Hey guys welcome back to PSALMS to God! We are continuing the series on black Israel.

A couple of notes up front, before we jump into the episode— So first of all this is a series. So the first part of the series was released last week; so if you haven't listened to that already please go back and listen to that. It will definitely make more sense if you listen to the episodes in sequential order. I try not to do that but this is just one of those episodes where that's just the case. Also I want to make a correction and a clarification about something I said in the previous episode so we left off that episode talking about this pattern that the Israelites had with going into Egypt when there was a time of trouble or when they were in distress, and I start listing people that actually had gone into Egypt that were Hebrews and/or Israelites. And I misspoke and added Isaac to the list. Isaac had a desire to go to Egypt; that was his first instinct but God told him not to go and so he didn't. And so in my memory of the story I was thinking that he went but he didn't actually go. So wanted to make that clarification.

That clarification is in the show notes that I posted along with the episode but I know some of you probably don't actually read the show notes, so I wanted to verbally put it here. And I also wanted to put a reminder that I do try to link the scripture references and any other references that might be mentioned in the episode in the show notes for exactly this purpose. Sometimes I do misspeak. Sorry guys, I am human; but I try to be as precise as possible I'm when I'm recording the podcast. And so I just wanted to provide that option for people to double-check and of course encourage people that when you're listening to me or anyone else you should always be double-checking what people are telling you and the references and the context of the references because like I said some of us are only human and we make mistakes and then other people are actually purposely trying to mislead you. So you definitely want to be on top of the references and the quotes that people give you!

That being said let's jump into the episode. So we left off talking about this fact that the Israelites always fled into Egypt. And we talked about the fact that the Israelites looked like the Egyptian, and all of that is very important because of what the Bible says happened to them after they fled into Egypt.

Starting at the end of Deuteronomy 28, if we go to the very last verse verse 68, it says:

Now if you're looking at that verse, when you first look at it, obviously says they're going into Egypt so we don't even have to keep talking about that; they went back to Egypt. But when we’re looking at the rest of the verse, it says that they sold themselves as slaves, but then it says no one will buy them, and that's kind of a conundrum. You’re like wait a minute how can you sell yourself as a slave but nobody buys you?—that doesn't really make any sense. What I think is meant here is that in the Old Testament, particularly, but in the New Testament as well, there's this concept of redemption or being redeemed. It's talked about.. The most—I guess the obvious example that I think about is in Ruth, where it talks about redeeming somebody.

But basically the concept of slavery back then… In America when we think about slavery we think about hereditary slavery. Blacks in America were slaves because they were black and because they were born to slaves, and so the people who were in charge basically put this label of inferiority upon us, and just if you were black you were automatically a slave. But that's not how slavery necessarily worked in the old world and in the beginning.[4]

What happened back then is you had people who were conquered so if you are conquered people then you might end up a slave but also you had poor people who sold themselves into slavery. We didn't have welfare there weren't soup kitchens or food stamps or any of these things to help people who didn't have money or who didn't have a way to provide for themselves. So they might end up in servitude, but what would happen is if somebody went into servitude, maybe I know you and I find out that you're in this position—that you’ve gotten yourself into debt and that you've now sold yourself into slavery. If I have the money, perhaps I will come and pay off your debt and now you're no longer a slave. I am basically redeeming you; I'm buying you but really I'm buying your freedom. And I think that is what is meant by “no one will buy you.”

When they went into Egypt, they would become slaves but no one was going to come and redeem them from that slavery. They were going to just have to pay the price for their mistakes or their disobedience to God.

So once they got into Egypt where do they go? Because let's remember, Egypt would not have wanted to keep these people in their borders. The Egyptians may not admit that the Hebrews had been there and that, you know, the plagues happened, because that makes Egypt look bad—but we already know that Egypt was fond of defacing there hieroglyphics and things to erase history that they were not fond of. That doesn't mean they didn't know the story, they didn't know what happened. There are other passages in the Old Testament when they come up to people and people would know who the Israelites are. They know what God had done in Egypt, and so when they returned to Egypt, the Egyptians are definitely going to be wary of keeping these people as slaves because they know what happened the last time they kept these people as slaves. It's not a good idea. This could end up badly for them; they don't want that burden.

Now they don't want these people to go free, because the last time you see what happened to them. They're not friends with these people; they don't like these people, they don't really want them to prosper, but they also don't want damage coming to them. So they're definitely going to want to load off these people onto other people… Like “yeah we want you to be slaves, but not necessary our slaves.” You know what I'm saying? So if you can imagine maybe the Israelites end up, you know, propagating down into Africa. Maybe. This is speculation… But it makes sense when you start looking at where the Bible actually says they go after they've sold themselves into slavery into Egypt.

