Reading Race, Reading the Bible.

Reading Race, Reading the Bible. By Peter T. Nash. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. xiv and 72 pages. Paper. $6.00.

How far south does the map inside your Bible go? Oddly enough, my Bible maps include Ireland and Denmark but go only as far south as Thebes and, in one insert, Ethiopia. Britannia is not in the Bible; Ethiopia is. In Reading Race, Reading the Bible, Peter Nash examines the ideological moves that shifted the racial center of Christianity north and west from Palestine.

For Nash, a Hebrew Bible and language teacher, these disorienting maps reveal the extent to which Africa has been exorcised from the biblical story. Is this omission accidental or systematic? With dense and well-footnoted research, Nash explores how racism became institutionalized in the West and has been a part of European and American churches and universities for the past four hundred years. Guilty of supposing that nothing good could come from Africa, Euro-American scholars have neglected to follow the Bible's own witness of Israel's ethnic and cultural African roots; Western scholars have also downplayed the fact that Israel's neighbor, the influential Egyptian Dynasty, was an African civilization.

Through this study, Nash hopes to show three things. First, our modern racial prejudices have historical beginnings and are foreign to the Bible. Second, Israel considered itself close cousins to surrounding peoples and not "racially" different even from its enemies, thus removing race as a biblical category. Third, Nash hopes that ancient Israel's status as an Afro-Asian people takes new precedence over the Euro-American tendency to view Israel as "proto-Caucasians." With these goals in mind, the reader can meet the ancient Hebrews anew, appreciating their unique voice as members of their own world.

Though it is a short book, absorbing the full import of Reading Race, Reading the Bible may take multiple readings--a small price to pay for having one's biblical maps redrawn.