Joseph, the Enslaver

God tells Abraham that his descendants will be “sojourners in a land thatis not theirs and will be servants there…for four hundred years.” (Gen. 15:13)

About a hundred years later, Joseph is sold into slavery and rises to power, resulting in saving his family from the famine. Joseph says twice that God was responsible for this and that his motives were good. (Gen. 45: 5, 45:7, 50:20)

However, other results of Joseph’s rise to power and advice to Pharoah include:

• 20% emergency taxation of the Egyptian farmers for 7 years (Gen. 41:34-36)
• exploitation of these same farmers for the next 7 years, resulting in Pharaoh owning all the money, livestock, and land (Gen. 47:13-23)
• the 20% emergency taxation becoming a standing tax (Gen. 47:24-26)

In other words, Joseph’s counsel (at God’s direction) turned a nation of peasant farmers into a nation of sharecroppers.

One of the puzzles for me in the Exodus story has been the question of why the Egyptian population would have tolerated the long-term massacre of Hebrew boys. Even given different morals and cultural biases, the killing of baby boys is a fairly universal negative.

Reading through Genesis this time, I began to consider the lifestyle of the Egyptian population goes a long way in explaining why they, as a society, would have tollerated the enslavement of the Israelites and eventual slaughtering of the babies.

Jared Diamond, in Collapse, describes the recent killings in Rwanda as having a similar basis. Basically, the impoverished population grew so large that “those whose children went to school in bare feet killed those whose children went to school in shoes.”

From a human perspective, it’s hard to justify those results compared to feeding seventy Hebrews (Gen. 46:27), yet the Bible is clear that Joseph acted at the Spirit’s guidance “for good”.

Do Famines Just Happen?

Famines are mentioned at least five times in Genesis. They play a major role in the setting for several events in what’s depicted as a span of about 200 years.

In all of those times, there is never an indication in the text that the famines were a result of sin.

God Speaks to (poor) Women

Between Genesis and Judges, the only women God speaks to positively are the husbandless or childless.

God talks to Eve in jugdment.

He talks to Sarah when catching her in a lie.

He talks to Hagar, a single mother alone in the desert, in mercy–twice!

Cursed into Poverty

People cursed into poverty in Genesis include…

Cain

Canaan

Esau

Reuben

Simon

Levi

…all of whom were cursed as a result of sins that destroyed their relationships. The curses all involve further loss of relationships.

Esau becomes rich anyway.

The (Biblical) Origins of Wealth

The first time wealth is mentioned in the Bible is when Abraham and Lot are so wealthy that they overuse their resources and their relationship is damaged. The desire for sustained wealth instead of sustained relationship leads Lot to Sodom. (Gen. 13)

The next time wealth is mentioned is when Abraham refuses booty from the Kings of the Plain. I used to think this was because he wanted to glorify God as the source of his wealth. After living in Central Asia, though, I think it was to avoid the entanglements that such a “gift” would bring. (Gen. 14)

The third time wealth is mentioned (Gen. 26), it leads to a break in the relationship between Isaac and Abimelech.

In Genesis 31, it’s wealth, not poverty, that damages Jacob and Laban’s relationship.

In Genesis 32, Jacob gives up his wealth to restore the relationship with Esau.

In general, the relationship problems associated with wealth in Genesis arise from people having too much, not too little.

I’m not sure what this means for our study, but it seems relevant to the immense wealth and resource consumption in the world today combined with such a high number of devastated relationships.

The (Biblical) Origins of Poverty

Although the word “poverty” isn’t used, I think it’s fair to say that it first appears when Cain kills Able. Cain’s punishment includes

• insufficient results from his work
• homelessness, refugee status
• no helpful social relationships (one of Myer’s definitions of poverty in Walking with the Poor)

If this interpretation is accurate, then the first poor person brought poverty upon himself by refusing God’s grace.

What did the first poor person do to relieve his poverty? Built a city: a broken cistern since cities are communities based on need instead of love and require levels of social stratification that exaccerbate poverty.

Socialist, or Levitical?

What kind of government would…

• mandate that all residents pay taxes for religious organizations regardless of their own religious beliefs,
• allow an unchecked appointed body to set taxes without representation from the taxed,
• prohibit the full utilization of resources by land and business owners
• regulate agricultural and technological innovations, including out-0f-hand prohibitions of research projects
• severely limit inheritances
• radically redistribute land, property, and workforces every fifty years
• completely regulate external trade
• set centralized policies for all interest-bearing transactions
• mandate nearly 30% national taxation for projects that directly benefit 8% of the population,
• regulate the sale of land, prohibiting certain classes from buying or selling land,
• mandate property maintenance programs,
• mandate public health programs, including standards of personal hygiene,
• allow only one state religion, practiced fully in only one location,
• prohibit work nearly two months every year, and impose capital punishment for violating the prohibition.

