Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes

by E. Randolph Richards

  This inner voice is strengthened by the concomitant Western habit of dichotomizing everything, usually into good or bad. In fact, it is more basic than that. We tend to view everything as an “either-or.” Aristotle’s use of syllogisms and, ultimately, the dualism of Descartes have conditioned Westerners to polarize choices into two opposing categories.[6] (Many readers will be trying to decide if we are right or wrong about this!) Eastern thought, influenced by the Tao and Confucius, the yin/yang, tend to strive for harmony rather than distinction, stressing more a both-and perspective rather than an either-or. Thus, I (Randy) teach my sons to be individuals, make up their own minds, stand out from the crowd, stop listening to the group. I punctuate my lesson with an American aphorism: “Take the road less traveled.” My Chinese pastor-friend, by contrast, teaches his sons to live in harmony, to blend in, to listen to what the group is saying. Likewise, he quotes a time-honored Chinese aphorism, “It is the tall poppy that gets cut down.” Both fathers want their children to know what is right, but my sons are to listen to their hearts, and his sons are to listen to their community.

  Because Westerners—especially Americans—assume we should be internally motivated to do the right thing, we also believe we will be internally punished if we don’t. American literature offers a sterling example of the Western assumption that internal guilt will convict a wrongdoer of his crime. In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” an unnamed narrator tells the reader how he killed (for no real reason) the elderly man who lived with him, dismembered him and then buried him under the floorboards of his own bedroom. It is the perfect crime: he leaves no evidence, so he is sure to get away with it. But he is undone by his guilty conscience, which manifests itself in a hallucination that the old man’s heart continues to beat in his ears from beyond the grave. It’s a gruesome illustration, we know. But it makes the point. In the West, we know right from wrong objectively, and we typically assume that our wrongdoings will find us out because our consciences won’t let us rest until we confess.

  Defining Honor/Shame

  Things work differently in shame cultures. In shame cultures, people are more likely to choose right behavior on the basis of what society expects from them. It is not a matter of guilt, nor an inner voice of direction, but outer pressures and opinions that direct a person to behave a certain way.[7] Rules and laws are less a deterrent for bad behavior than the risk of bringing shame on oneself or one’s family. In fact, one should not regret actions that, in the words of Dayanand Pitamber, “have been approved by those considered significant. When a person performs any act in the interest of the community, he is not concerned about the wrongness or rightness of the acts.”[8] If a person commits violence that is approved by the community, then he has no reason to feel shame (and certainly not guilt). A critical value in this sort of culture is preserving “face,” or the honor associated with one’s name. As Duane Elmer notes, the Thai word for being shamed, for losing face, literally means “to tear someone’s face off so they appear ugly before their friends and community.” Likewise, the word among the Shona of Zimbabwe denotes, “to stomp your feet on my name” or “to wipe your feet on my name.”[9] If a person from a shame culture commits a “sin,” he will not likely feel guilty about it if no one else knows, for it is the community (not the individual) that determines whether one has lost face. This may seem unbelievable to many of you. You may think, Is that even right? Surely, the person “deep down inside” feels at least a twinge of guilt. (In our experience, no, they do not.) Paul considered himself “faultless” even though he was persecuting Christians (Phil 3:6). It was only when he was confronted by another that he realized his sin (Acts 9:1-5); this was also the case with Peter (Gal 2:11-14).[10] In a shame culture, it is not the guilty conscience but the community that punishes the offender by shaming him.

  For example, in 1997, a government minister of Malaysia, Ting Chew Peh, hoped to crack down on littering in his country. They put in place a fine of four hundred dollars (U.S.) for those caught tossing rubbish. But that wasn’t the main deterrent. Offenders would be required to pick up trash while wearing a T-shirt that read, “I am a litterbug.” Ting Chew Peh “hoped public shaming would deter others.”[11]

  The risk of shaming can likewise affect the way that entire governments act. After the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, Westerners rushed to help. The hardest-hit region, Aceh, has always protected itself from outsider influence. (Most Westerners would call this isolationism.) In this case, preferences had to be put aside. I (Randy) had never dreamed I would ever set foot in Aceh; yet, within weeks of the tsunami, I was leading medical teams there. Acehnese people were gracious and grateful. After a few months, though, the Acehnese government fretted over how their people would respond to so many foreigners everywhere. They worried the people might conclude their government wasn’t protecting them properly from foreign influence. There was risk of shame. So the Acehnese government demanded that foreigners leave. They didn’t want the foreigners to leave. They didn’t expect them to leave. They made the demand in order to save face, to show that they cared about their people.

  Indonesian vice president Jusuf Kalla needed to show that he honored the wishes of the Acehnese provincial government, so he demanded all foreigners leave the country by March 26, which was three months away. He didn’t actually want the foreigners to leave, nor did he expect them to. Asians understood all this. Malaysian defense minister Najib Razak, speaking for the countries of Southeast Asia, noted the timetable and later commented that foreign aid would remain as long as needed. From his perspective, everyone has saved face, everyone wins and everything is fine.

