Different Differences

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 9th

(enamel plaque depicting Naaman in the Jordan; image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia)

Looking at two of the texts from this week’s lectionary—2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c and Luke 17:11-19—it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the two passages are in conversation with each other. They have several things in common: they both feature leprosy as a plot point, they both center on the healing of that leprosy, they both reference Samaria, and they both funnel people toward religious elites for healing (priests, in Luke, and a prophet, in 2 Kings) in interesting ways. It seems likely that Luke’s narrative is in some kind of intertextual relationship with 2 Kings, even if it’s only that its more literate hearers and readers might have paused to think, “hey wait, that sounds familiar” when they encountered it. There are enough points of contact between the stories that the lectionary puts them together here, asking us to think about them together.

Reading them, though, I’m struck by yet another point of contact and comparison: the complexity of the stories’ underlying social structures. In some sense, this is true of every biblical story; all social structures are complex, and to the extent that those structures show up in writing, we can expect there to be complicated backstories wherever we look. But the dynamics seem especially fraught in these passages, and worth paying attention to. In fact, I’ve come to take the word “Samaria” or “Samaritan” as a cue that a biblical text is about to dive into some especially tricky territory. Often when Samaria or Samaritans are referenced in the bible, it’s because the text is about to surface something ethically complicated or theologically nuanced. The Samaritans and Samaria were often a kind of mirror that were held up, especially by the gospel writers, as a way of seeing themselves and their own traditions—sort of a test subject or externalized self where thought experiments could be carried out with minimal risk.

This might be because “Samaria” and “Samaritans,” for New Testament writers, mapped a whole world of imperial violence, territorial occupation, and messy identity. Samaritans were neighbors to Judeans and also kin; Samaria was both territorially and traditionally related to Judea. But this was a relationship marked by the actions of the Assyrian Empire, seven centuries before Jesus’ day, which conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and intermixed with the local population there. The mixing of peoples is a feature of many places that have experienced conquest and occupation, and Samaria was no different, resulting in the Samaritans—a group of people that thought of themselves as inheritors of the traditions of Israel. But Judeans also thought of themselves (Judeans) as the proper inheritors of that tradition, and resisted the idea that Samaritans had a legitimate claim. Thus they were cousins, rivals, neighbors, and sometime opponents. This is why a reference to Samaria or Samaritans always signals to me that the text is about to dive into complicated territory; just by writing the word, the gospel authors were pulling up a long and complex story.

The passage from 2 Kings is doing the same, centuries before the gospel of Luke, and it’s talking about the effects of imperial violence in very frank terms. It begins with a reference to war, and Naaman’s status as a warrior. Naaman served the king Aram and the Arameans, but the text says that the Arameans were successful due to the actions of Israel’s God—an interesting claim about how God might manipulate human conflict for God’s own purposes. In the conduct of war, a girl of Israel had been taken captive (5:2) and was now serving Naaman’s wife. This is passed over quickly in the text, matter-of-factly, as a way to explain how and why an advocate of Israel’s God was placed within the household of an Aramean military officer, in a position where she could make known the powers of the prophet Elisha. And, for the world described by 2 Kings, a life like the one of the enslaved girl of 5:2 really was a matter-of-fact part of the world. No one would have thought her remarkable. She would have been thought of as unfortunate, certainly, but no one would have been surprised that someone could be enslaved through warfare. Thousands upon thousands of people would have been living in similar circumstances, and no single one of them would have been surprising.

The text of 2 Kings doesn’t say so, and our bibles don’t make this explicit for us, but this is the mechanism by which a lot of the “mixing” between peoples took place. Sometimes (as is imagined by this week’s lectionary text in Jeremiah 29), intermixing took place through marriage, as people from different places and cultures and ethnicities lived together and gradually blended their lives. But in other times, the circumstances were less rosy, and the consequences for people like the girl of 5:2 were more dire. She was captive—enslaved—in a foreign land, subsumed under that land’s customs and practices, and subject to whatever treatment her enslavers decided to give her. The girl’s knowledge of Elisha’s work in Samaria is probably evidence that she held on to the memory and nostalgia of her homeland and its customs. She was in captivity, and (if the text is to be trusted on this) even predisposed to wish for the welfare of her captor, but she still longed for home, even as she was far away.

