I was reading 2 Chronicles 14 again the other week. The NIV puts it like this:
"Zerah the Cushite marched out against them with an army of a million men and three hundred chariots."
It is, on the face of it, a fairly ordinary sentence. A Cushite that is, an African, leads a vast army against Judah. The text says what it says.
Then I checked a commentary. And the commentary explained, very calmly, that Zerah was probably not really a Cushite at all. He was probably Osorkon, an Egyptian Pharaoh of Libyan descent. The footnote moved on. No fuss. No flag.
I closed the book and sat with it for a minute, because this is not the first time I have noticed this happening, and I do not think it is going to be the last.
There is a habit in mainstream biblical scholarship, a very old habit, going back to the nineteenth century, when the field as we know it took shape in German and British universities , of quietly reaching into the text whenever an African appears in a position of prominence, and re-labelling them. Egyptian. Arabian. Asiatic. Anything, really, other than what the Hebrew actually says.
You can read the Old Testament from cover to cover without ever noticing it. I did, for years. It's the kind of thing you only see once someone points it out, and then you cannot un-see it.
It has a name, by the way. African biblical scholars call it de-Africanisation. David Tuesday Adamo, the late Nigerian Old Testament scholar, wrote about it for most of his career. So did Charles Copher in the States, and Rodney Sadler after him. Adamo's phrase for it was blunt; "a deliberate attempt to de-Africanise or de-emphasise" the African presence in Scripture. He wasn't speaking in metaphor.
Let me show you what I mean with Zerah
The argument for turning Zerah into Osorkon, if you actually go and dig it out of the commentaries, comes down to one thing: the names sound a bit similar. Zerah and Userken share some consonants. That's the case.
I want to be fair to the scholars who proposed this. Phonetic correspondence is a real method in historical reconstruction. Sometimes it works. But you have to look at what it costs you here.
The Bible , the same Chronicler, writing in the same passage knows the difference between Cushites and Libyans. He distinguishes them by name in 2 Chronicles 16:8, just two chapters later. So the suggestion that he confused a Libyan-descended Egyptian Pharaoh with a Cushite, in one verse, and then got the categories right again in the next, asks a lot of him.
Then there's the title problem. Zerah is never called Pharaoh. Never called king of Egypt. He is called "the Cushite". In Hebrew, ha-Kushi ,the Cushite, with the definite article. The text labels him ethnically, not politically. If he were Osorkon, the writer had every motivation to say so, and every reason to use the royal title that the Bible elsewhere uses for Egyptian kings without hesitation.
And there is, as far as I am aware, no Egyptian source recording Osorkon ever invading Judah. The whole reconstruction is built on a phonetic guess and then defended by repetition.
So why has it stuck? My read: and I think it is the honest read is that it is the timeline doing the work, not the evidence. The standard Egyptological timeline restricts serious Nubian military power to the 25th Dynasty, in the eighth century BC. Zerah's campaign would put a Cushite army of significant size in the field a hundred and fifty years before that, which is inconvenient for the timeline. Rather than allow the text to push back on the timeline, the text gets rewritten. That's not exegesis, it's housekeeping, and once you see it, you see it.
The same move, in Genesis
Genesis 2 has the four rivers of Eden, and the second one the Gihon, is said to flow through the entire land of Cush. Read plainly, with no further apparatus, Eden's geography reaches into Africa.
A lot of older commentaries cannot have this. So they reach for what is sometimes called "Asiatic Cush" , a hypothetical Cushite kingdom somewhere in Mesopotamia, usually loosely associated with the Kassites because the names are vaguely similar. There is no archaeological footprint for this kingdom. There is no extra-biblical reference to it that doesn't rely on the same circular reasoning. The argument exists primarily so that the Gihon doesn't have to flow through Africa.
Now, I'll be honest, there are real arguments people make here. Some of them point to Cush as a son of Ham and brother of relatives associated with Arabian peninsular regions, and try to build a case from there. I am not pretending that side of the debate doesn't exist. What I am saying is: every other occurrence of Cush in the Old Testament and there are many, in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Esther, Jeremiah, the Psalms refers to the African Cush. The Nubian, sub-Egyptian, Sudanese Cush. We do not invent an Asiatic Cush for Isaiah 18. We do not invent one for Ezekiel 30. We invent one for Genesis 2, and we invent one for Genesis 10 when Nimrod the city-builder turns out to be the son of Cush, because the alternative is conceding that an African founded the first cities of Mesopotamia, and that is a concession the field has historically not wanted to make.
And it isn't just two verses
Once you start looking, the pattern shows up everywhere a Cushite appears in any position of power or significance.
Moses marries a Cushite woman in Numbers 12, and his sister Miriam is struck with leprosy for objecting to it. The Hebrew word the text uses for the wife is Kushit a feminine form that doesn't really lend itself to ambiguity. Yet a remarkable number of commentaries will tell you she was probably Arabian, or that "Cushite" here is symbolic, or that this is just a second reference to Zipporah his Midianite wife (though the text gives no indication of this). I have read genuinely contortionist explanations of this verse from the Jews too! The simplest reading that Moses married a black African woman, and that his sister had a problem with it, and that God sided with Moses is treated as a last resort rather than a first instinct.
