See also: Friendly Debate Advice for Christian Nationalists, Classic Tales, The Good Book, More of the Good Book, Doors & . . ., Malign Social Contagions; also Kevin Macdonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, here and here, as well as Kathryn S.’s “Fortune of the Field Shall Cast from forth His Chariot.”
In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest Protestant denomination, voted to apologize for slavery and “lingering racism.” This apology led Sam Francis to write an article criticizing the apology. Francis didn’t argue for slavery in his article; he pointed out that by the lights of the Bible, which the members of the SBC purport to follow, neither slavery or racism is a sin.
In 2017 the SBC condemned the Alt Right, which had become a genuine political movement which arose due to political concerns during the 2016 election. In 2021 the SBC’s convention was roiled by racial issues; especially contentious was the denomination’s leftward drift and acceptance of Critical Race Theory, itself part of the malign social contagion of Negro Worship.
The Southern Baptist Convention is sensitive to racial issues because the denomination developed after a split from other Baptists in the polarized environment which led to the United States’ Civil War. In the 1970s the SBC was part of the conservative reaction to the liberal excesses of the 1960s. It helped provide voters and supporters for the Reagan administration as well as other conservatives. Since the 1970s, however, the believers in “civil rights” and students of Black Studies programs have seized the cultural mainstream, making the SBC’s earlier conservativism and even earlier support for slavery problematic.
The Bible, which religious denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention purport to believe in, is a book filled with racial reality, however, with all that implies, including racial conflict and differences in outcomes. The Bible’s racial realism starts in Genesis, with the story of Noah’s Ark.
Noah’s Ark, Race, and Darwinism
The flood is described in Genesis, chapters six through nine. Noah receives a call from Divine Providence to build an ark. Noah is informed by the Almighty that while he and his family are righteous, the rest of humanity is wicked and will be destroyed by a great flood. Noah builds his Ark for himself, his family, and two of every kind of animal. The flood comes, the Ark floats on the waters, and after some time Noah releases birds to see if the waters have subsided and land has returned. Eventually the Ark comes to rest on Mount Ararat, where Noah builds an altar. His sons and their wives then repopulate the Earth. Later, Noah plants a vineyard for wine, and becomes an alcoholic. While drunk, his son Ham doesn’t cover Noah’s nakedness. (Exactly what this means is still debated.) Ham and his progeny are cursed by Noah, after he sobers up, to be the servants of the other brothers and their progeny.
This is a retelling of one of the oldest stories ever recorded. An earlier version of the story is found on Tablet XI in an ancient Sumerian poem called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh’s story contains many of the same elements, including a bird being released to determine if floodwaters have subsided and an altar being built afterwards.
There is probably some historical truth to both stories. The flood was not global, though. There is some evidence that changing hydrology caused the Black Sea to expand around the time that the Early Farmers were building farms and settlements in the region. This flood would have been an extremely traumatic event for the people who experienced it, and the story would have been passed down orally long before it was written down. There is also a possibility that the story of the flood is a combined account of more ordinary floods in Mesopotamia where people took to “arks” with their families and two of every kind of domestic animal.
The differences between the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah are considerable, though. Gilgamesh is merely a story of survival. The story of Noah is also a depiction of racial reality with an unintentional and Darwinian exploration of alcoholism.
The first vineyards were planted somewhere in the Caucus Mountains, near the Black Sea and Mount Ararat. Alcoholism followed shortly thereafter. The first alcoholics would have been negatively selected for in the region very early on. The rate of alcoholism today increases the further one gets from the location of the first vineyards. In the Old World, eople from lands far from the eastern shore of the Black Sea — Ireland, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and so on — have problems with alcohol, but still function well. In the New World, alcohol destroyed the Indians.
Noah’s story also depicts racial differences. All the people described in it are white, but they are different enough for there to be sub-races that were recognizable to Genesis’ writer. The story of Noah’s three sons — Japheth, Shem, and Ham — mythologically explains the origins of the three sub-races in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
- Japheth corresponds to the Indo-Europeans who were in Anatolia, Greece, and points northward and westward during the Bronze Age. Some of the languages which would have been spoken at the time were an early form of Greek, Hittite, and Luwian, the language of Troy.
- Shem corresponds to the Semitic peoples in Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, and Arabia. The languages spoken there during the Bronze Age were Akkadian, Aramaic, and Canaanite — a mutually intelligible group of dialects which included Hebrew and Phoenician.
