the American Indians. Each year, we Americans celebrate Thanksgiving. This holiday commemorates the Pilgrims being helped by the Wampanoag Indians to establish a settlement in the New World. But the reason the Indians helped the white guys was because the white guys helped them to push their enemies, the Narragansetts, out of the way so that they could be the big cheeses in the area. What the Indians didn’t take into account was that the White folks were coming to take the land away from them. The point here is that there were dozens of small Indian tribes and people groups in New England. They didn’t get along. They usually didn’t speak the same language, and they had very different backgrounds, but what they had in common was that they thought they were the first, the biggest, and the best.
When I lived in Humboldt County, CA I learned that there were five different American Indian tribes living there, Wiyot, Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa. I found a website that said they “lived together sharing a common bond—the environment and their culture.” But from people I spoke to and books I read by tribe members, they hated one another, spoke different languages (that’s right other than signs, they couldn’t communicate), and were constantly at war with one another (when they had anything to do with one another).
One interesting thing I’ve found in noticing all this over the years is that everyone I’ve talked to about the meaning of their name is that their name always means something like, “the people.” And they always have a word for everyone else that means, “not the people.” The Jews have “goi” and “am.” Or “Jew” and “Gentile.” The Romans had “Romans” and “barbarians.” And on and on.
The point of all this is to show that the people groups of the Bible are nothing new. Everyone, overall time, in every place does the same thing. If you mess with one, you’re messing with the whole tribe, clan, family, and/or nation. And when God came to Abram/Abraham and created a covenant with him and all his offspring and everyone they captured or collected over the years, that covenant bound them together into an even tighter knot than they had been before.
In addition, there is no sense of anyone ever being a lone ranger. It isn’t until America in the 1800s that the great individual comes into existence. Today it is common for us to think of being the individual, thinking for ourselves, and being our own man (or woman). But this kind of thinking is unique to us and it really has no place in biblical understanding at all. Yet since this American Cowboy way of reading history has come into existence we tend to read it into everything. The fact is, no one has ever thought this way, except us, and only for the past 150 years or so, and only in the United States.
Image by Gary Chambers from Pixabay