Moses Married a Black Woman (and why we have a hard time seeing race in the Bible)

Most people don’t know that Moses married a dark-skinned woman, because most people don’t read the book of Numbers. And if someone does read Numbers, they probably don’t know that the Cushites had dark skin, and miss the colorism of Moses’ siblings in chapter 12.

When I first learned that Moses married a Cushite woman, it took a while for the significance of it to settle in. Possibly the most important person in the Old Testament was in what we would today call an interracial marriage, with God’s uncompromising approval. It has great significance for Christians in a world of racial conflict, but the story is tucked away in a hard-to-read book featuring a woman from a people group forgotten in twenty-first century American culture, and it begs the question: are there more stories like this one?

We know the Bible and its contents apply to all of life, but race and all of the issues associated with it seem to be addressed by the Bible in indirect, general ways: we know that all people are made in God’s image, and we know that people from every nation will be together in glory. There’s the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the Ethiopian man in Acts 8, but is that all?

It takes a little digging, but in fact there is much in the Bible related to race. The origins of race and racial identity can be found in the twisting of Jewish identity, which manifested in various forms of nationalism before being applied to skin tones over 500 years ago, thus marrying racism with colorism. But issues of colorism and problems with Jewish identity existed long before the modern form of racism on their own:

• from stories of lesser-known figures with non-Jewish ties like Phinehas, Ebed-Melech and Zephaniah, to the stories of well-known Jewish figures like Peter, James and John
• from lesser-known passages like Psalm 87, to well-known books like Galatians and Romans

The list could go on. Why have we missed all of this? I think there are three reasons: (1) we don’t understand the theological roots of racism, (2) we have trained ourselves to be quiet about race, and (3) we have very deceitful hearts.

Racism Has Theological Roots

We’re used to the idea that racism is a social or cultural value judgment towards another group of people, like prejudice about someone’s work ethic or criminal history. But racism is also a theological value judgment of a group of people. It’s a condemnation, a removal from the reach of God’s grace because of birth or family, and it’s found in stories throughout the Bible.

But it’s not just an attitude found in the ‘bad guys’ of the Bible. It’s found in the people of God, like those in Jesus’ hometown (Luke 4) and the crowd at the Temple that attacked Paul (Acts 22). And it’s not just found in the people of God generally. It’s found in specific people that personally knew and followed God, and who were sent to tell of his love for others, people like Jonah and Peter.

Racism is not just a problem for ‘other’ people, it’s a problem for God’s people. Throughout the biblical story, God’s people fall into the temptation to judge outsiders as less worthy, and judge themselves as inherently superior. We know this in a general way because we know pride is a theme in the Bible, but for some reason we think the religious arrogance of so many of the people of Israel was never a social issue as well. If we can see racism in the biblical context we’ll see that it’s pride, but not a dehumanized, spiritual abstraction of sin. It’s spiritual pride attached to background, birth and bodies.*

In the few times that I have heard someone tell the story of Numbers 12, Aaron and Miriam’s sin of pride is clearly noted, but nothing is said of how their pride played out relationally with the new bride, whose fearfully and wonderfully created existence was twisted into a problem. This kind of omission is common in how we have viewed other Bible stories and we are all the worse for it because we fail to see how God has never been intimidated by the jumbled mess that politics, culture and personal sin make of ethnic differences.

We Keep Quiet About Racial Issues

Many white Americans feel uncomfortable discussing racism. It has become an unpardonable sin in our culture, and we have bought into this lie so when we see it in ourselves or someone like us, we ignore it, deny it or minimize it.

Of course, it’s not just a white American problem. This temptation to ignore, deny and minimize the sin of racism must have been functioning in Jonah’s heart. It must have been functioning in many who saw Peter withdraw from eating with Gentile Christians (Galatians 2). It even may have been functioning in Miriam and Aaron’s hearts: their self-centered pride would have given them just enough sense of shame to find any reason to complain about Moses other than the real one.

Many of us in white church culture have avoided any way of talking that ‘racializes’ a cultural or political situation out of fear that we would create or add to the disunity, and I wonder if we have taken the same attitude to the Bible. We’re hesitant to speak of biblical passages that address racial unity with anything deeper than sweeping, generalized vocabulary, so acknowledging the racial nature of Numbers 12 is unsettling to us. But avoiding the true nature of sin like that of Aaron and Miriam doesn’t pardon anyone’s sins. It just makes the situation worse.

There is a solution to contemporary racial issues, as complex as they may be. It might not sound like it, but the blood of a First Century Jew really does pay for the sins of all kinds of 21st Century Americans, and we can know it does because of how we see it changing the lives of Samaritans, Ethiopians and Romans in the Bible.

Biblical scholarship has been unhelpful at times by not highlighting the glory of God reaching all kinds of people groups**, but it’s one thing to not know what an ancient people group like the Cushites looked like, and quite another to ignore the specifics of identity in biblical stories. It’s one thing to seek harmony, it’s another to use harmony as an excuse to avoid thinking about all the ways the Bible speaks to the issue of race. No matter what we know about the Bible’s teaching on race we should be eager to learn more and speak of it all because it is breathed out by God and profitable for the unity of God’s people from everywhere for every generation. Denial and avoidance never solved conflict or reconciled disaffected family members, but proclaiming the hope of all hopes, the uniting blood of Jesus does.