- Ham corresponds to the people of Egypt and the northeast coast of Africa, and it includes the Canaanites, who were not related to Abraham. (There is some inconsistency here, admittedly. It could be that the “sons of Ham” are Egyptians and anyone else in conflict with the Hebrews who were not directly related.) The most important language of this group is Ancient Egyptian. The Bible paints the sons of Ham in a negative light. Although the Egyptians created a great civilization, they were easily exploited by other groups, such as the Hebrews and Greeks. The Egyptians expanded and created a great empire, but they didn’t expand in the truly dynamic way of the Phoenicians, Greeks, or others. What we are seeing in the “curse of Ham” is an exploration in mythical form of differences in outcomes between groups.
This interpretation is the standard view through the lens of European Christianity. Arab Muslims thought that the Greeks, along with the Hebrews, Arabs, Akkadians, and so on were the sons of Shem and that the Turks were the sons of Japheth.
The story of Noah’s sons reflects the understanding of someone whose knowledge is limited to the groups in the Eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, the people of this region did have a large impact on the populations of Europe in ancient times. This will be further explained below.
The Eastern Mediterranean, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Spread of Early Farmers and Indo-Europeans into Europe
Civilization, and all of its associated problems, arose in the Fertile Crescent and greater Eastern Mediterranean region. There, the local hunter-gatherers had wild plants and animals that could be domesticated. This includes the two key plants — wheat and barley — as well as cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys. From the perspective of the plants, one could make the case that wheat and barley domesticated the group of humans that became the Early Farmers. Then as now, the descendants of the Early Farmers labor to build irrigation ditches, which help the crops to grow, and walls and fences to keep grazing animals out. They also designed new farming implements to expand those plants’ reproductive success.
Agriculture is difficult to spread from group to group. The Early Farmers’ practices evolved by means of natural selection. These practices included the foresight to store seeds, plow the ground, dig irrigation ditches, and so on. The first farmers had to resist the temptation to eat the seeds for the following year’s crop in the early spring, just when the supplies were lowest and the people hungriest.
When missionaries and busybodies attempted to spread agriculture to hunter-gatherers in more recent times, they were always disappointed. Many Indians, for example, would slaughter and eat their beasts of burden and the seed corn over the course of a single orgy. DNA studies have determined that agriculture did not spread along with the Early Farmers across different groups. All whites who have ancestors who farmed are partially descended from the Early Farmers who lived in the Fertile Crescent during the Neolithic period.[1]
With a steady supply of food, the Early Farmers were able to increase their population through high birth rates. The tribes which remained hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia were displaced by Early Farmers in ancient times in a process which would have been similar to whites displacing the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas later.
The Early Farmers spread from the Fertile Crescent to Anatolia and then to Europe during the Neolithic age — starting more than 8,000 years ago. In southern Europe, they mixed with Western Hunter-Gatherers who were already there, but only to a small degree. The expansion of the Early Farmers in that region was mostly, but not entirely, a displacement of the Hunter-Gatherers. In northern Europe, the Early Farmers interbred with the Western Hunter-Gatherers more and displaced them less.
The easy spread of the Early Farmers westwads into Europe, especially its southern part, was due to an accident of climate and geography. It is easier to travel by sea than by land, and southern Europe has a long coastline that is easy to reach from Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent by boat. Additionally, it is easiest to spread agriculture along an east-west axis, where the climate is similar and the growing seasons and daylight hours are the same. The climate in the region is roughly the same from Persia in the east to Iberia in the west. The Indo-Europeans conquered Europe after it had been settled by Early Farmers in the south, and a more mixed population of Early Farmers and Western Hunter-Gatherers in the north, so they were capturing preexisting settlements with an ability to produce large amounts of food.
The Indo-Europeans were comprised of two groups of hunter-gatherers (Eastern Hunter-Gatherers and Caucasus Hunter-Gathers) who also had approximately a quarter admixture of Early Farmer DNA. Researchers today call them the Yamnaya Culture. This is merely a politically-correct term for who were once called Aryans. They were close enough to the Early Farmers to benefit from the rise of agriculture, but just far enough away to not be displaced by them.
The Indo-Europeans likely expanded from two places. The consensus is that they started out from the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea. There is also a minority view that they got their start in Anatolia. These two views could be compatible. One group of Indo-Europeans could have left the main group in Anatolia and then moved into the virgin territory of the Pontic Steppe, and then expanded outward from there.
Either way, it is unquestionable that they expanded. In the Old World they went as far north and west as Iceland, and as far south and east as Sri Lanka. Their ability to expand was due to two unique strengths: an evolutionary adaptation to be able to digest milk into adulthood, allowing them to settle grasslands and mountain ranges with their goats and cattle; and the intelligence to combine emerging technologies, which made them unbeatable warriors.
