The Politics of Interpretation: Understanding Biblical History in Palestinian Rural Culture

Abstract

This article investigates the role of the biblical story in the Palestinian context of cultural and political change. It explores how Palestinian Christians have depicted modern-day Palestinian rural culture as being a continuation of biblical culture. The article explores two different ways of understanding the bible to which this continuation thinking applies: first, when the bible is being read through the eyes of the Palestinian rural community (or ‘the Bible through peasant eyes’, as New Testament scholar Kenneth E. Bailey put it) and secondly, through the eyes of the politically oppressed. To illustrate this, the small Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank serves as a case study. In the post-1967 context, it became important for the inhabitants to portray their village as going back historically to the Ophrah and Ephraim of the bible, thus reimagining their identity as being essentially biblical. This insertion of contemporary Palestinian history into biblical history, and vice versa, is for the inhabitants of Taybeh a way to give scriptural sanction against Zionist constructions and a way to express their theological and cultural belonging to the land. This article demonstrates how their view both relates to and stands in conflict with Western understandings of biblical history, featuring the work of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travellers, missionaries and ethnographers from Europe.