Abstract
Systems of law define communities and contribute to their stability by regulating the behavior of members toward each other and toward outsiders. Religious laws also regulate the behavior of community members toward the gods or other superhuman beings. Prophetic figures can have various relations to legal systems. They can be lawgivers, as in the well-known case of Moses. They can also be called to reaffirm the binding status of the law and call back to proper behavior a wayward community, as with many prophets in the Hebrew Bible. But they can also be called to infuse familiar laws with new, often surprising, life. That is the case with the two examples considered in this chapter.
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Notes
Shepherd Robert Athlyi Rogers, The Holy Piby (Kingston, JM: Research Associates School Times Publications/Frontline Distribution Int’l Inc., 2000), reprint of the 1924 edition with foreword by Ras Sekou Sankara Tafari and introduction by Ras Michael (Miguel) Lorne, pp. 101, 102. In my copy of the 1924 document the passages appear on pp. 1–3. See The Holy Piby (Woodbridge, NJ: Athlican Strong Arm Company, January, 1924). All subsequent references will be to the current reprint unless otherwise noted.
On Rogers and the early Rastafari see Robert Hill, Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in the Early Rastafarian Religion (Kingston, JM: Research Associates School Times Publications/Frontline Distribution Int’l Inc., 2001), pp. 17–18. Earlier versions of Hill’s essay appeared in Epoche, a religion journal produced by students at UCLA, and Jamaica Journal 16 (1983): 24–39. All subsequent references will be to the current reprint unless otherwise noted.
On the international spread of Rastafari, see Ian Boxili, ed., The Globalization of Rastafari (Kingston, JM: Arawak Publications, 2008),
Frank Jan Van Dijk, “Chanting Down Babylon Outernational: The Rise of Rastafari in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific” and Randal L. Hepner, “Chanting Down Babylon in the Belly of the Beast: The Rastafarian Movement in the Metropolitan United States,” in Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane, eds., Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 178–198 and pp. 199–216, respectively. 9. Rogers, The Holy Piby, p. 63.
On the pervasiveness of familiarity with the Bible in Jamaica, see Ken Post, “The Bible as Ideology,” in Christopher Allen and R. W. Johnson, eds., African Perspectives: Papers in the History, Politics and Economics of Africa presented to Thomas Hodgkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 190–192, 205; William Spencer, “The First Chant: The Promised Key”, in Murrell et al., Chanting Down Babylon, p. 372.
See Rodney Stark, “How New Religions Succeed: A Theoretical Model,” in David G. Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, eds., The Future of New Religious Movements (Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 11–29.
For Rastafarian criticism of the King James Version, see Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 117;
Joseph Owens, Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica. (Kingston, JM: Sangster’s Books, 1960), pp. 31, 32, 33, 274; Murrell & Williams, “Black Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Murrell et al., Chanting Down Babylon, p. 327,
William David Spencer, Dread Jesus (London: SPCK, 1999), p. 15.
Rev. Fitz Ballintine Pettersburgh, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy (Kingston, JM: Headstart Printing and Publishing, 1996), reprint of the 1925 edition with a prologue by Ras Miguel Lorne, ch. 50, “Diploma,” verse 9, p. 84. All references will be given to the reprint edition, unless otherwise noted.
G. G. Maragh, The Promised Key (Accra, Gold Coast: Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Editor of the African Morning Post, Head Office, 1935), p. 16.
See Chevannes, Rastafari, pp. 87–88; see also Ennis Barrington Edmonds, Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 34f.
See Frank Jan Van Dijk, Jahmaica: Rastafari and Jamaican Society, 1930–1990 (Utrecht: ISOR, 1993), p. 66: “In Jamaica, Ethiopianism took the form of a latent ideology without organizational structures.” See also Edmonds, Rastafari, p. 34.
As cited in Leonard Barrett, The Rastafarians, rev. ed., (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 77.
The Holy Piby’s identification of God with Elijah seems to rest on both the narrative of Elijah’s ascent into heaven in II Kings 2 and on the use of El as one of the names of God in the Hebrew Bible. “El” is a common Semitic word for “divinity.” See Genesis 33:20; 35:7; Judges 9:46. See Martin Rose, “Names of God in the OT,” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. IV, (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 1001–1011.
See Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 11–14, 153–163; the phrase “quarrying into tradition” appears on p. 163.
See Ben Klassen, Nature’s Eternal Religion (Milwaukee, WI: The Milwaukee Church of the Creator, 1973)
and Klassen, The White Man’s Bible (Milwaukee, WI: The Milwaukee Church of the Creator, 1981).
See Ben Klassen, with Victor Wolf, The Little White Book (El Cerrito, CA: The Church of the Creator, 1991), 92.
As cited in George Michael, Theology of Hate: A History of the World Church of the Creator (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009), p. 174.
Ben Klassen, Against the Evil Tide: An Autobiography (Otto, NC: The Church of the Creator, 1991), pp. 411f.
Ben Klassen, A Revolution of Values through Religion (Otto, NC: The Church of the Creator, 1991), p. v.
See Leonard Ziskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2009), p. 338; Michael, Theology of Hate, p. 192.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Carol Cosmon, trans., abridged with an Introduction and Notes by Mark S. Cladis (New York: Oxford University Press: 2001), p. 46.
Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 53.
See Ben Klassen, Building a Whiter and Brighter World (Otto, NC: The Church of the Creator, 1986).
Ben Klassen, RAHOWA! This Planet Is All Ours (Otto, NC: The Church of the Creator, 1987), p. 12.
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© 2014 Eugene V. Gallagher
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Gallagher, E.V. (2014). Black and White and Read All Over: Rereading the Ten Commandments. In: Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434838_6
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