The most important piece of military technology at that time was the chariot, comprised of a team of domesticated horses pulling a lightweight wheeled cart. The early Indo-Europeans didn’t ride horses during the Bronze Age because horses hadn’t yet been selectively bred to carry a human adult carrying weapons and armor. The wheel is usually seen as a basic invention — hence the expression “don’t reinvent the wheel” — but the wheel can only exist when connected to an axle, which is itself an advanced technology that must do several things at once. An axle must be strong enough to support the load being carried and thin enough to accommodate a wheel that can then rotate around it. The Indo-Europeans were taller, able to travel in war bands along with milk-producing animals that they used for food, and they had a technological edge.
It has been consistently shown that genetics contribute to behavior. In Europe society took on increasing individualist traits, probably from the admixture of the three aforementioned genetic communities. The Europeans would go on to produce scientists, statesmen, explorers, and other notables. Their individualist culture also meant they could pick the best men for a job, meaning that governments, armies, business firms, and other institutions could enormously increase their effectiveness while cooperating seamlessly.
Individualism verses Patrilineal Clans
One of the problems that the Middle East has in terms of political organizing is that the region’s societies are based on patrilineal clans. There are plenty of rules of reciprocity and fair play within a clan, but completely different rules apply to those outside the clan. This is called amoral familism by anthropologists and was first described in the book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1955) by Edward C. Banfield.
The Bible provides a perfect example of how a patrilineal clan system works, as well as its pitfalls. In Genesis, Abraham is married to Sarah, who is Abraham’s half-sister. Sarah has a difficult time conceiving, so she offers her Egyptian handmaid to her husband and Ishmael is born. Sarah seethes with jealousy. Eventually, Hagar and Ishmael are cast aside after she bears a son of her own, Isaac. After Sarah dies, Abraham marries a woman named Keturah. According to some traditions Keturah is a daughter of the Japheth group, and thus is Indo-European. Abraham has six sons by her. Daughters are not mentioned, but there likely were some.
Abraham eventually gives his sons by Keturah gifts and send them east, where they disappear from the Bible and enter the realm of legend, such as by assimilating with the Phoenicians (possibly) or joining Ulysses on his odyssey (unlikely).
The story of Abraham’s progeny shifts to Isaac, the only child of Abraham and Sarah. Genesis, Chapter 24 reads:
Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh:
And I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac.
The servant returns to Ur and meets Rebecca, and a marriage is arranged. Rebecca is the daughter of Bethuel, who is the son of Abraham’s brother, Nahor.
This is an example of cousin marriage based on patrilineal clans. On a large scale it is a policy of extreme ethnonationalistic exclusion. Abraham’s other sons are cast out entirely. One can see the anger and the feuds which can easily follow in such a family arrangement.
For example, The Book of Obadiah has no moral instruction; it is only a tirade against the Edomites, the descendants of Abraham’s grandson Esau, who was cheated in various ways by his brother Jacob. The Edomites refuse to assist Jacob’s descendants in a war. In The Book of Ezra, we see the development of Jews into what they are today. Prior to that book the characters in the Bible are Hebrews and Israelites, but not modern Jews. The Jews are descendants of Jerusalem’s political and economic elite who return after the Babylonian conquest. They are unable to reintegrate with those of their kinsmen who were not deported.
In present-day Lebanon, which has a genetic and cultural history that is very similar to that of Abraham’s family, the men of one town will shoot at men from another town for reasons that none of them can articulate.
The Philistines, an Indo-European Männerbund
The Philistines are the major villain in much of the Old Testament, and there are many battles and wars recorded between them and the kingdoms of Israel/Judea. They are first mentioned in the Bible in Genesis, Chapter 21. Most scholars think it is an anachronism. While the Bible has some good moral instruction, as history it is less reliable. The Philistines appear in Canaan after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, when the settled cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were overrun by the Sea People. It is possible that the story of the Trojan War comes from this time.
What is certain is that the Sea People undertook a series of aggressive and victorious military campaigns against the settled civilizations of the Late Bronze Age. The Hittites vanished as an empire after the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Egyptians were terribly weakened. It is speculated that there was a vast economic downturn in the region, as well as considerable internal problems that helped the Sea People to cause such havoc.
During that downturn, groups of Europeans from as far west as Sardinia, as well as from Greece and the Aegean Islands, were able to conduct spectacular hit-and-run attacks after building technologically advanced ships flying black sails. It is also possible that they had developed iron weapons as well. Iron is harder than bronze and it can be found everywhere. The only thing needed to smelt iron as opposed to bronze is a hotter furnace. Bronze also requires two metals, copper and tin. Acquiring both metals demanded long supply routes to reach the Eastern Mediterranean. Using iron gave the Sea People a significant military advantage.
Since many of the languages of the Eastern Mediterranean have been rediscovered and their clay tablets and hieroglyphics translated, we can learn about the Bible’s events through the eyes of peoples other than the Hebrews. Ramses III’s tomb contains hieroglyphics that mention the Philistines, claiming that the Philistines are defeated by the Pharaoh (he never loses in the Egyptian records). After they are “defeated,” they are settled in Canaan, where they occupy five cities: Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron, and Gath. The archeological and historical records don’t clearly show which town was predominant. Some scholars favor Gath, while others favor Gaza.
The Philistines first genuinely appear in the Bible in Judges, at a time when Canaan was politically disorganized: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25 KJV). Judges describes a Bronze Age “dark age,” so it corresponds to what was going on elsewhere during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. In the context of collapsing populations, general disorder, and a military band of warriors on the prowl, the Egyptian Pharaoh would have found it practical to settle a Männerbund in a buffer zone such as Canaan.
Kevin Macdonald writes in his excellent book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition that
. . . a basic unit of Indo-European culture was the Männerbund, an all-male war band that set out to achieve fame and fortune by conquering other territories. Also, there is no evidence that these Indo-European cultures eradicated the peoples whom they dominated; they used their position to extract services from them via servitude or some more mitigated status comparable to medieval European serfdom. Females would have been taken as mates and males would have been useful for labor. In the long run, upward mobility would be possible for males of the conquered group (e.g., those with military talent), and barriers to intermarriage would gradually ease, resulting in a mixed population. Moreover, steppe cultures were highly sex-typed, with males dominating burials, deities, and kinship terminology. (p. 19)
Archeologists have applied the lights of science to the Philistines, and they find that the Philistine’s earliest bones contain DNA which originates in Southern Europe. The Bible says that the Philistines came from “Caphtor” (Crete), so they are Indo-Europeans (Japheth). It also says that they were children of Ham (Egyptians). The story of the Philistines in the tomb of Ramses III shows that they were the Sea Peoples who first invaded Egypt, so the contradiction can be resolved with a full account of the Philistines’ history.
The newer skeletons in Philistines’ graves show more local Canaanite DNA, thereby indicating high rates of intermarriage with the locals. The Philistines also brought pigs with them to Canaan. DNA analysis of the pigs’ bones show that they, too, originated in southern Europe. The feral pig populations in modern-day occupied Palestine are descended from the Philistines’ pigs.
Archeologists have also found that
[t]he appearance of Aegean and Canaanite jugs and pots side-by-side were also complemented by Canaanite pots at the same locations. The evidence clearly shows that although the Philistines may have violently conquered Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, Gaza, and Ekron, they did not drive out the native Canaanite population. The archeological evidence also demonstrates that settlement patterns were not unified at each city; there was great variation in each city of the region that would become known as Philistia.[2]
It is uncertain what language the Philistines spoke. We know that the name for a Philistine leader was saran (plural seranim). This corresponds with the Hittite “tarwanis” and the Greek “tyrannus.” The name Goliath is of Indo-European origin. Additionally, the Philistines practiced the Indo-European custom of individual combat in battle. The story of Goliath calling out to the Israelites for one-on-one combat is like the story of the one-on-one fight between Hector and Achilles. It is also certain that the Israelites and Philistines had no trouble communicating. This means that it is likely the Philistines had adopted the local Canaanite language over time.
There are parallels with the Philistine Indo-European Männerbund in other places. In France, a Männerbund of Viking “sea people” conquered Normandy. There they adopted Christianity, took French women as wives, and replaced their Norse language with French. In Northern Europe, the Männerbund of the Teutonic Knights established themselves among the Baltic Prussians. They unofficially took Old Prussian wives, but they dropped the Old Prussian language and came to speak Low German. Many Prussian family names have a Slavic or Old Prussian root, indicating assimilation of the conquered peoples. In the New World the Spanish Conquistadors created Männerbünde and then went on to conquer most of the Americas.
The Philistines were destroyed as an independent political entity as a result of invasions from two different empires. The first was the Assyrians. 2 Kings 12:17 (KJV) reports that “[t]hen Hazael king of Syria went up, and fought against Gath, and took it: and Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem.” The Assyrians deported conquered populations to their heartland, so many Philistines were taken into captivity.
Modern scholars note that
[n]ot all deportations and forced migrations of rebellious peoples committed by the Assyrians was done uniformly or for the same reasons. In other words, when Sargon II deported the inhabitants of Ashdod, he may have only taken the ones he believed presented the most problems, or he may have taken the ones he considered the most valuable for their skills. While the text states he deported all of the inhabitants, some ethnic Philistines no doubt still inhabited Ashdod when Psamtek I laid siege to the city, or at least the denizens of the city still practiced some Philistine cultural mores and behaviors.[3]
The Philistines were later conquered by Babylon as well. Graves from the time of that conquest show skeletons with injuries from swords and spears. The Philistines disappear from history after the Babylonian conquest ,with a final, possible coda in the story of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Gaza.
While the Philistines were destroyed politically, genetic evidence shows that they were not entirely wiped out. The modern Palestinians have DNA which matches that of the early Canaanites. Since we know that the Philistines mixed with local Canaanites, it is certain that they continued to survive, although as subjects of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires which followed.
The name Palestine in fact comes from the name of the Philistines’ homeland:
Specifically, the name for the region was “Philistia”, which is the term that modern scholars use to described the Philistine heartland. The name then passed into the ancient Greek as “Plaistine”, Latin as “Plaestina”, and Arabic as “Filastin,” to become the modern “Palestine.”[4]
Race and the Bible
The Bible resonates with many whites because their ancestors were related to the farmers in Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, and the Indo-Europeans described in Noah’s story. Genesis was written long after agriculture had spread, however, so the spread of the Genesis story reflects cultural diffusion across a people who had an indirect connection going back as far as the Neolithic (Early Farmers) and as late as the early Bronze Age (Indo-Europeans). Because of that ancient link, people in Denmark or Spain can understand the story of those Old Testament characters who deal with crop failures, wars, life in cities, jealousy, problematic business transactions, and difficulties stemming from sexual escapades — because their problems are so similar.
If a white person looks at the stories produced by vastly alien peoples such as the sub-Saharans or ancient Mayans, he cannot relate to them. It ends up being the same sort of voyeurism he experiences in docudramas such as Cops, or in a mural depicting human sacrifice in an air-conditioned museum in Mexico.
Obviously, the interpretation of the Bible offered here doesn’t follow the theological concepts of “inerrancy” or literalism. This is rather a secular reading of the text from a white advocacy perspective. The point of it is to show that the universalist, color-blind reading of the text practiced by many Christian denominations doesn’t follow from with the facts as given in the text itself.
The Bible is filled with examples of racial awareness. It is clear from the comparison of the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh with that of Genesis that the latter story’s central thrust is a study of the Eastern Mediterranean’s three large sub-races. Race and ethnicity are the point of the story, with mankind’s wickedness and the flood itself only being secondary. The Bible also describes ethnonationalist addition and subtraction. The Israelites continuously subtract to the point where they become a people at odds with everyone around them, even their own near kin. By contrast, groups like the Philistines practiced ethnonationalist addition.
The Kingdom of the Philistines doesn’t exist today, but neither do the kingdoms of Israel or Judah. Nevertheless, the Philistines do exist among the modern Palestinians, albeit in a form reflecting the subsequent imperial conquests by Rome and the Ottomans. The Bible additionally clearly provides a frank exploration of racial matters, albeit in a mythological and moral form, that is not much different from the narrative of racial matters as advanced by white advocates. With that in mind, condemnations of racism or racial awareness, such as those made by the Southern Baptist Convention, are unnecessary.
* * *
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Notes
[1] Not all scholars agree. As Kevin MacDonald writes in his book Individualism and the Western Tradition: “There is an emerging consensus for three distinct population movements into Europe during prehistoric times: 1) Western hunter-gatherers (WHGs), 2) farmers from Anatolia, known as Early Farmers (EFs), and 3) the Indo-Europeans (I-Es) originating in the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic Steppe region in present-day Ukraine and Southern Russia” (p. 3). Present-day Anatolia has a different genetic makeup from that of the Early Farmers who migrated because the region has been invaded by other peoples: Hittites, Greeks, Turks, etc.
[2] Charles River Editors, The Philistines: The History of the Ancient Israelites’ Most Notorious Enemy (Scotts Valley, Ca.: CreateSpace, 2017), Kindle location 213.
[3] Ibid., Kindle location 606.
[4] Ibid., Kindle location 63.
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2 comments
Excellent article. And it’s nice to see Eupedia put to use on Counter-Currents. However, I suspect the Western Hunter Gatherer map is out of date. The percentages of WHG ancestry seem rather too high across the board.
If there is more up to date DNA information in visual form, please share the link.
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