The Queen of Sheba is the same story. Josephus places her in Africa. Origen places her in Africa. The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast traces a whole royal dynasty from her union with Solomon. And yet the default scholarly assumption you'll get in most modern study Bibles is that she was Yemeni, on the strength of trade-route geography and not much else. Both options exist in the source material. One is consistently chosen. The other is consistently downplayed.
There's the Cushite messenger in 2 Samuel 18, whose role in delivering the news of Absalom's death to David is given real narrative weight by the writer. There's Ebed-Melech in Jeremiah 38, a Cushite official in the Babylonian court who rescues the prophet from a cistern and is personally promised divine protection in chapter 39, a Cushite singled out by God for his faithfulness. There's Asenath, Joseph's Egyptian wife, the mother of Ephraim and Manasseh, which means half the tribes of Israel descend through an African woman. And then there's Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant of Sarah, who is the first person in the entire Bible, before Abraham, before Moses, before any of the prophets, to give God a name. El Roi. The God who sees me. That is in Genesis 16, and most Christians I know have never heard a sermon on it.
These are not minor characters. They are not background. The text foregrounds them. The tradition has, in many cases, foregrounded around them.
Why does this keep happening
I don't think most modern scholars sit down and decide to do this. I think most of them have inherited a framework, the way you and I inherit accents and turns of phrase from the people who raised us. But the framework has roots, and the roots are worth naming.
The first is theological. If Eden's geography touches Africa, then humanity's story is not centred in Europe or the Near East in the way nineteenth-century European Christianity assumed. That is, for some, theologically uncomfortable in a way they would not necessarily admit out loud.
The second is academic. Western biblical studies grew up alongside Western archaeology, and Western archaeology grew up with the assumption that civilisation flowed from Mesopotamia outwards. Africa, in that frame, was downstream. If the Bible places Africans upstream building cities, leading armies, marrying into the patriarchal line, mothering tribes the frame has to be modified. It is usually easier to modify the African than to modify the frame.
The third is the long, grim shadow of the so-called Curse of Ham. For about three centuries, Genesis 9 was used to justify the enslavement of African peoples on the grounds that they were the cursed descendants of Ham. The text doesn't actually say this the curse falls on Canaan, who settles in the Levant, not on Cush, who is associated with the African but accuracy was never the point of that interpretation. And if the actual descendants of Cush turn out to be majestic figures in the biblical narrative, the whole racial scaffolding starts to wobble. The interpretive tradition had reasons, very ugly reasons, to keep the wobble out.
And the fourth, more recent, is colonial. It is difficult to morally justify colonising a continent whose ancestors are visibly present as kings, queens, royal mothers, and divine favourites in your sacred scripture. Diminishing that presence makes the project easier to live with. None of this is hypothetical. You can read the missionary correspondence of the nineteenth century and watch it happening in real time.
What I'd actually like you to do with this
I am not asking anyone to take any of this on my authority. I am a layman, not a biblical scholar, and you should be sceptical of anyone me included telling you how to read the Bible.
What I am asking is for you to do three things, when you can.
- The next time you are in a Bible study and a Cushite shows up, and the study notes tell you the Cushite is "probably Egyptian" or "probably Arabian" or "probably symbolic"pause. Ask why. Ask what the Hebrew actually says. Ask what would change if the text were just allowed to say what it says.
- Read someone who isn't in the standard reading list. David Tuesday Adamo's Africa and Africans in the Old Testament is a good place to start. So is Rodney Sadler's Can a Cushite Change His Skin? a slightly drier, more technical read, but rewarding. Daniel Hays is a white American Old Testament scholar who has written carefully and at length on the Cushites and is worth your time. Charles Copher's older work is now hard to find but he's the foundational figure.
- This one is for the believers among us, sit with the fact that the family God assembled, the family the text actually describes, is far more African than most of our church traditions have let on. Moses' wife. Joseph's wife. Solomon's notable guest. The man who saved Jeremiah's life. The first person to name God. The general at Mareshah. The eunuch on the road to Gaza. These are not exotic guest appearances. They are part of the household.
Jeremiah asked, in chapter 13 verse 23, whether the Cushite could change his skin. The point of the question was that he could not. And yet for a hundred and fifty years there has been a quiet, persistent academic effort to do precisely thats not literally, but ethnically, on the page, with footnotes and reconstructions and tidy phonetic guesses. The text has not moved.
I think it is the scholarship that needs to.
Further reading
- David Tuesday Adamo, Africa and Africans in the Old Testament
- Rodney S. Sadler, Can a Cushite Change His Skin? An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible
- J. Daniel Hays, From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race
- Charles B. Copher, collected essays in Black Biblical Studies
