Siva and Vishnu

[David Salmon]

The Bible is replete with contrasts between light and darkness, beginning
with Genesis 1, in which God created the light, found that it was "good,"
and set it to rule over the darkness.  Genesis is usually attributed to
Moses, who lived c. 1446-1406 B.C. by one system of dating.  Other scholars
attribute the Pentateuch--first five books of the Bible--to several sources
dating between the 5th and 10th centuries B.C.

In Job, a book whose story is variously dated, possibly as late as the exile
c. 6th cent. B.C. (but before it), and definitely recorded after the advent
of iron in the Middle East (Job 19:24), which by the notes I am consulting
is said to have been by 1200 B.C., puts the following into the mouth of
Bildad the Shuite in speaking of the fate of the wicked:

    "The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out;
        the flame of his fire stops burning,
      The light in his tent becomes dark;
        the lamp beside him goes out."  (Job 18:5-6.)

    "The memory of him perishes from the earth;
        he has no name in the land.
      He is driven from light into darkness
        and is banished from the world."  (Job 18:18.)

    "Surely such is the dwelling of an evil man."  (Job 18:21.)

However, the contrast between light and darkness is not racial nor immutably
associated with particular peoples or regions.   I am not aware of any
reference that equates dark skin with evil. Rather, the contrast is between
righteousness and evil, which applies as behavior and beliefs would warrant.

(To justify holding Africans as slaves, American slaveholders used to rely
on Genesis 9:25-27, in which Noah cursed Canaan, his grandson, to be slaves
of his son Shem, because Ham, Canaan's father, had seen Noah's nakedness.
Canaan and his descendants, however, were not black nor located in Africa.)

The RV references seem much more racially focused, although it may be that
the darker indigenous peoples were initially regarded as evil because of
practices that the composers of the RV found morally abhorrent.

David


----- Original Message -----
From: "N. Ganesan" <naga_ganesan at HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK>
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 8:48 AM
Subject: Re: Siva and Vishnu (was: Kinship systems)


> "V. C. Vijayaraghavan" wrote:
>
> >About your "interesting" observation of "black as evil" in the
> >Bible coming from Iran (presumably the racist aryans)-another
> >meaningless speculation- there are two possibilities to satisfy your
> >curiosity- a. Jews and other semites don't need to learn racism from
aryan
> >texts, it is inborn. b. Jews in their sojourn in Egypt learnt it from the
> >Egyptians - after all the Pharoahs loathed the black people in Sudan and
> >southern Egypt and waged exterminatory campaigns against them.
>
> That exactly was my request to the list  a while ago.
> Appreciations for any references (from the listers) where black
> and/or darkness being considered evil in the Egypt of the
> Pharoahs or the Judaic literature from pre-Iranian contact
> periods. Ie., before, say, 600 BCE.
>
> . . . .
>
> Hence my quetion: is this an Indo-Iranian heritage in
> the Bible?
>
> Regards,
> N. Ganesan
>
>