Because behaviors and values described in the Bible most often have no analogues among contemporary Euro-Americans, social scientific biblical interpretation uses appropriate, explicit models of behavior verifiable among contemporary peoples through which to process behavior described in biblical documents. While the process sounds anachronistic, models are judged as structurally appropriate when they accord with all relevant biblical data and thus generate new understanding. Among biblical data in search of a verifiable, explicit model is that of ancestrism and ancestor veneration. In this essay, data from First Maccabees describing Israelite time and ancestrism are viewed in comparative perspective, at a high level of abstraction, with ancestrism perspectives provided by sub-Saharan African biblical scholars and theologians. During the last thirty years the amount of work produced by African scholars has increased to the point that it can be considered a large corpus of original research. In their selection of biblical texts to work on, African scholars have stressed those passages that relate to their own cultural experience. These quite often embrace the social structures and cultural values described in the Old Testament. This essay will explore the categories of time and ancestry by comparing ancient Israelite and African perspectives, while noting the wide ranging contributions of African scholarship.
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