We Have Deceitful Hearts

Whether we are ever caught in sin as Aaron and Miriam were, we must know that our hearts are not immune to the sin of racism. The truth of Jeremiah 17:9, that our hearts are deceitful above all things, should be enough to show us that putting ourselves in the place of Aaron and Miriam in Numbers 12 involves no stretch of the imagination. And the truth of Christ’s death in our place, that we are forgiven for all our sin is the peace our hearts need if we are accused of racism, whether the accusation is true or not. Like Miriam, we have a brother that should have been offended but chose instead to intercede for us before God.

Looking back on my life, I see many times when I looked down on others who were different than me, for no other reason than skin color or family background. And what compounded the problem was my own blindness to my sin and my lack of trust in how God responds to sin.

Trusting God matters even when we don’t sin. I once had a parent of a student come to me and accuse me of racist treatment of his son. It wasn’t true, but there were two ways for my heart to respond to that kind of accusation: a response that was only focused on the accuracy of the charge, or a response that was aware of the bigger truth that I am a sinner with a deceitful heart, sometimes a racist sinner, guilty of much more than what I’m being accused of, and redeemed by a power greater than my accuser. The way I responded to the parent was outwardly calm, but inwardly I felt very defensive. My confidence in God’s redeeming power wavered back and forth in that moment. Though I never questioned the truth of Jeremiah 17:9 or the truth of forgiven sin intellectually, my heart questioned those truths in practice.

The way we learn from Scripture is a process of seeing truth worked out in our lives, sometimes supporting our experiences, sometimes challenging them. When our experience is challenged, our hearts are tempted to evade, diminish or redirect the truth. What we find in Scripture is that racism is not far from any of us. If we can acknowledge this, we will also discover again and again, that Jesus really did come to heal us. We need not let our deceitful hearts hold God’s Word back from speaking to us about race. We will always find that he speaks hope and joy to us in the end.

Moses Married a Black Woman And We Can Be Happy That He Did

Moses kept the telling of the story in Numbers small, possibly out of love for his sister. But the story is there, no doubt out of Moses’ love for God. Moses’ wife was probably part of the mixed multitude that went up with Israel in the Exodus (Ex. 12:38) given how many Cushites lived in Egypt at the time, so she was part of God’s great redemptive act in the Old Testament, and Moses’ marriage to her removed any doubt about her status in God’s family. Aaron and Miriam didn’t want her there, but God did; they didn’t rejoice at the wedding but they should have because unity in diversity is beautiful. So racism is more than unnecessary division, it’s sin that uses skin to create division where there should be joy.

God never intended for his people to act as Aaron and Miriam did, he intends for us to welcome others who are born and raised in places and cultures that are different than our own, and to rejoice in how they are tied to us as family members. When Moses married a black woman, Aaron and Miriam were given the opportunity to rejoice in a beautiful picture of God’s great promise in Genesis to bless all the families of the earth. They failed to see how those words from God applied to them, and they weren’t the only ones. In Matthew 8, Jesus warned of how outsiders would come from all over the world and participate in a great celebration in glory, while insiders who rejected God’s mission to the world would be cast out. The Church, in its spiritual unity and ethnic diversity is becoming a beautiful bride for Christ, although the Church is a bride that is very different than Christ. Moses wife was very different than he was, but that clearly didn’t diminish God’s approval and we can be glad that it didn’t because anything that demonstrates Christ’s unwavering commitment to his Church will glorify his name and assure us of his love.

God has spoken of his great joy in this coming Wedding in his Word. We have the opportunity to search his Word and seek the unity in diversity that it proclaims lived out in our world, experiencing a taste of the great joy that is coming in that Wedding. Let’s not miss out like Aaron and Miriam did.

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*Of course there is a very important religious dimension to the issue of race in the Bible related specifically to circumcision and the nation of Israel. But the religious division between Israel and the Gentiles was never intended by God to function as a religious AND ethnic division. The pride of many ethnic Israelites made it that way, and so the conflicts between Israelites and Gentiles must be seen as both religious and ethnic conflicts.

**Bible scholars haven’t been helpful in this. In many ways, God’s Word on the diversity of his people is absent from our sunday schools and sermons because it’s absent from our systematic theologies and scholarly writing:

“[T]he traditional Systematic theologies used for most of the twentieth century did not address the race issue at all. Often these volumes had entire chapters devoted to philosophical and biblical discussions of ‘Anthropology’, but they failed to address one of the central anthropological problems within the Church today. Likewise they contained entire chapters on ‘Ecclesiology’, but did not address the major division in Church life today. A few of the more recent volumes, however, have at least begun to address the issue… Yet other influential theologies… are silent on race… Meanwhile, over twenty-three million Black American Christians, most of them extremely conservative in theology, feel excluded from the White evangelical ‘community of God’ that is teaching and studying these theologies. We clearly have a problem that needs addressing; yet much of evangelical theology has, in general, ignored it.” (From Every People and Nation, by J. Daniel Hays, p19–20)

This isn’t just a general omission. It is specific to people with dark skin:

“The terms ‘Cush’ or Cushite appear 54 times in OT. The term Hittite or Hittites appear 61 times (with 10 for Uriah). Scholarly discussions practically always devote much more time to discussing the Hittites, Hurrians, Sumerians and Arabs than they do the Cushites, if they discuss the Cushites at all.” (Hays, p26).