I’ve been spending some time in the Pentateuch, and I’m now convinced that, while capitalism may not be evil, it certainly is not biblical.

Fighting (boxing) Poverty

Chris Jones’s Falling Hard and Thomas Hauser’s A Year at the Fights both take readers through a year in the life of boxing reporters. They both stand well on their own, but make a great set.

Hauser’s veteran take on the New York fight scene has a “been-there, been-fed-up-with-that” attitude that leaves him free to throw his credentials around in taking on boxing commissioners, refs who didn’t intervene when a fighter was killed, and even a boxer who called his opponent “gay”. The last of these is a pretty easy target, given the politically-correct walls professional boxing is constantly battering. (Really, is anyone in the world surprised that an openly-professing Muslim boxer is disinclined to honor homosexuality?) Still, A Year at the Fight brings the perspective of years of hope and disillusionment, and it’s a great introduction everything about professional boxing that doesn’t happen between the gloves and the faces.

Falling Hard is worth reading for exactly the opposite reasons. Jones identifies himself from the start as a rookie journalist assigned his paper’s least-attractive beat: boxing. It’s more a memoir of writing about boxing than about boxing, but I appreciated Jones’ use of language and humor, and his reluctance to indulge in the mockery some sports writers love to poor on people who would probably kill them were the pen not mightier.

I seriously hope that Jones’s editors encourage him to keep his wit and insight in boxing instead of a more literary reporting field.

Wilson J. Humber: basic micros

If you’re familiar with the basic principles of microeconomics and investment, Wilson J. Humber's, Dollars and Sense won’t help you. It’s a basic primer on financial management for people who don’t know anything about it, and who would rather give away money than become rich.

As a financial idiot, I appreciated it more than the Rich Dad/Poor Dad stuff that implies failure to become rich is the result of moral or intellectual deficiencies.

Willa Cather vs. Pearl S. Buck

My Antonia gets full credit for being a story about 19^th-century Midwestern farmers that doesn’t remind me of the Little House on the Prairie books. Willa Cather’s prose didn’t dazzle me, but it fit the tone, and she has some quotable lines. So why didn’t the book move me?

I found myself going back over the characters—all realistic and likeable, or at least sympathetic in some way. I went over the landscape and weather descriptions—all worthy of being painted for the cover of a lesser book. She occasionally condescends to her characters by writing the immigrants’ speech in dialect, but that problem’s too common to destroy a book over.

And then, around page 130, I saw it. First, I was going over these things before I was half-way through the book, so the world she wanted to create wasn’t quite there. Second, that I kept having to remind myself that the first-person character was male.

Willa Cather is not a man. That is a trait shared by many other great writers. With few exceptions, though, the other great women writers remember that they aren’t men and don’t try to write as a male impersonator.

This presumptuous fault stood out especially because I read My Antonia just after finishing The Good Earth, which is also by a female author with a male protagonist. Pearl S. Buck demonstrates quite a bit more insight into the human condition, but I suspect her insights wouldn’t have rung as true if she had written in first person.

My Antonia is billed as a coming-of-age story of a boy in Nebraska. But it’s not. It’s a story of how women wish men would come of age: friendly-like, and respectable, and honorable (with minor, attractive flaws), and no more sexual than a single overly-intense kiss, and no more violent than an occasional bluster and hair rumple. When male authors try to write a female character first-person, you can almost always be assured a sexual fantasyland. The opposite happens in My Antonia. It’s a portrait of a gelding as a young man. She just doesn’t get it.

“It” means the concern for appearance and honor and significance and legacy and power and sex that is part of being male. (Maybe it’s part of being female, too, but I don’t think it’s the same.)

Pearl S. Buck gets it. The Good Earth is a masterpiece, on part with The Grapes of Wrath or Nectar in a Sieve for showing the point of view of the rural poor. Buck treats her characters with compassion and respect, refusing to escape from their problems through irony or other forms of authorial condescension.

It’s tragic how little has changed in Asia since she wrote it. Sure, revolutions have come over and over, along with cars and the Internet, but you could still meet most of the people today. I can’t recommend The Good Earth highly enough.