The passage from Luke 17 depends on its audience knowing something about this reality. When ten people come to Jesus and one of them is specified as a Samaritan, the text is telling us that there is something set-apart and specially-marked about his status as a Samaritan, even before anything else happens. The audience knew that something complicated was afoot there, even before the action commences. As it turns out, the story depends on his special status as a Samaritan, not to show he was deficient in some way, but to show that he alone did the right thing. The reference to his Samaritan-ness serves to set up the reader’s expectations—expectations that he would do the wrong thing—and then the passage inverts those expectations through the telling of the story. For that inversion to work, the reader has to come to the story already holding an understanding of Samaritans as unworthy folk who are unlikely to do the right thing. This is one of many ways in which the bible embeds the biases of its authors, and expects its readers to understand and share them. This story simply doesn’t make much sense if the reader doesn’t already know that the Samaritan is set apart, different, and potentially bad.

By the way, there’s yet another fascinating layer to the passage from 2 Kings 5, and it has to do with the way race was theorized in 19th century America. It was common among white slaveholders to read another passage, Genesis 9:20-27, as an origin story for African people and therefore as a warrant for slavery. This is the passage where Noah gets drunk after the flood, and lies naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, saw him naked, and thus brought a curse—the “curse of Ham”—upon himself and his descendants. Ham’s son was named Canaan, and so the text reads, “Cursed be Canaan, lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers…Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem, and let Canaan be his slave….” This is an etiology—a story of explanation of origins—for Israel’s later conquest and subjugation of the land and people of Canaan. In antiquity the conquest was justifiable, theologically, because of Genesis 9—or so the thinking went. Millennia later, American slaveholders in the 19th century seized on this same story as a justification for their enslavement of African people, and it became understood by them that dark skin was the “curse of Ham,” the way the descendants of Ham and Canaan could be identified. It was a tidy theological excuse for slavery.

But this passage (further on from were the lectionary cuts it off this week) from 2 Kings 5 became a kind of counter-narrative to this story. The exegete William Anderson, who had been enslaved himself, read 2 Kings 5:27 as an origin story for whiteness. Instead of viewing blackness as a degenerate form of whiteness, Anderson viewed blackness as the original form of humanity (based on a reading of Genesis 2:7 where the earth was described as dark) and whiteness as a degenerate or diseased form of it. In the KJV, 5:27 reads that “he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow,” which Anderson interpreted as an explanation that whiteness is acquired and represents a diseased form of humanity. (One of my favorite recent books plays out this argument and others like it in detail; it’s definitely worth buying and reading if you are interested in the ways biblical interpretation intersects with questions of social ethics and justice).

Of course, we live in a time and place where we understand that race is neither a blessing nor a curse, and never a sign of God’s favor or displeasure, but a phenotypical expression of a few genes, as magnified and reinforced by social constructions, often encoding bias and inequality. Race is something we invented to explain ourselves to ourselves, and it doesn’t have anything to do with anyone’s nakedness or drunkenness. But it’s interesting that this passage that is so concerned with difference (Samaria and Samaritans) became so entangled with modern American notions of race and difference. The distinction between Samaritan and Judean in the ancient Levant was constructed on different grounds than the distinction between Black and white in 19th century America, but both appealed to certain biblical narratives to understand themselves and their world.

It’s striking how many biblical texts read this way—both as experiences and as explanations of difference. The bible is substantially made up of people trying to understand their world and their lives, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the things people wrote from those experiences have turned out to have a major role in our thinking about our own world and lives. In thinking about how to interpret these two texts from 2 Kings and Luke today, it’s worth asking: what do these stories help us understand about ourselves and our world?