In the days leading up to Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, and in a circulated letter written after the initial violence outside the Morant Bay courthouse on October 11, Black Native Baptist deacon Paul Bogle called on other residents of St. Thomas-in-the-East to join him in fighting for the rights of the parish’s Black residents. He framed the events that were unfolding as a race war and urged others to join the cause, “Skin for skin!” Chapter 2 traces the interpretive history of this slogan, drawn from Job 2:4, and shows how it came to be used within the international anti-slavery movement. In using the phrase, Bogle aimed at a Black alliance that would cut across ethnic, religious, and class lines and that would be willing to meet White violence with a violent Black response. Although the rebellion was crushed, Bogle’s vision has lived on, shaping the experience of race in Jamaica today.

On behalf of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society, Quaker reformer Eliza Wigham drafted a public letter of condolence to Maria Jane, wife of George William Gordon, who had been executed for his alleged involvement in Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Wigham applied Matthew 25:40 – “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” – to George William Gordon. Chapter 5 shows how this text reflected a central pillar of the logic of the international anti-slavery movement. As deployed in sermons, speeches at public meetings, and argumentative pamphlets and books, including some penned by Wigham, this biblical text encoded a hierarchy that valued White heroism while delegitimizing Black agency in resisting White power. The chapter thus reckons with the fact that in the years and decades after the rebellion Bogle and other Black Jamaicans who died with him were viewed, even by White liberals, as misguided, or even barbarous.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.

Having been found guilty of treason, George William Gordon spent his last hour writing to his wife a letter containing personal goodbyes, business notes, and a firm protestation of innocence. Thanks to the newspaper-savviness of his mother-in-law Ann Shanon and his acquaintance Louis Chamerovzow, the letter was published in dozens of papers around the world. It fell like a thunderclap, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the Jamaica government and the island’s White English governor, Edward John Eyre. Chapter 3 examines Gordon’s use of biblical language in his final letter. Enslaved at birth on the Cherry Garden estate, and rising to become an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest legislative body, Gordon invoked 2 Timothy 4:17 – “I have fought a good fight” – to present an alternative to Paul Bogle’s vision of a Black alliance prepared to meet White violence with a violent Black response. For Gordon, Black advancement would come only through what he considered legitimate forms of protest, namely political agitation and the shaping of public opinion in newspapers.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

Having opposed Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy as an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest elected legislative body, and as a journalist and publisher, mixed-race Jamaican Robert Alexander Johnson migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the Tribune. Chapter 4 recovers Johnson’s body of writing on Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–6. Johnson adopted the position that the events of October 11 were a riot, not a planned, organized rebellion. How, then, could Johnson account for the brutal government suppression? He quoted Hebrew 11:4 – “he, being dead, yet speaketh” – which summarizes Cain’s murder of Abel. Johnson, like a long line of Black interpreters this chapter traces, looked to the Cain and Abel story to provide an etiology of the inexplicable savagery of White violence. Johnson warned readers contemplating Reconstruction not to entrust the rights of free Black Americans to their former White enslavers.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.

Before beginning the critical, scientific inquiry into the history of Saul, David, and Solomon in the rest of the book, this chapter offers a simple run-through of the main elements of the biblical story itself. It begins with the biblical depiction of the time of the Judges, before there were kings in Israel, and then tells the story of Saul, leading to the rise of the monarchy. It outlines the biblical depiction of his reign as Israel’s first king, along with his later interactions with David, who became his successor. It briefly lays out how David took the throne and expanded the kingdom, and the troubles he experienced within the royal family, including the battles of succession first with Absalom then between Solomon and Adonijah. Finally, the chapter lays out the story of Solomon’s glorious rule, and then his death and the division of his kingdom in the time of his son Rehoboam.

This chapter reviews the ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish evidence to discern the marriage practices the early Christians would have known. It lays the foundation for tracing the antiquity of customs attested in the later Byzantine sources. In addition to ancient texts, this chapter examines Roman artistic depiction of marriage in frescoes and funerary art.

Betrothal was originally an independent rite that solemnized a promise to marry and also had legal and canonical ramifications in Byzantium. This chapter analyzes the ritual gestures employed in betrothal across the Eastern Mediterranean world, such as the exchange of rings or other gifts. It also discusses the ecclesiastical prayers recited at Byzantine betrothals and what they reveal about theological perceptions of marriage, as well as family roles and domestic practices.

Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

Before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins acquired a copy of the Vulgate Latin Bible for future use and returned his copy of the King James Bible to his unhappy father. From a Bible-centred Protestant perspective, much of the doctrine on which he was to meditate as a Jesuit poet is non-scriptural, and could be described as Catholic accretions. This chapter reveals that Catholic versions of the Bible underwent revision down the centuries, as Protestant versions did, and that Victorian Catholics were not forbidden to read the Bible. A new Holy Catholic Bible is adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in glory. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was promulated in 1854, further widening the gap between Protestant and Catholic teaching. But for Hopkins, the unpublished laureate of the Blessed Virgin, the (unscriptural) Immaculate Conception lay at the heart of his faith.

This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

This essay explores the role of the dictionary in religious history, specifically as a conduit of social and intellectual authority brought to bear in religious interpretation, sitting both upstream and downstream of the broader flow of history, culture, and forms of knowledge. Of particular interest is the history of three categories of reference works: the bilingual dictionary (or lexicon) focused on ancient biblical languages; the Bible dictionary, focused on biblical realia, geography, and similar topics; and the theological dictionary, focused on significant biblical ideas associated with particular words or the ancient speakers. The categories are situated historically in the development of biblical scholarship and philology in the West, from the pre-modern era through the contemporary and digital context. Two case studies demonstrate the intersection between dictionaries, biblical interpretation, and cultural ideologies: use of Bible dictionaries and lexicons in the antebellum period as a tool for attacking or defending slavery on biblical grounds in the American South; and the influence on theological dictionaries in the early twentieth century from the anti-Semitic context of Nazi Germany.