Text & context.

According to the Bible, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel killed Naboth and stole his vineyard after the farmer had refused to sell the king his land (1 Kings 21). On the one hand, the story is simple, and I remember my Sunday school teacher explaining it to me, his gray beard trembling with rage. But over the last two years, I've read the story carefully twice - once in a Salvadoran refugee village, and once at Harvard Divinity School - and I've found that how we understand it teaches us as much about our own values as about the history of Israel.

The books of Kings, especially the legends about Ahab, reflect a crisis in Hebrew life. The kings oppressed the poor and served other gods. The prophets cursed them. Yet God did not punish the kings and the poor received no land, no food, no justice. The Hebrews wrote the books to answer an impossible question: "Why does God withhold his hand?"

As a dozen Salvadoran refugees and I huddled in the shade of a rusty awning, we asked the same question. The army killed Archbishop Romero as he said Mass. It killed dozens of nuns, six Jesuit theologians, and thousands of other Christians. Years after the war, the rich and guilty live on lavish estates or in Miami condos while the poor scratch at barren land.

"When they took my land, they didn't kill me. I'm luckier than Naboth, I guess," frowned a small man after his wife closed the Bible she had been reading. Several heads nodded agreement.

"Stop whining!" cried a woman's voice from the shade. "So King Ahab took Naboth's vineyard and that bastard D'Aubisson took our families' land. What do we do? What will God do?"

My friend Mercedes, the organizer of the Bible study is defensive about God. Mercedes fought with the Marxist guerrillas during the war, but now walks the countryside "talking about the God of the Poor," as he puts it.

"Well," he stammers to the woman, "Elijah came and cursed Ahab, right? Said he and all his children would be eaten by dogs, right? And D'Aubisson died of cancer, which isn't quite dogs, but...."

The conversation went on until the shadows lengthened, the wind cooled, and the women and men could return to the fields. When we stepped out into the afternoon sun, no one had recovered her farm, no new revolution had started, and Christ had failed to come down on clouds from heaven to judge the unjust. But somehow, something was better.

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor," smiled Mercedes, perhaps a little sadly, as we walked up the mountain to the small hut he so kindly shared with me. "Jesus didn't make much justice today, but at least he got us talking."

At Harvard, Naboth's story also got us talking. Matthias, a German who knows more Jewish history and Hebrew grammar than your normal gentile, helped us through the rough Hebrew verb forms, the strange idioms, the historical context. The more we read and talked, the more inadequate Mercedes's group seemed to me. The Spanish translation was appalling; the Hebrew conveyed Elijah's urgency and anger so much better. And how could we have talked about Naboth's motivations without considering the Israelite land-tenure system? The land belongs to God, who distributes it equally to all the children of Israel; to sell the land is to create inequality and to sin against God. We talked about Queen Jezebel and Canaanite influences on Israelite politics, and debated how we should understand Elijah's curses. But in spite of my new knowledge, I felt something missing from the classroom.

As we pieced together the Hebrew text, I thought how Mercedes would love that knowledge. I remembered the woman who had lost her father's farm to the government, how she too thought of the land as a gift of God. Again and again, I have come across verses that would make powerful tools in the hands of my friends in Central America.

I don't doubt that the Harvard interpretation was true to the facts, but it is obviously not sufficient. At Harvard we examined the inner workings of the text, but in El Salvador the Bible worked on us, transforming us into people who might "do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God" (Micah 6:8). Being true to the facts can break down old prejudices about what the Bible means, but obsession with those facts often makes us deaf to the book's commands.

As Matthias taught me more about Ahab and Jezebel, my fury at their injustice grew - not so much because the writers of Kings made me empathize with Naboth, but because I came to see El Salvador reflected in that vineyard. Two years at Harvard have molded my Sunday school teacher's anger and Mercedes's sadness into something more ambiguous and honest. Yet anger and sadness must stand behind the academic facts if we are to listen to the tale and be true to God.

Kurt Shaw studies Bible at Harvard Divinity School. He studied liberation theology in El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia.