SBL: The Bible as Colonial Handbook

In Adelaide, the once proud City of Churches, so named by Anthony Trollope in 1872 in a book on Australia and New Zealand, the meeting of the International Society for Biblical Literature was taking place, incognito.  No banners, no welcome signs, left Adelaideans unaware that SBL, founded in 1880, is the oldest and largest society of Biblical scholars, with over 8,500 members across 100 countries.

The upwards of 500 participants, coming from 39 countries, must have felt as if they were members of a secret society, as they had to find their way without the benefit of signage to the relevant lecture rooms in the large and impressive campus of ‘UA’, the newly amalgamated University of Adelaide and University of South Australia.

As I searched for the SBL registration hub following the map on my phone, I did notice one sign that kept reappearing on fences and walls that read:  “The Adelaide University supports the lawful freedom of expression and allows peaceful protests by its students that do not reasonably cause others to feel threatened.”

Such is the ‘new normal’ on university campuses, which have become hotbeds of anti-Israel, antisemitic protests that victimised Jewish students and faculty alike since October 7^th  2023, and which the hearings of Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion have documented in raw detail.  In fact, this and other aspects of the ‘new normal’ are what drew me to attend the largest conference on Biblical Studies in the Southern Hemisphere.

Fortunately, during the University’s recess, there were no such actions on display, but I wanted to see how the bedrock tradition on which Western civilization and its universities were founded was holding up against a more insidious internal assault by the current academic zeitgeist.  I did not have to look far to discern deep fissures in what was once holy ground.

Streams of papers were grouped under the heading of ‘colonialism’ and ‘feminism’ and often they were conjoined.

One young woman, who identified as ‘descended from settlers,’ was a senior lecturer at La Trobe, and had trained in law before studying theology, read the book of the late prophet Hosea (ca 750-720 BCE) as a template of colonial rape of both women and the land, an expression of patriarchy’s general violence toward women, and its particular ‘theology of rape’ of colonised women.

The presenter extended her indictment to the case of colonial Australia, which she alleged ‘teaches that colonial sexual rape is part of colonial ideology.’  ‘The unruly subject, the woman, who is colonised, must be raped, just as the land is raped, which together is the genocidal project of colonialism.’

Not an eyebrow lifted in alarm at this unbridled animus. Nor did the almost 3,000 year leap that this imaginary exercise entailed raise a question of ‘scholarly method’ from the audience.

At the time of Hosea’s writing, when Israel was besieged by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the north and Judea was attacked by King Sennacherib in the south, the metaphor of marriage fidelity or lack thereof was a typical literary device to convey the message that faithlessness to God would inevitably lead to subjugation by Israel’s enemies. Like Biblical prophets before and after him, Hosea viewed the destruction of Israel and its sufferings through the metaphorical lens of marriage where Israel was often imagined as God’s ‘betrothed’.

To witness a university lecturer read the allegorical text literally and to claim that the book of Hosea lends permission to ‘sexual domination and taming,’ is not just anachronistic but an embarrassment to the serious literary and historical analysis of Biblical texts.  But then to allege further that this book furnished the purpose and rationale of colonial Australia is not just a lie, it is an act of scholarly abuse.

The emotionally laden charge, backed by no material evidence, is an effective rhetorical trick where the audience is left to prove the negative, which is impossible when the interpreter of the text dismisses as irrelevant its actual historical context.

But the most telling sign of this presentation came at the end, when the speaker sat down and wrapped herself in a brand new, straight out of the packet, white and black keffyah, the sign of anti-Israel protesters, as if to reinforce her point that the Jewish Bible is not only the model but the enabler of the Greatest Evils in History, colonialism, rape, and the occupation of Palestine.

In another session, the same theme and method were deployed by a speaker who hailed from a prominent Lutheran theological college in Adelaide. This time it was the post-exilic Book of Ezra, which served as her template of colonialism, despite it being an account of the return of Israelites to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon.

Composed around 400 BCE, the book of Ezra, the priest and scribe,[1] is based on memoirs, Aramaic letters, and assorted lists, and narrates the reestablishment of the city, its courts and judges, its priestly religion and all that was needed to rebuild the Temple that had been vanquished by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 587-586 BCE.  Most importantly, it is the formal restoration of ‘the people of the book,’ when the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) were redacted and became authoritative.  In other words, it was the story of a national rebirth of a people back in their own land, which was authorised by the edict of the Persian king Cyrus.

All this historical detail received scant mention because the presenter asserted that the Israelites’ return from Babylon is based on a dubious belief ‘that it is their right to occupy the land and rebuild the Temple’.  The term ‘occupy’ is pro-Palestinian speak for Israel’s illegitimacy.

In a regretful tone, the presenter also noted that Christians accept the Book of Ezra’s narrative, which she alleged is directly responsible for their belief that it is their ‘divine right to colonise the world.’

Her message was clear, the Hebrew Bible gave the blueprint for colonialism.  Lost on this presenter was why Ezra the priest was concerned that his people had not sufficiently ‘separated themselves from the peoples of the lands and their abominations,’ and thus were losing their religion by following other gods.

Instead, our presenter leapt 2,500 years into the future and attributed to the Book of Ezra the Australian settlers’ visceral shock and horror at the dire conditions of the indigenous people.  But why let history get in the way of propaganda?   Guided by the debut best-selling futuristic novel, Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius[2], which ‘uses an allegorical alien invasion to explore the brutal history of European colonisation in Australia,’ the presenter dismissed any of the salutary effects that settlers and missionaries brought to the indigenous people.

Defending her use of Coleman’s novel, the presenter also referred to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale, an anti-religious dystopian science fiction novel about a misogynist religious cult that takes over the U.S. government.  The book, which was made into 66 episodes for TV, and was hugely popular with feminists and atheists, was inspirational because, as the presenter stressed, ‘fictionalised history of things that really did happen,’ is a reliable guide to understanding the cruelty of colonialism.

The deep irony, which owes nothing to colonialism and Christianity, is that a sixteen hour drive due north of Adelaide, will take you to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, the home of the largest concentration of Aboriginal town camps, and where indigenous Australians experience the highest rate of family violence and sexual abuse, mostly committed by indigenous men and boys against women and girls. The Central Land Council in response to the recently reported death of Kumanjayi Little Baby, has called attention to the scourge of family violence in indigenous communities, with one of the child’s grandfathers saying that the town camps were ‘not safe for children.’[3]

When academics choose fantasy over reality, fiction over fact, and ideology over ideas they contribute to the demise of higher education. But as GK Chesterton (1874-1936) a leading critic of the modern academy observed in his day, academics rarely subject themselves to self-examination, leading to a society governed by ‘ephemeral fads.’  Today, that fad is anti-colonialism which has been wielded as a weapon against the very civilisation and peoples who brought the magnificent works of the Bible to the world.

And speaking of the people who today are their descendants, the Jewish presenters, which included a tiny contingent of Israelis, were especially interested to hear the two panels that were dedicated to dealing with antisemitism. For the most part the papers focused on the ‘difficult texts’ in the New Testament and in Josephus’ works, that have been used by the churches of all denominations throughout the centuries to persecute Jews and view them as ‘sons of the Devil,’ to quote the Gospel of John (8:44).

With the most prominent American Jewish scholar of the New Testament in attendance, Professor Amy Jill Levine,[4]who has done an immense amount of work with the churches to undo millennia of antisemitism in the academy, a special panel, held at the nearby Scots Church, of Christian clerics and Rabbi Ben Elton of the Great Synagogue addressed the situation of antisemitism today.  It offered a brief window of goodwill that gave encouragement.

Always impressive, Levine, who has served as Vice President of the Catholic Biblical Association and is about to become its President, is a formidable example of academic rigor and possesses all the scholarly tools that once were the hallmark of Biblical studies. But are no longer, as was abundantly evident in the quality and tenor of many of the conference papers.

Thus, I was left with an overwhelming sense that the conversation had moved on, and that the current interest in the books of the Bible was now led by people who are deeply unsympathetic if not antagonistic to their Jewish authors, who were, then as now, obliged to fight for their country’s survival.

In addition, a larger issue loomed as I listened attentively to as many presentations as possible over four days, in a field I once studied, taught and believed to be essential to understanding what constitutes the ancient Biblical ‘bones’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has provided the bedrock of Western civilisation. The concept of a shared tradition is increasingly side-lined, rejected, or condemned, and it reminded me of how, almost a century ago, the antisemitic German theologians of the 1930s de-Judaised, Christianity to make it ‘acceptable’ to the Third Reich.[5]

If the recent SBL conference in Adelaide is anything to go by, that kind of ideological revisionism, could become the theology preached from the pulpit by the new crop of divinity students in Australia.

[1] The Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah, the layman and governor, are separate in the Christian bible but combined in the Hebrew Bible as Ezra-Nehemiah.

[2] Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius (2016). (When I pointed out that ‘Terra Nullius’ did not reflect British policy toward indigenous people but was a term introduced in the 1970s by Justice Lionel Murphy who borrowed it from an African case, she responded by saying it was irrelevant, as the colonialist attitude was unremittingly negative.)

[3] Page Taylor, ‘Racism inquiry told of failures,’ The Australian, 18-19 July 2026.

[4] Amy Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, San Francisco: Harper One 2006.

[5] Robert P Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Dr Rachael Kohn AO, FRNS is a broadcaster and author.