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" Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There’s more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. So if you don’t have all the money you want, it’s because you lack the virtues required for success—industry, frugality and determination. A nineteenth-century biographer of George Washington put the matter this way: “In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands . . . why is any man hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?”[17] There appears to have been a trend from very early in American thought to invert Paul’s proverb “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thess 3:10 NIV 1984) to read, “If a man can’t eat, it is because he doesn’t work.” People know what they need to do to make money, we think, so if they’re poor, they must deserve it.
This understanding of wealth is the very opposite of how many non-Western cultures view it. Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. "
― E. Randolph Richards , Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible
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" bad behavior of its characters? In stories of right/wrong, we can identify the bad guys and the bad actions. Sometimes in Scripture it is harder. We sometimes see “sin” where the narrator did not intend it—or worse, we don’t see “sin” when the narrator was waving it in front of our faces. In the outrageous story in Judges 19 of the Levite and his concubine, we likely misread many parts. We see “sin” in several parts of the story: unfaithful concubine (v. 2), sexual assault (v. 22), rape (v. 25), cruelty (v. 28) and desecration of the dead (v. 29). We wouldn’t want to dispute any of these sins, but we likely missed some the narrator considered more important. The man repeatedly shamed the woman’s family by taking her from her parents but never giving her a full marriage (vv. 1-3) and later insulted her father’s hospitality (v. 10). Also, what the man had feared would happen in Jebus, a non-Israelite town (v. 12), actually happened in an Israelite town. "
― E. Randolph Richards , Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible
Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible