Video Series: Communal Culture Episode 1: Eastern vs Western Thinking

⬤Marcia: A woman on a business trip to Africa was shown to her room. To her great confusion, they were setting up a second bed in her room, even though she told them repeatedly she was traveling alone.

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⬤Brian: Shalom! Welcome to Bridges to the Bible! I’m Brian Johnson.

⬤Marcia: And I’m Marcia Johnson.

⬤Brian: This seems rather inconsiderate of them. Why didn’t they give her her own room? What were they thinking?

⬤Marcia: The place that this person was visiting was very communally focused, and so they thought they were being so hospitable to her. In fact, they told her the reason why they were setting up the extra bed was: “Don’t worry honey. We know that you’re traveling alone, and we don’t want you to be lonely, so we’re going to put someone else in here with you.”

⬤Brian: That’s really different than our culture.

⬤Marcia: Sure is.

⬤Brian: This is a series on Biblical culture, focusing on the communal aspects of Biblical culture because their focus is a lot more community focused than ours. You can go to BridgesToTheBible.com to download the episode guide for this lesson, where you can find study notes to follow along, discussion questions, and more.

⬤Marcia: So we’re studying Biblical culture so that we can help get past some of the cultural assumptions that we might bring to scripture, such as this traveler’s assumption that nobody else would be staying in her room. And then we’re also studying Biblical culture so that we can help uncover what is not being said by the Biblical authors, things that they just assumed that we would know were running in the background.

⬤Brian: And their cultural worldview was quite a bit different than ours. So today let’s compare and contrast these cultures, ours and theirs.

⬤Marcia: So the worldview and the Bible comes more from an eastern perspective than our western perspective, and the Israelites were a subset of this eastern perspective; sometimes we refer to it as the Hebraic worldview, in contrast to our modern western mindset. So let’s compare these!

⬤Brian: Yeah, let’s see here, let’s do some role playing and I’ll be the ancient Israelite.

⬤Marcia: So what makes you so qualified Mr. Brian to be playing the role of the eastern mindset?

⬤Brian: Well I just so happen to play an extra in the “Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular!”

⬤Marcia: Do you realize that you just said something that you assumed people would know that you’re talking about Disney World?

⬤Brian: I guess so, and let’s see here, I think, just like I had a costume there, I should have a costume for this. Just like when we had church plays growing up, I’ll throw in a bathroom because that is just like what an ancient Israelite would wear.

⬤Marcia: That’ll be perfect! And I’ll be explaining the modern world view, so as far as my costume, I guess I’m actually all set just the way I am.

⬤Brian: Alright, let’s do this!

⬤Carol: Welcome to World of the Bible! I’m your host Carol Lee, and we have brought someone all the way to our studio today from Galilee in Israel from the first century. Please join me in welcoming Gid’on!

⬤Gid’on: Shalom!

⬤Carol: Thank you for coming this long distance. Please introduce yourself to us.

⬤Gid’on: My name is Gid’on, the son of Yoash, son of Avi-melech. I’m of the tribe of Ephraim. I live in the town of Aphek. I have seven sons and daughters. I have five brothers and sisters.

⬤Carol: Tell me what you do.

⬤Gid’on: Well, I have a vineyard that I tend; it’s between the vineyards of Eliezer and Shimon. Eliezer, he’s married to my —

⬤Carol: Okay, that’s nice, but you know getting back to you; we’re trying to get to know you. For example, tell me what you’re going to be doing when you get back home.

⬤Gid’on: Well, I’ll be dropping by Moshe’s house after pruning some of my vineyard. I had borrowed some tools from him; it’s been a couple days since we’ve talked, and recently he got some new goats, and they make some of the best cheese! So I’m hoping to get a little bit of that, bring it home, and my wife will be waiting. She’ll have dinner waiting. I’ll have some cheese to bring for a part of it. We’ll have a nice long dinner and talk and relax until it gets dark, and that’s when it’s basically time for bed.

⬤Carol: Wow! In contrast, for my meals, I just usually eat on the run, very rushed, and I usually eat by myself. Although, I do once a week try to make a really nice meal for my husband and myself, and we sit and watch the news while we eat it. We do, though, a couple of times, a few times a year, have a nice meal with our whole extended family. Do you see your extended family very much?

⬤Gid’on: Well, my brother lives in the room next door and our other brother next to him, and my cousins are across the courtyard from me, and I see them every day!

⬤Carol: Well, my extended family lives all across the country, and my sons that are grown now have moved into different states, and we only see them about two times a year.

⬤Gid’on: That is so sad! For us, we just build an add-on to our homes as the family grows. The sons add on and the daughters get married and go live with their husbands. For instance, Eliezer – his son is getting married soon, and so he and his son are working to add on a new room to their family estate. And then when they’re all done, his new bride will come and live with them. You know, I was at the village wine press, actually, just a few days ago with Eliezer, and we were talking about the upcoming wedding, and I mentioned to him how my son has started to become quite the musician. And so I was thinking maybe he would be a good fit to be in the wedding to play. And that evening Eliezer and his son and a few others stopped by while we were having dinner and they sat down —

⬤Carol: Wait a minute, that just sounds really rude! You mean, you were eating a nice private dinner in your home, and they just barge on in?

⬤Gid’on: Yeah, it’s a public place. People come, and they just come and go there. The back of the house is what you would call private, I guess.

⬤Carol: I guess we look at our home as really private; in fact, we really like our privacy. We love to build these decks on the back of our house, and we can sit back there and not see anybody else. I guess we really don’t know our neighbors very much.

⬤Gid’on: That’s so sad to be so isolated!

⬤Carol: We’ve lived in the same home for a few years now. We are thinking, though, of selling and moving south. The winters are just so cold, so thinking warmth would be good.

⬤Gid’on: But you said that your sons have moved away, and if you move away, who’s cultivating your land? Are you renting it out?

⬤Carol: Land? We only have this tiny little plot that basically our house fills up.

⬤Gid’on: Oh. Our land we inherit and pass it on from generation to generation. I work at land, my father worked it, his father, etc., and same thing with all of my neighbors. Now, a few years ago, sadly enough, one of our neighbors fell into terrible financial straits and had to sell his land. But thankfully, he had a cousin that came and actually bought it for him, so it could stay in the family. Actually, just last year a Gentile came through and offered to buy my land. He was looking for someone; he liked my vineyard. I felt insulted! It would be like selling part of my family!

⬤Carol: There’s nothing wrong with selling your land. Maybe you could have used the money to buy better land, or maybe some of your own goats.

⬤Gid’on: That is just unthinkable! It’d be like treachery, betraying my family and betraying my father! You know, what happened to this Gentile: he ended up going to another village, looking to buy some land there, and he found this girl there that he was interested in and she and him. So he talked with her father, and her father just flat out refused. He was not interested at all, but… it happened: they got married anyways. And so her father drove them away!

⬤Carol: Oh! That sounds just really harsh!

⬤Gid’on: Harsh? No, she knew better! She should have thought of what this would bring on her family: this brought shame on her family. The only way her father could deal with it was to drive her away, and try to restore some of their family’s honor.

⬤Carol: So what you’re saying is your actions are determined more by what other people think and whether that brings honor or shame. My actions: they’re based on whether what I think is right or wrong. Don’t you have little voices in your head telling you what to do?

⬤Gid’on: No, I’m not really following what you’re saying. My community: that determines, what do they think about this. If my actions bring honor, then I might do it; if it brings shame, that I want to avoid it.

⬤Carol: But shouldn’t this girl have been able to marry whoever she wants? Doesn’t matter what her parents think.

⬤Gid’on: She was under the authority of her father, and she needed to respect that.

⬤Carol: That just sounds so overbearing. I can decide what’s right for me.

⬤Gid’on: You know, everyone is under the authority of somebody else. I’m the patriarch of my family; I have the authority over everyone, but then I still have to defer to the authority of the elders and other leaders in the village. We all defer to the king, and even the king is supposed to defer to God.

⬤Carol: Speaking of God, I’m curious how you approach your faith and if we worship in some similar ways.

⬤Gid’on: Well, my goal is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might. That’s what’s known as the “shema”. I pray this twice a day.

⬤Carol: I love to read my Bible. I probably have six Bibles.

⬤Gid’on: Six!? You must be incredibly wealthy to have six copies of the scriptures! Our village is incredibly blessed: we’ve got an entire copy of scrolls that we keep in our synagogue that we use. But what’s more important is what I’ve got stored here. I’ve memorized from a young age; I’ve got all the way through and memorized the whole thing.

⬤Carol: Unbelievable! I thought memorizing one verse a week was too hard. But I just want to let you know my faith really is important to me: I go to church every Sunday morning and sometimes on Wednesday night too, and every day I start out my day with the Lord I have a little quiet time. And so I’ll read a couple of verses in the scripture and then a little booklet, something encouraging, and then have some time that I pray.

⬤Gid’on: That’s so nice that you and your family can take that time to study in the scriptures in prayer every morning.

⬤Carol: No, they’re doing their thing; this is my quiet time, just reading it to myself and praying quietly.

⬤Gid’on: So you say you read silently? I’ve never heard of such a thing. For me, as my daily rhythm in the scriptures: reciting it, talking about it with others, and we’re in the synagogue. I try to get there multiple times per week that we can open up the scriptures together, read, discuss, and study them, and we pray together.

⬤Carol: So, what you’ve been telling me Gid’on: it sounds like your whole life is pretty much wrapped up in your community. It’s just not that way for me. We kind of do our own thing.

⬤Gid’on: I just can’t really imagine that. For me to have a wonderful family, to have food on the table, to live in harmony with everyone, what more could I ask for?

⬤Carol: Well, Gid’on, it’s been really nice talking to you today. Maybe we can have you back again sometime.

⬤Gid’on: Oh, why thank you! You know you and your husband should come over for dinner tonight. My wife will make a fantastic meal!

⬤Carol: I’m sorry, I’m just too busy.

⬤Gid’on: No, no really! I absolutely insist! You must come! Remember the goat cheese that I mentioned. You could have that.

⬤Carol: No sorry, really I can’t come, but thank you for joining me.

⬤Gid’on: Shalom.

[Oriental music]

⬤Brian: Wow! There are quite a few differences between our culture and theirs: this idea of individualism versus community. It’s quite different! It’s not that you’ve got one or the other other though; there’s a spectrum of it, and you could go even further than the Biblical culture. But this is why community is important. That’s why churches do have this emphasis or at least should have emphasis on providing community, that people aren’t just showing up and leaving, but you should be connecting with other people.

⬤Marcia: Even though I know the eastern perspective is important to understand, I’m a westerner through and through, and so in a proper western way, I want to summarize what we’ve been talking about: the differences between eastern and western cultures, through some proper western bullet points. So we’ve looked at where eastern people find their identity, and it was a lot more based on their community than their individualness of themselves. Their homes and their land: it was a lot more focused on public space with minimal private space. And what motivates their behavior is trying to gain honor and avoid shame, much more than an internal feeling of guilt. Authority, too: we saw that there’s a lot more respect for and acceptance of authority. And some differences in faith: we saw there was a lot more communal engagement in the faith practices.

⬤Brian: Right, and we’ll look at these and more in the coming lessons, in the coming weeks, and look into more detail, but for now, let’s kind of just jump into the Text; just look at a few examples of how this plays out at a high level. One example is that our English word “you” can be singular or plural. In most of the languages, if not all other languages (I’m not sure), they’re two separate words, so you can easily tell.

⬤Marcia: We have “y’all”…

⬤Brian: Yeah, kind of.

⬤Marcia: Or “you’s guys”!

⬤Brian: Yeah, something like that, but that’s us trying to adapt to the fact that we’re lacking it. So when you read the Bible, it’s got two different words in both the Older and the New Testament. So frequently throughout the New Testament, when it’s using “you”, it’s very often plural. That Paul is speaking to the community as a whole. For instance, here’s one example: 1 Corinthians 6:19, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.” So the “you” is plural, but the actual word “temple” is singular. So the ESV (that’s the NIV) – the ESV captures a little bit more accurately here, “Or do you not know (“you” plural) that your body (singular) is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” So you collectively are a singular temple. If you go to that world and you look at what temples looked like, here’s two examples of some Greek temples. Temples were made up of lots of individual blocks, and so imagine a person being each block in the temple. It’s not that each block is a temple. We like to say “my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” – no, you collectively form the temple. Here’s one temple where all the blocks are together; here’s another temple where all the blocks basically are separated and fallen apart. Which temple would you like to be a part of? If you want to be a temple by yourself, that doesn’t really work. You’re a temple because you’re a part of a community.

⬤Marcia: Another scripture example is one that we see on mugs and bumper stickers. Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” So we western individualists read God knows the plans I have for “you” (me, individually), the plans for … to give “you” (me) a future. But we need to look at the context that this was written in too. Who does God have plans for? It’s not a promise for each of us individually. The context is this is written to the tribe of Judah, who’s about to go into exile in Babylon. Very few of the people who heard Jeremiah saying these words were going to ever see their land again. Terrible things were ahead for those individuals, things like King Zedekiah: his children were going to be killed in front of him, his eyes plucked out. He’s going to be taken to Babylon, in prison the rest of his life. This verse did not apply to him individually, but God had great plans for the nation of Israel. So this is a promise to the community, not a promise for each individual.

⬤Brian: So to recap what we’ve talked about today: understand that the Bible is written to individuals in a community, as part of a community but not separate from it. Likewise, understand that there’s this eastern versus western contrast that we’re showing. We’re focusing on community today and for this series, but there’s a lot of other differences as well that we’re just not even talking about, so we’re just ignoring them altogether for now. And finally, the Bible’s written by easterners to easterners. It’s just assuming this more eastern worldview and we need to enter into that in order to understand it and grasp it.

⬤Marcia: So we hope that this session gets you thinking more about how communal Biblical culture was. Such a contrast to our individualistic culture!

⬤Brian: Continue the conversation at BridgesToTheBible.com where you can download the episode guide to this lesson and more. The download includes the notes, discussion questions and more. Tune in next time, where we’re going to look at the concept of honor and shame within Biblical culture. This is just such a foreign concept that it’s still something I struggle with because it is so different than how we view this world. So I hope you will join us, and until next time, SHALOM!

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