Slavery, the Hebrew Bible and the Development of Racial Theories in the Nineteenth Century
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European and American race scientists were fundamentally Christian in their orientation. This paper outlines how interpretations of the Hebrew Bible within this Christian Weltanschauung facilitated the development and articulation of racial theories which burgeoned in western intellectual discourse up to and during the 19th century. The book of Genesis was a particular seedbed for identity politics as the origin stories of the Hebrew Bible were plundered in service of articulating a racial hierarchy which justified both the place of Europeans at the pinnacle of divine creation and the denigration, bestialization, and enslavement of Africans as the worst of human filiation. That the racial ethos of the period dictated both the questions exegetes posed and the conclusions they derived from the text demonstrates that biblical interpretation within this climate was never an innocuous pursuit, but rather reflected the values and beliefs current in the social context of the exegete.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it