Joel Baden and Tisa Wenger discuss colonial narratives, indigenous theology, and the downsides of going to a “Promised Land” in Deuteronomy 26:1-11. The text is appointed for Thanksgiving Day (USA), in Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Where You Start the Story (Thanksgiving U.S.A.)
Voiceover Voice:
The Lord is giving you this land as an inheritance and taking possession of it. Well, whose land was it before?
Helena Martin:
This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study.
Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.
This is a special episode for Thanksgiving Day—and the last episode for Year C. Here to discuss the text is Joel Baden, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Center for Continuing Education, and Tisa Wenger, Associate Professor of American Religious History. This was the pair we had for our very first episode, and then by total coincidence we scheduled them for this episode, too. So that appropriately wraps up our first year.
They’re discussing Deuteronomy 26:1-11, which is appointed for Thanksgiving Day in Year C. Here’s the text.
Helena Martin:
[Deuteronomy 26:1-11]
When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.” You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
Joel Baden:
Deuteronomy 26 opens with a command for the Israelites to bring gifts of their first fruits when they enter the land, and to sort of recite a summary of what’s often described as sort of God’s salvific acts, as they present this offering to their local priest. Tisa, when we were looking at this, I think that we were struck by, not the content of the statement that the Israelis are supposed to make, this famous “my father was a wandering Aramean,” but rather the way that it’s framed at both the beginning, and the end, particularly the beginning which starts, “when you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it and settle in it,” which sort of presents it as if it’s just an open land for you to come walk right into.
Tisa Wenger:
Yes, that’s right. And coming to it as I do as a historian of American religion and also someone who works in indigenous studies, I see this, “the Lord is giving you this land as an inheritance and taking possession of it.” Well, whose land was it before? There were people there before and this passage and others like it was in fact, used by Puritans coming to America as justification for taking this land. They put themselves in the place of the Israelites.
Joel Baden:
Right. So we know, according to the Bible’s own story, that the land they’re coming to is full of people.
Tisa Wenger:
Is full of people.
Joel Baden:
Absolutely full of people who have been living there for basically forever, and in come the Israelites with their claim to the land. And of course, what the Bible is saying is, God has given this to you, and in effect, by necessity taken it from the local inhabitants.
Tisa Wenger:
That’s right. And so when any group of people since then have claimed the mantle of being the chosen people, as the Puritans who I referenced earlier also did, they can use that as justification for violence against the people that are already there.
Joel Baden:
It’s interesting. So often in so many scenarios, people put themselves obviously into biblical stories.
Tisa Wenger:
Yeah.
Joel Baden:
And the exodus story, you know, more than any other, I would think, except for maybe David and David and Goliath. But when we put ourselves into the exodus story as Israel being redeemed and saved and brought out of Egypt, very rarely do we continue in the story and think about, well what happens when Israel actually comes into the land that they were promised? They sort of become the oppressive force for the people who had been there before. So there’s a question of where we put ourselves in the story and where we cut the story off as we’re telling it.
Tisa Wenger:
Yeah, absolutely. And few people want to put themselves into the story as the Canaanites.
Joel Baden:
But there are people who do, right? The Native American community, at least some readers, some scholars have brought this up and said, you know, this exodus story as it keeps going is really not so good for us.
Tisa Wenger:
Well, and they’ve put themselves into the story as the Canaanites only because in fact, they were placed in that role by the arriving settlers, Puritans and others who put themselves in the role of the Israelites.
Joel Baden:
Right. So, it’s interesting. What reads like a very celebratory text can in fact, come out, depending on your perspective, something that could be, can be an oppressive text.
Tisa Wenger:
Right. And of course, as we read through this text, the Israelites are saying, “the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer.” So, they were the oppressed and so it’s a story that’s usually read and is, you know, a story of salvation. God’s saving us. God taking us out of this situation of oppression and putting us in a land flowing with milk and honey. But you’re absolutely right, it all depends on where you start the story and from whose perspective you’re reading it.
Joel Baden:
And there’s something so particular also about the fact that they’re supposed to bring first fruits of the land.
Tisa Wenger:
Yes.
Joel Baden:
Like the first fruits once they’ve arrived.
Tisa Wenger:
Yes.
Joel Baden:
As if the land hadn’t been producing for the people who were there before.
Tisa Wenger:
Yes. And most texts have multiple erasures. So we’re just identifying one erasure here.