So let's read a couple of verses out of Deuteronomy 28. We're not going to read the whole thing because this episode would be way too long. I'm just going to highlight certain versus but I definitely encourage you to go back and read the whole thing. I also want to inser, I’m reading the CSB just because it's easier to read from than other versions and it seems to be fairly faithful to the translation. So let's go to verse 32… Verse 32 says:

So they're going to have children; their children are going to go somewhere but they can't do anything about it. Just remember that. That's just food for thought, okay. Then it says in verse 36:

So they’re going to a nation that they don't know about and their ancestors don't know about. Somewhere—nobody's ever heard of this nation.

Okay then let's go to verse 49:

Okay, so this nation that they've never heard of, that they don't know about, it's from the ends of the Earth—that explains why they don't know about it, because it's from the other end of the world—is going to swoop down like an eagle, and they're not going to know the language.

All right, but that's not where it stops. It continues on, and in verse 64 it tells you that:

So this pattern of them ending up in these places all over the world, from the ends of the Earth, far away, that they don't know about and that their ancestors don't know about.

So let's talk about what the Israelites knew and what they didn't know. Now, obviously this is a prophecy but let's think about the history of the Israelites and where they were going. OK, so I mean where they came from versus where they’re going.

Abraham is basically the father of the Israelites; he's the patriarch that they basically all call father Abraham. Obviously they descend all the way back to Shem and to Noah, but Abraham is typically the last patriarch that they reference often, because Abraham is the one they gave the promise to—or that God gave the promise to.

So, Abraham came to Canaan, which would eventually become Israel. from Ur—which was in the region that the Babylonian Empire would pop up in. So saying that you don't know about this land or these people in Babylon, it is a false statement. They knew about Babylon; these people were over there and they knew that land existed. They probably spoke that language as well or knew of that language.

You also have to remember that Israel is centrally located for the old world. Hint hint… Egypt was south of them, Europe was north of them, and then the Middle East, India, Asia all of these things were to the east. That meant that trade routes all flowed through Israel. So they would have had interaction with all of these people. This is also why other countries were so apt to attack and try to take advantage of this place, because it was perfect. It’s on the water—so you have sea ports and sea trade available to you, but also you have direct access to these different entities or these different power hubs from across the world. So they would have been very familiar with the people to the east, the people to the south, in the people directly north of them. The Greeks, the Romans, like I said the Babylonians, the Assyrians the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Ethiopian… All of these people are talked about in the Bible all the time! They know who these people are.

So who is it that they don't know that's going to come and take them out of Egypt, and scatter them across the world?

Let's think. At what point in history were people taken from the continent of Africa and scattered across the world to places that they did not know that their ancestors had never heard of and they didn't speak those languages? That sounds like the Transatlantic Slave Trade to me.

So, let's recap you have Hebrews who look like Egyptians and other Egyptians and Africans. So basically let's summarize this by saying that the Hamites and the Semites looked alike. So you have both Hamites and Semites on the continent of Africa. The Semites are in bondage to the Hamites, because we see that they sold themselves as slaves into here, into the nation of Africa, into Egypt. So the Hamites have these people that they don't want. The Egyptians have these people they don't want, and these people from far away—far away being Great Britain, Germany, France, the Danish, all of these countries that where way further north; countries that are not typically talked about in the Bible (They’re implicitly mentioned in the table of Nations, but they're not explicitly mentioned.) Like for instance, Ashkenaz, which means Germany, but the Germans did go into Africa too, but of course most of the Nations that ended up taking slaves and bring them over into the Americas would be the Spaniards, the English, the French, Portuguese; that's who brought slaves from Africa into the United States and into the South American countries, in the Central American countries, and into the islands around the Americas.

If you go to a history class, they will tell you the Africans sold themselves into slavery, that they were already slaves, and that the Africans sold their African slaves into slavery with the white man. But maybe those weren't African slaves that they were selling you, because remember in the last episode I gave you the examples of where they couldn't differentiate between the Egyptians and the Hebrews? They couldn't tell that Paul was an Israelite; they thought he was an Egyptian. So these same white people, you know they still saying all black people look alike. We all look alike to them. OK, they can't tell the difference between the Hebrews and the Egyptians. So of course they think that the Africans sold other Africans to them.