  Well, not quite everything. Americans didn’t understand. People in the United States were stunned and outraged, asking: How dare they kick us out? Don’t they want us there? America’s government demanded an apology, and a power struggle began. Indonesia wanted and needed us there. If Indonesia stood firm, they would lose aid they desperately needed; if they gave in to the United States, the Acehnese provincial government would lose face. Ultimately, they apologized, to their shaming. Even after the apology, many Americans thought that the Acehnese were ungrateful, which represents a cardinal sin in many Western cultures. No one won.

  To summarize, in an innocence/guilt culture (which includes most Western societies), the laws of society, the rules of the church, local mores and the code of the home are all internalized in the person. The goal is that when a person breaks one of these, her or his conscience will be pricked. In fact, it is hoped that the conscience will discourage the person from breaking the rule in the first place. The battle is fought on the inside. In an honor/shame society, such as that of the Bible and much of the non-Western world today, the driving force is to not bring shame upon yourself, your family, your church, your village, your tribe or even your faith. The determining force is the expectations of your significant others (primarily your family). Their expectations don’t override morals or right/wrong; they actually are the ethical standards. In these cultures, you are shamed when you disappoint those whose expectations matter. “You did wrong”—not by breaking a law and having inner guilt but by failing to meet the expectations of your community. For our discussion here, the point to notice is that the verdict comes not from the inner conscience of the perpetrator but from the external response of his or her group. One’s actions are good or bad depending upon how the community interprets them.

  As is clear from all this, non-Western and Western cultures have a difficult time understanding each other. Western readers of this book likely think the non-Western view of honor is strange and convoluted. Our non-Western friends find us equally confusing. Westerners like to think of ourselves as holding to the moral high ground that is found within ourselves; non-Westerners often view us as insensitive.

  Language and Some Fine Distinctions

  The vocabulary for honor and shame is difficult for Westerners to keep straight, not least because though we still use the terms
honor and shame, we use them differently.

  First, shame is not negative in honor/shame cultures; shaming is. Technically, in these cultures, shame is a good thing: it indicates that you and your community know the proper way to behave.[12] You have a sense of shame; if you didn’t, you would have no shame. You would be shameless. This is different from being shamed. When an older American asks, “Have you no shame?” they mean, “Don’t you know the proper thing to do?” When one is censured for not having a sense of shame, for being shameless, then one is shamed.

  We know that all this can be confusing. But remember that languages tend not to have words for ideas that are not considered important. Since honor/shame isn’t important in English, we are lacking in the words we need. Make no mistake, though: shame is important. It was why the Jewish officials killed Jesus. They didn’t kill him for going around preaching “love one another” or for healing the sick or for performing miracles. They killed him because he had taken their honor—a limited resource (more on that below).

  This all means, of course, that how we view immorality—whether we view it as wrong or as shameful—affects the way we read the Bible. In a landmark essay, theologian Krister Stendahl demonstrated that the introspective conscience of Westerners is alien to the biblical authors.[13] Beginning with Augustine, Christians understood Paul’s conversion as a troubled conscience weighed down by the guilt of sin but transformed by the soothing message of Christ’s forgiveness. Paul “saw the light,” not so much literally as internally. Luther encouraged Western Christians to come to Christ via our own consciences properly convicted from our reading of God’s law. Today, we often skip over Paul’s statement that his life was blameless according to the law before he met Christ (Phil 3:4-6). Paul shows no sign of a troubled conscience before or after his conversion. Yet we don’t know how to have a conversion without inner guilt. Doesn’t Jesus promise a Paraclete (“Advocate”) that will convict the world? Absolutely (Jn 16). But what goes without being said for us is that “conviction” must be internal. In fact, we might (mistakenly) assume that is the only way the Spirit might work. Actually, the Spirit uses both inner conviction (a sense of guilt) and external conviction (a sense of shame). While the ancient world and most of the non-Western world contain honor/shame cultures and the West is made up of innocence/guilt cultures, God can work effectively in both.[14]

  Honor and Shame in the Old Testament

  When you know to look for it, the honor/shame aspect of the cultures of the Bible becomes apparent in many ways. We have enough space to consider only a couple examples. Scholars generally agree that the Holy Spirit convicted biblical characters through external, not internal, voices. A very familiar Old Testament story of how God convicted an unrepentant sinner illustrates well how our assumptions about an introspective conscience can cause us to miss what’s really happening.

  The prophet Nathan was the tool of the Spirit to convict David of his sin with Bathsheba (2 Sam 12). That much we usually get right. Nevertheless, we commonly misread this story because we miss the undercurrent of honor and shame. We typically assume that David was aware of his sin but stubbornly refused to repent. Then, when Nathan confronts David—or, in a sense, tricks him—David’s conscience is pricked, he gives in to his inner conviction and he publicly repents. It is far more likely that David had not given the matter a moment’s thought. Remember, we Westerners tend to be introspective, but biblical characters were generally not. From beginning to end, the entire story of David and Bathsheba is steeped in honor and shame language, and this explains why Western readers often find some parts of the story confusing.

  The way the narrator opens the story is telling: “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem” (2 Sam 11:1).

  David was not where he was supposed to be. He was lounging at the palace, while Joab was doing the kingly role of leading the army. (Joab’s role will come up again.) Already the issue of honor and shame is introduced. David is not acting honorably as king. Then matters get worse. “One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her” (2 Sam 11:2-3).

  Women (then or now) don’t bathe in places where they could be seen publicly. We might assume Bathsheba had been engaged in a ritual Jewish bath, but the text never says, or even suggests, that she was Jewish (her husband was a Hittite).[15] Furthermore, we are unaware of ritual purifications done at night. Since it is evening (remember, David had been in bed), it is likely it was dark and therefore Bathsheba had provided sufficient lighting—sufficient for bathing and sufficient for being seen while bathing. We may assume Bathsheba was aware that her rooftop was visible from the palace, notably from the king’s balcony. In antiquity, people were cognizant of their proximity to the seat of power. Even today, White House offices are ranked by their distance from the Oval Office. We would be unlikely to believe a White House aide who said, “I just stepped out in the hallway to talk. I didn’t realize that the president of the United States walked down this hallway every day at this time!” Likewise, we would be skeptical if Bathsheba asserted, “Oh, I didn’t realize that was the king’s balcony.” We think the story is told in a way to imply she intended to be seen by the king. Her plan works.[16]

  David likes what he sees, so he asks a servant to find out who she is. The servant responds to the king’s question with a question: “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” (2 Sam 11:3 nasb).[17] This sort of response is customary in an honor/shame culture. The servant responded with a question because it would shame the king for a servant to know something that the king doesn’t know. So he informs the king by posing a question, giving David the opportunity to answer, “That’s correct.” Everyone saves face.

  Then David has Bathsheba brought to his palace, where he sleeps with her. Then she goes home. When we find out she’s pregnant, we may be tempted to think, Uh oh. Now David is in trouble. There’s no hiding what he’s done now (2 Sam 11:5). But that’s not really the point. David is the king; he could have paid Uriah for the woman. But David isn’t interested in acquiring Bathsheba as a wife or concubine; he wants to save face.

  Most Westerners will likely misread here. First, we’ll assume a measure of privacy that didn’t exist in the ancient world. David’s adultery with Bathsheba was not a private affair. He asked a servant to find out who the woman was. As soon as the king sent a servant to inquire who the woman was, everyone in the palace would be talking. Then he sent messengers (plural) to bring her to the palace. The entire palace would know that David sent for the wife of Uriah.

  Also, the narrator wants us to know that the real conflict is between David and Uriah. The story quits referring to her as “Bathsheba” and switches to “the wife of Uriah” (“Mrs. Uriah”). In fact, it is quite possible that the narrator never tells us her name. Bathsheba means “daughter of an oath” or probably “daughter of Sheba.” Likely, this term references her appearance and origin—she is from Sheba—rather than her name. The story centers upon Uriah, the named and undisputed victim in the story. The wife of Uriah came, spent one or more nights and then was sent away. (The text pours on shame by saying she was “sent away,” not “she left.”)

  Everyone in the palace knew about it. “The wife of Uriah” is shamed, since David didn’t keep her. When she sends word that she is pregnant, it is public news. Everyone knows. Everyone will also know that David sent for Uriah: “So David sent this word to Joab: ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ And Joab sent him to David” (2 Sam 11:6).

  Now, we may not know why he sent for Uriah, but everyone else would have. David is asking Uriah to let him off the hook. If Uriah comes home and spends one night with his wife, then the baby is “technically” Uriah’s, even though everyone knows o
therwise. Honor would be restored (among the men). Bathsheba may be the unhappy victim—either because she was assaulted originally or, more likely, because she was sent away afterwards. For our purposes here, though, we should note David’s concern is not whether adultery is objectively right or wrong. He doesn’t appear to be nursing a guilty conscience. While in our Western culture, a “guilty conscience” can go without being said, in David’s culture, honor and shame did not need to be stated overtly. The hints and innuendos were sufficient. David’s concern was not soothing a guilty conscience but protecting his honor as king.

  It is quite likely that Uriah had already heard the gossip by the time he returned home. Supplies were constantly flowing between the city and the army. Everyone wanted news from home. If Uriah had no friend or servants in the city to fill him in—which was unlikely, since his house was so prominently located—he would have found out what was going on somehow. Uriah was no messenger or courier; he was a soldier. Kings did not summon random soldiers. Before you keep that appointment, you would want to know why. If the king intended to execute you, you would want to know so that you could fail to show up for the appointment. In any case, it is clear from the story that Uriah finds out what’s up before he sees David: “When Uriah came to him, David asked him how Joab was, how the soldiers were and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house and wash your feet.’ So Uriah left the palace, and a gift from the king was sent after him” (2 Sam. 11:7-8).