| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation analyses the role that biblical interpretation played in endowing racial whiteness with scriptural authority and privilege at the beginning of the British colonial project in North America, justifying imperial domination as the ideologies of race and empire coalesced in Britain over the course of the seventeenth century. It investigates the mechanisms behind such use of the Bible in what Vincent Wimbush calls the scripturalization of whiteness. In broad terms, scripturalization is the process by which aspects of culture become scripturally or religiously authoritative by getting read back into the biblical text through interpretation. Wimbush defines scripturalization as social-psychological-political structure establishing its own reality.^My thesis is that the scripturalization of whiteness, biblical interpretation fusing imperial, racial, and sacred ideologies, coalesced in early seventeenth-century Britain due to shifts in biblical interpretation caused by the rise of the British Empire, emergent racial ideology, and epistemological changes fueled by the combination of Protestant biblical literalism, emergent scientific discourse, and the rise of individual authority. These factors influenced late pre-critical biblical typologies of King Solomon as King James, especially Solomons maritime commerce with Ophir and his interactions with the figure of the Queen of Sheba in First Kings 9:10-10:29. Such identifications participated in wider interpretive traditions of understanding Britain as Israel that included portrayals of non-Christian, non-European lands and peoples as non-Israelite.^This dissertation employs methods of biblical reception history and hermeneutics of cultural criticism, postcolonial theory, and Critical Race Theory (CRT) to analyze selected writings from early seventeenth-century Britain, including those of King James I of England (1603-25) and prominent Anglicans: Bishop John Williams, Rev. Samuel Purchas, and Bishop Joseph Hall. I argue that the rise of the British Empire, marked by the first permanent English colony of Virginia in North America in 1607, required biblical sanctification for imperialization in commercial, military, colonial, and cultural-religious arenas. In addition, the construction of race supported these imperial-colonial projects and was also sanctified by biblical interpretation. Racial whiteness, in particular, evolved from combinations of European color symbolism and English exceptionalism, both of which were based in part on Protestant interpretation of biblical color symbolism and biblical exceptionalism.^Furthermore, with the rise of modernity following the Protestant Reformation, epistemological shifts driven by Protestant biblical literalism, proto-individualism, and developing scientific discourse of empiricism and fact allowed biblical typologies to at times reverse their frame of reference from the biblical world to the modern world. This dissertation exposes the work of the scripturalization of whiteness and explains how whiteness was scripturalized in a foundational period of British and Euro-American history, drawing attention within biblical studies to reception history of Solomon and narratives of Ophir and Sheba in early modern Europe and adding to the work within biblical studies using Critical Race Theory, especially critical whiteness studies. | |
