Setting vs. Story
Aug 11th, 2009 by ljkim
Sometimes people confuse the setting of the story with the point of the story. So many people think the sexism in Bible = God is sexist or the Bible is sexist. That’s kind of like saying the author of The Color Purple is a racist because there are racist characters or that Jane Austen didn’t think women should be able to own property. And yet you can’t understand the stories apart from their cultural settings… So you wouldn’t understand Naomi and Ruth unless you understand the powerlessness that women held in that culture, or the rise of King David without understanding the violent military world he lived in… In both cases God goes along with the rules of the cultural setting and yet is deeply subversive of it: in Ruth because ultimately a woman is Naomi’s savior, and with David as God ultimately rejects his temple because of the (figurative) blood on David’s hands.
God goes along with the rules of our culture(s) as well. But it would be a mistake to think that what He’s really after amounts to the middle-class dreams we tend to have for ourselves. Naomi got something better than a man to come and save her from her situation, she got Ruth. And Ancient Israel got something better than a warrior ideal. This means that in order to see the good things God actually wants for you, you might need to look beyond the standards and dreams of your culture…
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