Promised Land and Today's Dispossessed

excerpt from Joshua and the Promised Land
by Roy H. May, Jr.

Naim S. Ateek is deeply concerned for the land. His hope -- and what he believes is biblically required -- is "that Palestinians return to share the land of Israel-Palestine." Ateek is Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and pastor of its Arabic-speaking congregation. For him, the question of land is a constant pastoral concern.

Rather than choosing the conquest theme of the Promised Land, he looks to the story of Naboth (1 Kings 21). This text teaches about living in the Promised Land. Like the account of Joshua, this story is part of the Deuteronomistic history of the land. It especially lifts up the land as inheritance. For Ateek, the story of Naboth is relevant because:

The death and dispossession of Naboth and his family has been reenacted thousands of times since the creation of the State of Israel...But it is more than a story of tragedy, since at its heart stands a God who is a God of justice, the God who governs history, who has a long memory, and will not allow injustice to go unchecked forever.

The story's basic teaching is that God requires justice. "Whenever injustice occurred, God intervened to defend the poor, the weak, and the defenseless."

Ateek links this imperative for justice with the problem of land by signaling two key biblical concepts: the land belongs to God; and God finally is not bound to any particular land. Here we find important ethical implications. "Those who want to live on the land, must obey the owner of the land," he writes. Justice and righteousness are to characterize living in the land. One can't do as one pleases. The implications are universal:

The land that God has chosen at one particular time in history for one particular people is now perceived as a paradigm, a model, for God's concern for every people and every land. As God commanded the Israelites to obey God's laws in their life in the land, so God demands the same from all peoples in their lands. God's unequivocal demand that the Israelites not defile or pollute the land with injustice, lest the land thrust them out, becomes a warning to all governments and to the peoples of every land. God requires every human being to live according to the divine standard of righteousness.

Since the whole earth belongs to God (Ps. 24:1), no land, including Israel/Palestine, is intrinsically more holy than another. "The land can, however, become holy to those who put their trust in the God of the whole universe, whose nature does not change -- a God of justice for all, who desires goodness and mercy for all people living in this and every land." (2) Holiness is determined by one's living righteously or justly in the land. For Ateek, ethical living, not a specific place, defines the center of holiness.

In South Africa, black Christian theologians and church leaders have used the Exodus and Promised Land traditions as sources for their fight against apartheid. For Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dutch Reformed pastor Allan Boesak, Exodus is the theological model for their freedom struggle. They identify black Africans with the Israelites in Egypt. They emphasize how God freed them from slavery and gave them a land. "God would give them the land of Canaan, the promised land, the land that flowed with milk and honey. He would do that because God is a God that hears, that sees, that remembers," Archbishop Tutu preached. Most importantly, the archbishop continues, "God takes sides. God isn't neutral. He took the side of slaves, of the oppressed, the victims, and continues to do so even today. God is at the side of the poor, the hungry, the oppressed and victims of injustice." (3) For Archbishop Tutu, this is the central message of the Promised Land stories.

Boesak argues that "the all-surpassing characteristic of Yahweh is [Yahweh's] acts in history as the God of justice and liberation for the sake of those who are weak and oppressed." The Exodus is a living event, "no an isolated happening." Yahweh always demands justice, "not only from the pharaoh who oppressed Israel, but also from the rich and powerful within Israel who will not give justice to the poor." For this reason, Black Theology in South Africa is the search for a totally new social order that "will have to drink deep from the well of African tradition." This is not an impossible dream, Boesak says, because:

all through black history black people have lived through their strong belief in that "land beyond the Jordan," in that reality which is there, beyond the whip and the slavemaster, beyond the poverty and dejection, leaving black children a legacy of hope. (4)

The Promised Land of Canaan is the image of freedom, Boesak is saying. It moves black Africans to struggle for justice.

Finally, from the Americas come voices that also find liberating values in these stories. Jace Weaver, an Oklahoma Cherokee and United Methodist pastor, believes that a biblical model for "Native American/Canaanite liberation" can be found in the account of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 27 and Josh. 17). He explains:

The story illustrates that all, even the most powerless and oppressed of a society, have the right to share equally in the promise of God. It says also that the oppressed must not remain silent or inactive in the face of their oppression: At every turn it is incumbent on them to remind the oppressor of God's promise and to be the heralds of their own salvation. Most important, the story has direct meaning for the story of the Canaanites.

The names of the five daughters were, in fact, the names of five towns in northern Canaan in the land of Hepher. The names were taken from Numbers 26, where The Hepherites were not destroyed or dispossessed, moreover, but formed a religio-political alliance with the Israelites.

The story in Numbers and Joshua is the story of the maintenance of the Hepherites' cultural and territorial integrity -- an integrity that, according to the biblical witness, survived at least until the time of Solomon.

Indians are the Hepherites, Zelophehads' daughters, sharing a god with, and living in the midst of, a foreign people, yet preserving our own identity. (5)

We've already listened to some voices from Latin America. Others, such as Marcelo de Barros Souza of Brazil and José Luis Caravias of Paraguay, also have written extensively on land, theology, and ministry. They see the conquest of Canaan as a liberation movement by poor and landless farmers, much like similar movements in Latin American today:

Liberation from Egypt can be typified as flight from domination by the Canaanite system. The conquest of the land led by Joshua can be typified as struggles in search of economic and political autonomy.

Farmland and a territory to be a people together on the land were the objectives. Barros Souza and Caravias emphasize that there is a difference between "Canaanite" beliefs and "Hebrew" beliefs. These are especially evident in terms of land ownership. The Canaanite god Baal gave support and justification to the big landowners. Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews was different.

Yahweh did not have any specially favored children to give the land to, excluding the majorities. He promised and wanted to give land to all the people equally, without exclusivisms or privileges. For that reason, he sided in favor of the landless and struggled with them to get land.

These authors recognize that the Joshua and Promised Land accounts have been abused as justifications to steal land. They argue that to do so is to read the stories dishonestly and out of context:

In order to understand correctly a text or historical event, we must explore its context. Thus the words of the Bible against the Canaanites, the laws that safeguarded a certain ethnic exclusiveness for Israel, and the whole theology of promised land, only can be understood as weapons for the struggle of poor, landless Hebrews, their identity as a people threatened, and struggling for possession of land. To take these passages and appropriate them in order to dominate and impose one's imperialism is dishonest. (6)

Each of these voices of the dispossessed finds ways to put the Joshua and Promised Land traditions on the side of today's land-needy. These voices are faithful to the biblical texts and reflect re-readings of the past for the sake of the present that emerge from their own reality of needing land. In spite of the many moral questions raised in them, these stories can be reclaimed for the struggle for justice. The voices we have heard capture well the central theological features of these old stories.

Footnotes:

2. Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1989). The various quotations are found, respectively, on pp. 87, 88, 106, 108, 111. (return to text)

3. Desmond Tutu, Esperanza y sufrimiento (Buenos Aires and Grand Rapids: Nueva Creación and William B. Eerdmands Publishing Co., 1988), pp. 49-50. (return to text)

4. Allan Aubrey Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study on Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1977) pp. 19, 20, 151. (return to text)

5. Jace Weaver, "A Biblical Paradigm for Native Liberation," Christianity and Crisis (February 15, 1993), p. 40. (return to text)

6. Marcelo de Barros Souza and José Luis Caravias, Teologia de la Tierra (Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1988), pp. 145, 146, 287. (return to text)

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