Then they take them to this land that they have never seen before and that they don't know anything about they don't know the language… Could be conjecture or that could be exactly what Moses was telling them was going to happen.

Why would I think that this is actually saying that the the Hebrew Israelites were actually black people or African Americans or the people who became slaves in America?

Bad things happen to people all the time in this planet. We live in a fallen world, and atrocities are happening every day. Last week my heart broke hearing about what's happening in Sudan. It is a tragedy there are mass killings, genocides, horrible things happening to people all over our planet, even today. And we're supposed to be a civilized world now. But bad things are still happening and it's not just in Sudan. There was a genocide in Myanmar it might still be happening; the media is not really good at keeping us up-to-date on whether things are still happening or in progress, that it's over… I don't really know, you have to really actively keep seeking out information about these atrocities that are happening in other nations, and even in our own nation atrocities are still happening.

But the point that I want to focus in on for Deuteronomy 28 is that, like I said, it says that they will be scattered among the nations, and it also talks about the separation of the families and stuff like that. There could be people still on the continent of Africa; there are definitely people scattered across other continents, other countries, because it says that they would be scattered across the ends of the Earth. So everywhere on the planet, the Hebrews were scattered to, and we cannot forget about the lost tribes, because these curses are given before Israel splits up. So these don't just apply to the tribe of Judah, which is what we refer to as the Jewish people. This also refers to the lost tribes from Assyria and where they went, who knows.

So even in talking about this, the Assyrians could have sold their captives off into the Americas, they could have sold them into China, into Japan. You really don't know how far they were scattered out, and what happened. Like I said, they definitely would have intermixed and intermingled with people. So in other countries where they were scattered, I don't necessarily know what their phenotype looks like now, but I am focusing in on what this is saying and what this particular passage [is saying] because the odds of all of these things happening to one people make it really really clear that this has to be about those people.

Yes, parts of this have definitely happened to this group and that group, and is not to say that those people are or are not part of this prophecy. But—like I said—if somebody fit every single point that's given in the prophecy, they are definitely a part of the prophecy.

So before I continue in reading Deuteronomy 28 and highlighting some other verses, I want to pause to give some historical context to American slavery. I don't want to just be here telling you what I have learned happened in American slavery, I want to read from scholarly sources. So in a peer-reviewed journal there is an article called “Rape As A Badge of Slavery: The Legal History of and Remedies for Prosecutorial Race-of-Victim Charging Disparities,” and this article is by Jeffrey Pokorak—no idea if I pronounced his name right.[1]

In this article, it says “for most of this nation's history raping a black woman was simply not a crime. First, laws for the prosecution of any offender for the rape of a slave woman”—so there were laws in place that made sure that if a white man (or a black man) raped a black woman, they couldn't prosecute them. And we see instances of this…

If you want to search on feminism—black feminism vs. white feminism—you will see other information about how treatment of black women in the U.S. is different than treatment of white women, and that there are certain problems or disadvantages of being black and woman that don't necessarily apply to white women. You'll also see a lot of things about how historically people have basically caped for the white man or the white woman's innocence and virtue. So there's been a lot of massacres and revolts or mass killings of black men under the claim that they are protecting the virtue of the white woman. Rosewood being the first thing that pops into my head, but you don't hear of that same vigilance at protecting the virtue of the black woman. In fact in society, we are more so painted as the harlot or the promiscuous [woman]. You can look up the—I think it's called… Oh how am I forgetting her name? The famous woman… I will link it in the description.[3] She was basically paraded around because of her features—her large breasts, her big butt. And they basically paraded her and gawked at her and basically over-sexualized her, as they do black women often. And so this article goes into the history of how it was basically always okay to rape black women, but not okay to rape white women. And this is also a product of how slave masters treated their slaves.

So white men raped their slaves all the time. One it gave them free slaves, because if you buy one slave, and you raped that slave, and they have a baby, that baby is also a slave. And now you have a free slave. Also you know, I don't know, they just decided they wanted to rape their slaves. So that was a very common practice. There was also things like plaçage;[5] if you look up the history of New Orleans and you look up the gens de couleur [libre]. It was a set of quote quote free black people—they still didn't have rights the way white people did, but a lot of times the women would enter into what is called plaçage, which meant that they were kept by a white man. They weren't married to this person, and this person would have a spouse, but he would come and he would sleep with them and they would have children and he would pay for their lifestyle.

It was sort of voluntary but when you have these types of power plays in place, it's not really voluntary. You don't really have a choice; it's a survival mechanism. And so these things were part of the American slavery landscape. I want to also read from the encyclopedia. So this is from Encyclopedia Britannica and so this says that “increasingly the supply of slaves came to be supplemented by the practice of slave breeding in which women slaves were persuaded to conceive as early as age 13 and to give birth as often as possible. Laws known as the slave codes regulated the slave system to promote absolute control by the master, complete submission by the slave. Under these laws the slave was chattel a piece of property and a source of labor that could be bought and sold like an animal. The slave was allowed no stable family life and little privacy.”[2]

So these articles—this encyclopedia article, and the previous article—I just wanted to give you a little bit of context outside of just me talking about what I know of what slavery looked like in America.

But now let's go back to Deuteronomy 28 talk about what was going to happen to the people of Israel when they ended up in this far away land that they didn't know about and their fathers didn't know about. So let's go to verse 30. Verse 30 says;

Then in verse 41 it says that:

Then if you continue reading, and you read verse… Oh, I skipped a verse, let's go back to 26:

And I wanted to bring out these three particular verses because they say something very specific to the horrors that black people endured once they were taken to this land that their fathers didn't know about. So like the article said, there was no such thing as a stable family life for slaves. The way things worked is that slaves could get married with the permission of the master. So you couldn't just marry whomever you wanted to. And a lot of time slaves would try to marry slaves from another plantation, because if they were married to somebody on their plantations, then the master could use that person against them, right—when they were trying to issue out punishment and things like that. But either way the master still had the right to sell the slaves. They didn't necessarily recognize these marriages, and they didn't have to grant them the right to marry, because it wasn't necessarily in the slave owners’ best interest. And they didn't think of these slaves as people; they thought of them as property. So a lot of times they were denied the right to marry, and that is where we get the modern tradition of jumping the broom[6]—it's what slaves did to signify that they were married and it was assigned to all the other slaves that they were married.

The Bible tells us that these people would become engaged but another man would rape them. And this was also part of that tactic of breeding the slave. So they wanted as many slaves as possible the cheap way—they didn't have to go out and buy slaves. So if they could get their slaves to reproduce then they would have plenty of slaves. But we all know that… You know, when you breed—okay, like I said they thought of slaves as animals—so when you breed animals, you want to take the animals with the best qualities and breed them together. You don't want the runt—the two runts—breeding together. That is going to produce more runts. So they wanted a hand in knowing who was sleeping with who, because they wanted “quality” slaves. So this man might have been engaged to this woman and this woman might have been in love with this man, but a slave owner might have thought that that was a bad mix. So he wanted this other slaves to sleep with that woman to produce “better” slaves for him. So he might force those slaves to sleep together, or like I said he might rape the slave himself. All kinds of horrors… But it's talked about right here.

Then in the other instance of your sons and daughters being taken away from them… Obviously we know that they did not care about family relationships. They would just rip the babies out of the mother's hands. They would sell the mother; they would sell the father. The would sell the kids. They did not care. This is why black people today have such a hard time tracing their ancestry. And of course the fact that they wouldn't issue black people birth certificates and there was very loose record of who was who and where they were. But none the less there was no sanctity for the family, and that is also what the Bible tells us.

But that last verse that I read the one that I almost skipped is the one that stands out the most to me. I want to read it one more time for you:

Have you guys heard the song Strange Fruit? Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. It’s a song about the Jim Crow South and lynching. What they would do to put fear in the hearts of black people—other than tar and feathering them—is they would lynch them, and they would hang them from the trees. But they would leave the bodies hanging from the tree as a sign of fear, as a psychological warfare, physical warfare. A terrorism to the black community, to say “stay in your place,” and when they would leave these bodies up there, you can imagine that the birds the wild animals, the gnats, the mosquitoes, whatever, would come and eat at the corpses. And if you went to try to take these corpses down: if you were white they would probably put you in jail or something, and if you were black, they were going to kill you too. So this also talks about lynching. Something else that happened to black people in the United States, in the Caribbean, in South America, in Central America—this is what happened, and it's mentioned in the Bible, y'all! It's literal. Like, every single thing that's mentioned here happened to us!

So we're 30 minutes again, we're a little over 30 minutes ,and I am not done because there's more. Yep, there's more! Deuteronomy 28:15-68, it's gold. Don't forget to read it. We will come back and we will finish this out. I will see you guys next time so you can catch the transcripts for this particular episode at www.psalmstogod.com/blackisrael2. See you next time!