My first thought is "who cares?" If we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, and race doesn't matter, why are we racially profiling Biblical people?
The impetus behind this claim seems to be to somehow discredit art which depicts Christ or other Biblical figures as white, or perhaps the idea in white people's minds that Biblical figures are "like them." Again, who cares? Isn't the whole point of the Bible that Biblical figures are like you and I? For that matter, every culture has depicted Biblical figures as members of their own culture. This is not an attempt to deny the historical lineage of the person, but to make the person more relatable to the viewer. New flash - the purpose of literature and art is not always to depict everything literally.
I won't go through the numerous depictions of Jesus and Mary in art, but here's an article with a small sampling of them.
But the real point of this post is to debunk the claim that there are no white people in the Bible. Skin color is mentioned only a few times in the Bible. The only places I can think of are Jeremiah 13:23 "Can Ethiopians change their skin or leopards their spots?" - presumably referring to the dark color of the skin of Ethiopians - and Song of Solomon 1:5 "I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem." So it would seem we have ample evidence of dark skinned people in the Bible.
However, Song of Solomon 5:10 says "My beloved is all radiant and ruddy distinguished among ten thousand." Ruddy meaning red. Hard to be red when you're black. Furthermore, later in the same chapter, verses 14-15 say "His body is ivory work, encrusted with sapphires. His legs are alabaster columns, set upon bases of gold." Alabaster and Ivory are light colored. My reading of this is that the lovers described in the book are a light skinned or white male and a black female.
Both Esau and David are described as ruddy as well and at least in Esau's case it is describing his hairiness. Did they have red hair? Reddish skin? Were they "white?" Who cares. but it seems at least possible, if not likely.
I guess some of it depends on who you consider to be white. An Aryan, white supremacist Nazi type person would say that only the Aryan race is truly white and all others are inferior. However, we are not Aryans, white supremacists, or Nazis. To contemporary Americans, white generally means of European descent, including Mediterranean cultures and Hispanics. At least that's the way race is considered in government forms and statistics. So let's look at whiteness from that perspective, especially since we're looking at this from a contemporary perspective.
There are Greeks in the Bible. Greece is a European country these days, but even in antiquity, Greeks were descended from various people, including white skinned people, and certainly at least some of them were what we would call "white." But regardless of skin color, Greeks are considered white today.
There are Romans in the Bible. Rome was and is in Italy. Italians are considered white.
There are many references to Tarshish in the Old Testament. The exact location of Tarshish is lost to history, but some scholars think it was in Spain or even Britain. Spanish people are considered white, as are British people.
Lastly there are the Galatians. The Galatians were Celtic people originally of France and the Balkans. Celts and eastern Europeans are considered white.
So yes, Virginia, there were white people in the Bible, even excluding Lot's wife. So stop virtue signalling with incorrect statements about the Bible.
N.B. if you want to discount Italians, Greeks, etc. as being non-white because of the way people were classified in antebellum times, note also that Catholics and Jews were not considered white, regardless of skin color, and so all religious art would get a pass, since they are depicting non-whites (Jews and Catholics), regardless of the color of the skin in the art.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment