White Christians Entered a Story Already in Progress
In Day 198 of The Bible Recap, Tara-Leigh Cobble pauses over Isaiah 19:23–25.
Egypt and Assyria, the great enemies of Israel, are reconciled to God and to one another.
God calls Egypt “my people,” Assyria “the work of my hands,” and Israel “my inheritance.”
Cobble tells her largely American audience:
“None of these people are white. Don’t worry, we’ll join this family eventually, white people, but we’re still a few hundred years off.”
She is joking.
But she is also correcting the picture many Western Christians inherited.
White Christianity is part of the biblical family.
It is not the face, origin or center of that family.
Modern racial categories did not exist in Isaiah’s world. These people were Judean, Egyptian, Cushite or Nubian, and Assyrian—peoples of West Asia and Africa.
The historical sequence matters:
- Eighth century BCE: Isaiah imagines Israel, Egypt and Assyria worshipping together. Cush has already appeared prominently in the preceding chapter.
- Fourth through first centuries BCE: Greek power moves into the center of the biblical world after Alexander.
- First century CE: Rome rules the Mediterranean, and the gospel spreads into Macedonia, Greece and eventually Rome.
- Seventeenth century CE: “Whiteness” hardens into the legal and political racial identity later used in the Atlantic world.
Aegean and European peoples appear earlier around the Bible’s edges. But through nearly the entire Hebrew Bible, the story’s center remains overwhelmingly West Asian and African.
Acts makes the order almost impossible to miss.
An Ethiopian is baptized in Acts 8 before Paul crosses into Macedonia in Acts 16.
Europe did not bring Africa into God’s family.
Africa was already there.
European Christians entered as Gentiles welcomed into an ancient covenant story, not as the racial supervisors of the people who preceded them.
That is what makes Dale Partridge’s revived Curse-of-Ham theology so backward. He takes later European political power, reads it backward into Genesis, and calls it divine headship. Africans become naturally dependent. Europeans become providential rulers. Colonial domination becomes discipleship.
Read: The Return of the Curse of Ham in MAGA Christian Nationalist Theology
Isaiah’s vision moves in the opposite direction.
It does not place Egypt beneath Israel or Assyria above Egypt.
It names former enemies together as the people, workmanship and inheritance of God.
Tara-Leigh Cobble’s reminder is simple, but devastating:
White Christians joined a family already populated by Africa and West Asia.
They enter beside them.
Not above them.
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