Joel Baden:
Oh absolutely. And on the other side of it, actually isn’t an erasure but a sort of unexpected, maybe inclusion. Which is that at the end of the text it says once you have sort of said the thing and brought your fruits, then you together with the Levites, that is the local priests and the aliens or strangers who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house. So right there, the notion that the stranger is going to celebrate with you and what they’re celebrating is the bounty that the Lord has given you and your house. We can certainly start by sort of saying who are the strangers in this scenario? There are lots of possibilities of sort of general people, groups, and individuals who fit that kind of description in the Bible. But often, especially in the history that will follow the Book of Deuteronomy in Joshua and even more so in Judges, strangers are often remnants of exactly that Canaanite population that was supposed to be wiped away.
Tisa Wenger:
So, the indigenous people in fact are marked as strangers.
Joel Baden:
Right.
Tisa Wenger:
There might be included in that category of strangers people who were not the original Canaanites.
Joel Baden:
Right. Absolutely. But the original Canaanites are probably in there also. But I think that what struck us most strongly when we were reading this passage was the question of, what does it mean to say that the stranger who resides among you shall celebrate? Not, can. Not, is allowed to. But, will, right? This is one of the few times that the stranger is forced to participate.
Tisa Wenger:
There’s a real ambivalence there because on the one hand, it seems to be a kind of inclusion of the stranger and the stranger is invited in to celebrate.
Joel Baden:
It’s very nice. It’s got a Thanksgiving kind of feel to it, right? We’re celebrating with our native friends.
Tisa Wenger:
Right. And of course when you put it that way, we have to think about the historical erasers of the traditional Thanksgiving narrative.
Joel Baden:
Of course.
Tisa Wenger:
Which makes it appear as if the native people, the Wampanoag in the case of the traditional Thanksgiving story, were just happy to receive these new white settlers. When in fact we know the history was much more fraught and complicated and violent than that.
Joel Baden:
And here too.
Tisa Wenger:
And here too.
Joel Baden:
Here too we’re going to have what we know is going to be intense violence, at least even according to the biblical narrative. And then, you know, we’re going to all sit down and celebrate with the first fruits of our harvest. Of our harvest, right – Israel’s harvest. So, there is this notion of, isn’t this so nice? The positive spin. We’re being welcoming. We’re being inclusive. Everybody’s part of the same, we’re including them in our story, right? We’re bringing everybody together.
Tisa Wenger:
But yet the strangers, who include the Canaanites, are being forced to celebrate on the Israelites terms. And they’re being forced to celebrate the narrative of the Israelites, which in fact erases their original presence on the land.
Joel Baden:
Right. So, is there a sense then that what’s happening is sort of a forced assimilation, which I think is true generally of the stranger, right? They’re welcome but there’s a few things that we really want them to be doing in order to fit in. It’s got a little post-colonial mimicry to it. That we’re enforcing our own practices and our own story. Right? Where is the Canaanite story here?
Tisa Wenger:
But it’s one thing to force assimilation on immigrants, which we can of course problematize as such, but it’s another level of erasure to force assimilation on the original indigenous population of the land. As if they were strangers, right? As if they were the immigrants and the new arrivals.
Joel Baden:
Yeah.
Tisa Wenger:
As if the land had been empty.
Joel Baden:
Right. So in both the beginning and the end here, there’s a sort of a conceptual evacuation of the original inhabitants of Canaan. There is the triumphant salvific entry of Israel into the land and in the text. It’s all about celebrating. Rejoicing. Rejoicing before the Lord. But I think that what we’re focusing on here is what that means in terms of what’s being taken away. And who’s being not just marginalized, but actually removed from the story altogether.
Helena Martin:
Thanks for listening. And thank you, Professors Baden and Wenger, for officially closing out our first year of Chapter, Verse, and Season.
For more Bible study resources, check out YaleBibleStudy.org. Videos, study guides, discussion questions: it’s all free. That’s YaleBibleStudy.org. And follow us on Twitter: @BibleYale.
Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. Mixing on today’s episode and our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.
We’ll be back on Monday for a new year of conversations from Chapter, Verse, and Season.
Book of the Bible:
Deuteronomy
Guests
Text
New Revised Standard Version Bible
Copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Credits
Host and Executive Producer: Helena Martin
Production Manager: Kelly Morrissey
Creator and Managing Editor: Joel Baden
Assistant Producer: Aidan Stoddart
Music: Calvin Linderman
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