Moses Married a Black Woman: Modern American Receptions of the Cushite Wife of Moses
Americans overwhelmingly assume that Moses married a Black woman. Using sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article highlights interpretations of Moses’s marriage to the Cushite woman in Numbers 12. Utilising cultural-critical reception history—that biblical interpretation is c...
| Subtitles: | Unnamed and Uncredited: Anonymous Figures in the Biblical World |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies
2022
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| In: |
Journal for interdisciplinary biblical studies (JIBS)
Year: 2022, Volume: 4, Issue: 2, Pages: 66-88 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Moses
/ Race
/ Bible. Numeri 12
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| IxTheo Classification: | HB Old Testament HD Early Judaism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Americans overwhelmingly assume that Moses married a Black woman. Using sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article highlights interpretations of Moses’s marriage to the Cushite woman in Numbers 12. Utilising cultural-critical reception history—that biblical interpretation is culturally conditioned—readers in the United States contrast a Black wife with an assumedly white Moses and Miriam and therefore display an assumption of a racial binary at work in their contemporary societies. In some cases, the name Tharbis is utilised as part of a post-biblical tradition that Moses acquired a war-bride in his early days as an Egyptian military leader. In three parts, the article first discusses nineteenth century associations between a Black wife and a white Miriam, followed by several examples of readers using "Moses Married a Black Woman," or, as I call it, "Mosaic miscegenation" in their social and intellectual spaces. Readers call upon Moses’s marriage to a Black woman to address their contemporary social issues. Tharbis makes a come-back with twentieth-century novels that lead up to the 1956 Hollywood film The Ten Commandments. Whether named or not, the wife of Moses, mentioned briefly in Numbers, serves as a touchstone on which Americans project their anxieties about abolition and inter-racial marriage. |
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| ISSN: | 2633-0695 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal for interdisciplinary biblical studies (JIBS)
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.17613/xhgz-er18 |