And then, to clinch the argument for any Judean so nationalistic as to be impervious to mere idealism, the story concludes: “Her neighbors gave him a name: ‘Naomi has a son,’ they said; ‘we will call him Obed.’ He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.” (Ruth 4:17.)

  Where would Israel have been, then, if there had been an Ezra present then to forbid the marriage of Boaz with a “foreign wife”?

  Where does that leave us? That the Book of Ruth is a pleasant story, no one will deny. It is almost always referred to as a “delightful idyl” or words to that effect. That Ruth is a most successful characterization of a sweet and virtuous woman is beyond dispute.

  In fact, everyone is so in love with the story and with Ruth that the whole point is lost. It is, by right, a tale of tolerance for the despised, of love for the hated, of the reward that comes of brotherhood. By mixing the genes of mankind, by forming the hybrid, great men will come.

  The Jews included the Book of Ruth in the canon partly because it is so wonderfully told a tale but mostly (I suspect) because it gives the lineage of the great David, a lineage that is not given beyond David’s father, Jesse, in the soberly historic books of the Bible that anteceded Ruth. But the Jews remained, by and large, exclusionistic and did not learn the lesson of universalism preached by the Book of Ruth.

  Nor have people taken its lesson to heart since. Why should they, since every effort is made to wipe out that lesson? The story of Ruth has been retold any number of times, from children’s tales to serious novels. Even movies have been made of it. Ruth herself must have been pictured in hundreds of illustrations. And in every illustration I have ever seen, she is presented as blond, blue-eyed, shapely, and beautiful—the perfect Nordic stereotype I referred to at the beginning of the article.

  For goodness sake, why shouldn’t Boaz have fallen in love with her? What great credit was there in marrying her? If a girl like that had fallen at your feet and asked you humbly to do your duty by her and kindly marry her, you would probably have done it like a shot.

  Of course she was a Moabite woman, but so what? What does the word “Moabite” mean to you? Does it arouse any violent reaction? Are there many Moabites among your acquaintances? Have your children been chased by a bunch of lousy Moabites lately? Have they been reducing property values in your neighborhood? When was the last time you heard someone say, “Got to get those rotten Moabites out of here. They just fill up the welfare rolls.”

  In fact, judging by the way Ruth is drawn, Moabites are English aristocrats and their presence would raise property values.

  The trouble is that the one word that is not translated in the Book of Ruth is the key word “Moabite,” and as long as it is not translated, the point is lost; it is lost in non-translation.

  The word Moabite really means “someone of a group that receives from us and deserves from us nothing but hatred and contempt.” How should this word be translated into a single word that means the same thing to, say, many modern Greeks? … Why, “Turk.” And to many modern Turks? … Why, “Greek.” And to many modern White Americans? … Why, “Black.”

  To get the proper flavor of the Book of Ruth, suppose we think of Ruth not as a Moabite woman but as a Black woman.

  Reread the story of Ruth and translate Moabite to Black every time you see it. Naomi (imagine) is coming back to the United States with her two black daughters-in-law. No wonder she urges them not to come with her. It is a marvel that Ruth so loved her mother-in-law that she was willing to face a society that hated her unreasonably and to take the risk of gleaning in the face of leering reapers who could not possibly suppose they need treat her with any consideration whatever.

  And when Boaz asked who she was, don’t read the answer as “She is a Moabite girl,” but as “She is a black girl.” More likely, in fact, the reapers might have said to Boaz something that was the equivalent of (if you’ll excuse the language), “She is a nigger girl.”

  Think of it that way and you find the whole point is found in translation and only in translation. Boaz’s action in being willing to marry Ruth because she was virtuous (and not because she was a Nordic beauty) takes on a kind of nobility. The neighbors’ decision that she was better to Naomi than seven sons becomes something that could have been forced out of them only by overwhelming evidence to that effect. And the final stroke that out of this miscegenation was born none other than the great David is rather breathtaking.

  We get something similar in the New Testament. On one occasion a student of the law asks Jesus what must be done to gain eternal life, and answers his own question by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27.)

  These admonitions are taken from the Old Testament, of course. That last bit about your neighbor comes from a verse that says, “You shall not seek revenge, or cherish anger towards your kinsfolk; you shall love your neighbor as a man like yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18.)

  (The New English Bible translations sound better to me here than the King James’s: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Where is the saint who can truly feel another’s pain or ecstasy precisely as he feels his own? We must not ask too much. But if we simply grant that someone else is “a man like yourself,” then he can be treated with decency at least. It is when we refuse to grant even this and talk of another as our inferior that contempt and cruelty come to seem natural, and even laudable.)

  Jesus approves the lawyer’s saying, and the lawyer promptly asks, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29.) After all, the verse in Leviticus first speaks of refraining from revenge and anger toward kinsfolk; might not, then, the concept of “neighbor” be restricted to kinsfolk, to one’s own kind, only?

  In response, Jesus replies with perhaps the greatest of the parables—of a traveler who fell in with robbers, who was mugged and robbed and left half dead by the road. Jesus goes on, “It so happened that a priest was going down by the same road; but when he saw him, he went past on the other side. So too a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him went past on the other side. But a Samaritan who was making the journey came upon him, and when he saw him was moved to pity. He went up and bandaged his wounds, bathing them with oil and wine. Then he lifted him on to his own beast, brought him to an inn, and looked after him there.” (Luke 10:31–34.)

  Then Jesus asks who the traveler’s neighbor was, and the lawyer is forced to say, “The one who showed him kindness.” (Luke 10:37.)

  This is known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, even though nowhere in the parable is the rescuer called a good Samaritan, merely a Samaritan.

  The force of the parable is entirely vitiated by the common phrase “good” Samaritan, for that has cast a false light on who the Samaritans were. In a free-association test, say “Samaritan” and probably every person being tested will answer, “Good.” It has become so imprinted in all our brains that Samaritans are good that we take it for granted that a Samaritan would act like that and wonder why Jesus is making a point of it.

  We forget who the Samaritans were, in the time of Jesus!

  To the Jews, they were not good. They were hated, despised, contemptible heretics with whom no good Jew would have anything to do. Again, the whole point is lost through non-translation.

  Suppose, instead, that it is a White traveler in Mississippi who has been mugged and left half dead. And suppose it was a minister and a deacon who passed by and refused to “become involved.” And suppose it was a Black sharecropper who stopped and took care of the man.

  Now ask yourself: Who was the neighbor whom you must love as though he were a man like yourself if you are to be saved?

  The Parable of the Good Samaritan clearly teaches that there is nothing parochial in the concept “neighbor,” that you cannot confine your decency to your own group and your own kind. All mankind, right down to those you most despise, are your neighbors.

  Well, then, we have in the Bible two examples—in the Book of Ruth and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan—of teachings that are lost in non-translation, yet are terribly applicable to us today.

  The whole world over, there are confrontations between sections of mankind defined by race, nationality, economic philosophy, religion, or language as belonging to different groups, so that one is not “neighbor” to the other.

  These more or less arbitrary differences among peoples who are members of a single biological species are terribly dangerous and nowhere more so than here in the United States where the most perilous confrontation (I need not tell you) is between white and black.

  Next to the population problem generally, mankind faces no danger greater than this confrontation, particularly in the United States.

  It seems to me that more and more, each year, both whites and blacks are turning, in anger and hatred, to violence. I see no reasonable end to the steady escalation but an actual civil war.

  In such a civil war, the whites, with a preponderance of numbers and an even greater preponderance of organized power would, in all likelihood, “win.” They would do so, however, at an enormous material cost and, I suspect, at a fatal spiritual one.

  And why? Is it so hard to recognize that we are all neighbors, after all? Can we, on both sides—on both sides—find no way of accepting the biblical lesson?

  Or if quoting the Bible sounds too mealymouthed and if repeating the words of Jesus seems too pietistic, let’s put it another way, a practical way:

  Is the privilege of feeling hatred so luxurious a sensation that it is worth the material and spiritual hell of a white-black civil war?

  If the answer is really “yes,” then one can only despair.

  LOOK LONG UPON A MONKEY

  CONSIDERING THAT I WORK SO HARD at establishing my chosen persona as a man who is cheerfully self-appreciative, I am sometimes absurdly sensitive to the fact that every once in a while people who don’t know me take the persona for myself.

  I was interviewed recently by a newspaper reporter who was an exceedingly pleasant fellow but who clearly knew very little about me. I was curious enough, therefore, to ask why he had decided to interview me.

  He explained without hesitation. “My boss asked me to interview you,” he said. Then he smiled a little and added, “He had strong, ambivalent feelings about you.”

  I said, “You mean he likes my writing but thinks I am arrogant and conceited.”

  “Yes,” he said, clearly surprised. “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess,” I said, with a sigh.

  You see, it’s not arrogance and conceit; it’s cheerful self-appreciation, and anyone who knows me has no trouble seeing the difference.

  Of course, I could save myself this trouble by choosing a different persona, by practicing aw-shucks modesty and learning how to dig my toe into the ground and bring the pretty pink to my cheeks at the slightest word of praise.

  But no, thanks. I write on just about every subject and for every age level, and once I begin to practice a charming diffidence, I will make myself doubt my own ability to do so, and that would be ruinous.

  So I’ll go right along the path I have chosen and endure the ambivalent feelings that come my way, for the sake of having the self-assurance to write my wide-ranging essays—like this one on evolution.

  I suspect that if man[1] could only have been left out of it, there would never have been any trouble about accepting biological evolution.

  Anyone can see, for instance, that some animals resemble each other closely. Who can deny that a dog and a wolf resemble each other in important ways? Or a tiger and a leopard? Or a lobster and a crab? Twenty-three centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle lumped different types of species together and prepared a “ladder of life,” by arranging those types from the simplest plants upward to the most complex animals, with (inevitably) man at the top.

  Once this was done, we moderns could say, with the clear vision of hindsight, that it was inevitable that people should come to see that one type of species had changed into another; that the more complex had developed from the less complex; that, in short, there was not only a ladder of life but a system whereby life forms climbed that ladder.

