In the Name of God: The Bible in the Colonial Discourse of Empire. Edited by C. L. CROUCH and JONATHAN STOKL

Abstract

T his book is a collection of essays on the interpretation of the Bible in the context of Western colonialism and colonialist discourses. The six entries are based on contributions to a meeting by the SBL’s ‘Bible and Empire’ programme unit in London in 2011, all revised and expanded. Yvonne Sherwood examines biblical interpretation in the sixteenth-century Spanish imperial context, comparing and contrasting it with the nineteenth-century context of the British Empire. While the Spanish context involves a variety of contesting interpretations, the British approach is argued to be a simple and straightforward one in the service of the Empire, a ‘telegraph bible’. Maria Ana T. Valdez examines the background to and influence of Esperança de Israel/Spes Israelis by the seventeenth-century Jewish author Menasseh ben Israel. The writing of the book coincides with the supposed discovery of the ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’ in South America and the time when the readmission of Jews to England was being mooted, amidst a certain amount of seventeenth-century eschatological fervour. Valdez points out how the two editions of the book, the original Dutch one by the author who lived in Amsterdam and the English one, were purposefully tailored according to the two differing audiences. Mark Somos looks at how secularization was effected in the seventeenth century by Selden’s Mare Clausum , Hobbes’s Leviathan , and Harrington’s Oceana . Much of the focus is on detecting the style of biblical interpretation used by the authors for their socio-political purposes. Moreover, the author argues that these works contributed towards so-called ‘soft imperialism’ whereby subject peoples could be ruled from a position of assumed superiority and paternalism that would also minimize potential problems of religious conflict. Andrew Mein’s article analyses the interpretation of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38–9 in British nineteenth-century eschatological-oriented discourse, which, while reviled in many quarters, nevertheless had a wide circulation and audience. In this line of interpretation, in the context of imperial uncertainties about Russia (attested also in practice by the Crimean war) the equation was made with Russia, whereas Britain was, through some dubious interpretative practices, seen positively as ‘merchants of Tarshish’ in Ezek. 38:13, with a mission to restrain Gog. All in all, British readers identified with the ‘good’ characters in the Bible, and its own considerable imperial abuses were not a topic of discussion. Hendrik Bosman focuses on a small group of (Dutch-based) Voortrekkers in nineteenth-century South Africa called as Jerusalemgangers who largely perished due to malaria when they tried to walk to Jerusalem. Bosman points out that their focus was on escaping the clasps of the British Empire rather than on an idea of a trek made in response to the Exodus narrative, as portrayed by later national myths about the period. Finally, Hugh Pyper shows how the Bible can also be an unwitting source of anti-colonialist discourse through an examination of connections between Indian and European nationalist narratives and comparisons between the Bible and the Vedas. In the nineteenth century, some in Europe saw the Vedas as more original than the Bible and as having influenced it. Pyper propounds how there was a clearly differing response to this in Britain and in Germany, building on their respective socio-political situations. For Germans, this resulted in the construction of an Aryan background and in exclusion of others, whereas for the British the postulated Aryan heritage served as a unifying concept, also in the service of the Empire. In turn, the developing Indian nationalist movement ‘scripturalized’ the Hindu religion in analogy with the Bible and made it a basis of Indian identity. Considering that the Bible thus served Indian nationalist purposes, one may suggest that its use for resistance by groups experiencing oppression due to that nationalism should be seen as a less than straightforward matter.