The Land of Canaan as seen south of Sidon, Lebanon.
“We are the Canaanites. We don’t like the Old Testament.” This, from my friend Diana, a Lebanese whose former husband is a Palestinian.
When I hear the Old Testament, I consider myself part of the “good guys”, the Israelites, God’s chosen people. I had never considered what it must be like to be singled out as part of the “bad guys”, the Baal-worshiping Canaanites who resisted God’s plan for the Holy Land which was, after all, to change the Land of Canaan into the Land of Israel.
The past is so visible in most of the world, something we don’t understand as Americans. Here in Lebanon the centuries of Crusaders, Ottomans, Romans, Byzantine, and Phoenician/Canaanite are jumbled together in buildings and ruins, refusing to be forgotten. The Lebanese are proud of their Canaanite ancestry which brought forth splendid city states like Tyre, produced the first alphabet (without which the Old Testament could not have been written down), and established such extensive trade routes in the Mediterranean that when it was time to escape Persian rule, they went to Tunisia and founded Carthage.
I asked Karen, the woman pastor at my Presbyterian church here what her experience was in preaching the Old Testament to Arabs. She and her husband had been in Damascus for years before moving to Beirut. She said the Damascenes in her congregation there would not listen to the Old Testament at all – simply repudiated it.
Now, this issue was supposed to have been settled in the second century AD. That’s when the Christian Bible was being compiled to include the Old Testament. There was a school of thought that held that the God of the Old Testament was so unlike the God of the New Testament that they were two different Gods. Hence, no reason to include the Old Testament in the canon. As every graduate from Sunday School knows, the Old Testament is read as the backstory to the New Testament which would make very little sense without it.
So what about this backstory? I asked Richard, the pastor of the Baptist church how he dealt with the issue. He immediately said that Christians have no business using Scripture to justify Israel as a Jewish state. He told me that God’s chosen people is not a race, Jewish or otherwise, but the community worshiping the One God. (Presumably this could include Muslims although I don’t think that’s what he meant.) The point he was making was that three thousand years ago the One God was having a tough enough time fending off Baal, Ishtar, Moloch, and other deities of the area that Canaanites, Moabites, and anyone else who believed in the One God was included in the chosen people. The names of such people appear in the Old Testament and as some of Jesus’ forbearers in the New Testament.
But to get to the issue of the land and who has a right to it, Richard said that the whole point of Christianity is that it is a New Covenant. The land deal is off. The promise is of new life, of everything that the Resurrection means. Solving the issue of Palestine/Israel by promises found in Old Testament is pouring new wine into old wine skins.
One of the most eloquent writers on the subject of the Torah and the land is Peter Beinart, a progressive American Jew. His book, The Crisis of Zionism, reminds those who justify Israel’s existence through the Jewish scripture that the gift of the land was always contingent. God expects justice to be done in the land. When the land becomes corrupt and full of violence, God expels his people from the land, just as the prophets warned over and over again. Actually, some of the Biblical phrasing is that the land will “vomit forth” those who defile it — a verb I learned in Arabic this week, strangely enough. It is in this prophetic tradition that Beinart reminds his Jewish readers that God will not tolerate the injustice done to the Palestinians and the land will be taken away again if the Zionists and their American collaborators don’t shape up. When I came back to Lebanon this year I brought several copies of this book as gifts because for some reason it isn’t in the bookstores here.
Personally, I love the Old Testament. I find its human stories of love, betrayal, and discovery so accessible. I find the prophets, especially the Minor Prophets (so-called because their books are short, not unimportant), thrilling in their denunciations of the powerful and in their visions of a just world. I even find the books of Leviticus and Numbers absorbing as historical artifacts, early attempts to integrate the body and spirit. In contrast, how much of Paul’s ranting can a person take? Would Prozac help? Would Prozac have helped Paul? Those Christians in Damascus must have had a fearsome faith to have listened to just the New Testament every week. It would have driven me right back into the arms of Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch for sure.
goingfortheguttural 