  Not so! Neither Aristotle nor those who came after him for more than two thousand years moved from the ladder of life as a static concept to one that was a dynamic and evolutionary one.

  The various species, it was considered, were permanent. There might be families and hierarchies of species, but that was the way in which life was created from the beginning. Resemblances have existed from the beginning, it was maintained, and no species grew to resemble another more—or less—with the passage of time.

  My feeling is that the insistence on this constancy of species arose, at least in part, out of the uncomfortable feeling that once change was allowed, man would lose his uniqueness and become “just another animal.”

  Once Christianity grew dominant in the Western world, views on the constancy of species became even more rigid. No only did Genesis 1 clearly describe the creation of the various species of life as already differentiated and in their present form, but man was created differently from all the rest. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …” (Genesis 1:26.)

  No other living thing was made in God’s image and that placed an insuperable barrier between man and all other living things. Any view that led to the belief that the barriers between species generally were not leakproof tended to weaken that all-important barrier protecting man.

  It would have been nice, of course, if all the other life forms on Earth were enormously different from man so that the insuperable barrier would be clearly reflected physically. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean world was acquainted, even in early times, with certain animals we now call “monkeys.”

  The various monkeys with which the ancients came in contact had faces that, in some cases, looked like those of shriveled little men. They had hands that clearly resembled human hands and they fingered things as human beings did and with a clearly lively curiosity. However, they had tails and that rather saved the day. The human being is so pronouncedly tailless and most of the animals we know are so pronouncedly tailed that that, in itself, would seem to be a symbol of that insuperable barrier between man and monkey.

  There are, indeed, some animals without tails or with very short tails, such as frogs, guinea pigs, and bears, but these, even without tails, do not threaten man’s status. And yet—

  There is a reference to a monkey in the Bible, one for which the translators used a special word. In discussing King Solomon’s trading ventures, the Bible says (1 Kings 10:22), “… once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”

  Tharshish is often identified as Tartessus, a city on the Spanish coast just west of the Strait of Gibraltar, a flourishing trading center in Solomon’s time that was destroyed by the Carthaginians in 480 B.C. In northwestern Africa across from Tartessus, there existed then (and now) a type of monkey of the macaque group. It was this macaque that was called an “ape,” and in later years, when northwestern Africa became part of “Barbary” to Europeans, it came to be called “Barbary ape.”

  The Barbary ape is tailless and therefore more resembles man than other monkeys do. Aristotle, in his ladder of life, placed the Barbary ape at the top of the monkey group, just under man. Galen, the Greek physician of about A.D. 200, dissected apes and showed the resemblance to man to be internal as well as external.

  It was the resemblance to man that made the Barbary ape amusing to the ancients, and yet annoying as well. The Roman poet Ennius is quoted as saying, “The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us!” Was the ape really the “vilest of beasts”? Objectively, of course not. It was its resemblance to man and its threat, therefore, to man’s cherished uniqueness that made it vile.

  In medieval times, when the uniqueness and supremacy of man had become a cherished dogma, the existence of the ape was even more annoying. They were equated with the Devil. The Devil, after all, was a fallen and distorted angel, and as man had been created in God’s image, so the ape was created in the Devil’s.

  Yet no amount of explanation removed the unease. The English dramatist William Congreve wrote in 1695: “I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.” It is not so hard to guess that those “mortifying reflections” must have been to the effect that man might be described as a large and somewhat more intelligent ape.

  Modern times had made matters worse by introducing the proud image-of-God European to animals, hitherto unknown, which resembled him even more closely than the Barbary ape did.

  In 1641 a description was published of an animal brought from Africa and kept in the Netherlands in a menagerie belonging to the Prince of Orange. From the description it seems to have been a chimpanzee. There were also reports of a large manlike animal in Borneo, one we now call the orangutan.

  The chimpanzee and the orangutan were called “apes” because, like the Barbary ape, they lacked tails. In later years, when it was recognized that the chimpanzee and orangutan resembled monkeys less and men more, they came to be known as “anthropoid” (manlike) apes.

  In 1758 the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus made the first thoroughly systematic attempt to classify all species. He was a firm believer in the permanence of species and it did not concern him that some animal species closely resembled man—that was just the way they were created.

  He therefore did not hesitate to lump the various species of apes and monkeys together, with man included as well, and call that group “Primates,” from a Latin word for “first,” since it included man. We still use the term.

  The monkeys and apes, generally, Linnaeus put into one subgroup of Primates and called that subgroup “Simia,” from the Latin word for “ape.” For human being, Linnaeus invented the subgroup “Homo,” which is the Latin word for “man.” Linnaeus used a double name for each species (called “binomial nomenclature,” with the family name first, like Smith, John, and Smith, William), so human beings rejoiced in the name “Homo sapiens” (Man, wise). But Linnaeus placed another member in that group. Having read the description of the Bornean orangutan, he named it “Homo troglodytes” (Man, cave-dwelling).