Text & context
Shaw, Kurt
TEXf & COMTEXT Kurt Shaw according to the Bible, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel killed Naboth and stole his vineyard after the farmer had refused to sell the king his land (1 Kings 21). On the one...
...Well," he stammers to the woman, "Elijah came and cursed Ahab, right...
...The prophets cursed them...
...It killed dozens of nuns, six Jesuit theologians, and thousands of other Christians...
...Said he and all his children would be eaten by dogs, right...
...cried a woman's voice from the shade...
...And how could we have talked about Naboth's motivations without considering the Israelite land-tenure system...
...On the one hand, the story is simple, and I remember my Sunday school teacher explaining it to me, his gray beard trembling with rage...
...Two years at Harvard have molded my Sunday school teacher's anger and Mercedes's sadness into something more ambiguous and honest...
...Stop whining...
...Matthias, a German who knows more Jewish history and Hebrew grammar than your normal gentile, helped us through the rough Hebrew verb forms, the strange idioms, the historical context...
...But over the last two years, I've read the story carefully twice once in a Salva-doran refugee village, and once at Harvard Divinity School and I've found that how we understand it teaches us as much about our own values as about the history of Israel...
...At Harvard, Naboth's story also got us talking...
...Mercedes fought with the Marxist guerrillas during the war, but now walks the countryside "talking about the God of the Poor," as he puts it...
...Yet God did not punish the kings and the poor received no land, no food, no justice...
...As we pieced together the Hebrew text, I thought how Mercedes would love that knowledge...
...But in spite of my new knowledge, I felt something missing from the classroom...
...Several heads nodded agreement...
...At Harvard we examined the inner workings of the text, but in El Salvador the Bible worked on us, transforming us into people who might "do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God" (Micah 6:8...
...to sell the land is to create inequality and to sin against God...
...The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor," smiled Mercedes, perhaps a little sadly, as we walked up the mountain to the small hut he so kindly shared with me...
...When they took my land, they didn't kill me...
...The conversation went on until the shadows lengthened, the wind cooled, and the women and men could return to the fields...
...He studied liberation theology in El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia...
...My friend Mercedes, the organizer of the Bible study, is defensive about God...
...Yet anger and sadness must stand behind the academic facts if we are to listen to the tale and be true to God...
...As Matthias taught me more about Ahab and Jezebel, my fury at their injustice grew not so much because the writers of Kings made me empathize with Naboth, but because I came to see El Salvador reflected in that vineyard...
...The more we read and talked, the more inadequate Mercedes's group seemed to me...
...The books of Kings, especially the legends about Ahab, reflect a crisis in Hebrew life...
...I remembered the woman who had lost her father's farm to the government, how she too thought of the land as a gift of God...
...So King Ahab took Naboth's vineyard and that bastard D'Aubisson took our families' land...
...What do we do...
...I'm luckier than Naboth, I guess," frowned a small man after his wife closed the Bible she had been reading...
...The Spanish translation was appalling...
...We talked about Queen Jezebel and Canaan-ite influences on Israelite politics, and debated how we should understand Elijah's curses...
...When we stepped out into the afternoon sun, no one had recovered her farm, no new revolution had started, and Christ had failed to come down on clouds from heaven to judge the unjust...
...Kurt Shaw studies Bible at Harvard Divinity School...
...Jesus didn't make much justice today, but at least he got us talking...
...And D'Aubisson died of cancer, which isn't quite dogs, but...
...What will God do...
...I don't doubt that the Harvard interpretation was true to the facts, but it is obviously not sufficient...
...Again and again, I have come across verses that would make powerful tools in the hands of my friends in Central America...
...As a dozen Salvadoran refugees and I huddled in the shade of a rusty awning, we asked the same question...
...The Hebrews wrote the books to answer an impossible question: "Why does God withhold his hand...
...The kings oppressed the poor and served other gods...
...But somehow, something was better...
...the Hebrew conveyed Elijah's urgency and anger so much better...
...The land belongs to God, who distributes it equally to all the children of Israel...
...The army killed Archbishop Romero as he said Mass...
...Years after the war, the rich and guilty live on lavish estates or in Miami condos while the poor scratch at barren land...
...Being true to the facts can break down old prejudices about what the Bible means, but obsession with those facts often makes us deaf to the book's commands...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 6
