One Blood

Page 159 of the New Testament section carries notes on the book of Acts. Near the top of the column sits a verse. Paul is in Athens. He is a Jew alone in a pagan city, talking to philosophers who worship gods he has never heard of. And he tells them something that would have startled them: you and I come from the same family.¹

Now look down the column. Below that verse, in small type, Finis Dake set a numbered list. Its heading reads: “30 reasons for segregation of races: (Acts 17:26).”² The first reason sets the frame for every one that follows.

Read that plainly. It says two things. God made the races separate on purpose. And crossing that line is not just unwise. It is rebellion against God.

Chapter 20 did one job. It put the page in front of you, and the pages around it, and did not characterize a word it had not first displayed. The complete text lives in Appendix B, numbered as Dake numbered it, so you can check anything I say here against the original.

Here is the question: what do you have to do to Acts 17:26 to get thirty reasons for segregation out of the space beneath it?

Why It Matters

I want to be careful, because there are two ways to answer this page and only one of them is worth the ink.

The easy way is to say that we know better now. That answer costs nothing. It also gives up the one thing that matters. If the reply to page 159 is that our century has better manners, then the note wins the argument about the Bible and only loses the argument about taste. The note claims to be Bible teaching. So it has to be answered as Bible teaching, from the same Bible it was printed inside.

That word inside is the whole problem. This was not a pamphlet someone handed out at the door. It sat in the margins of Scripture, beneath the verse, in the same typeface as the notes on prayer and prophecy.

Notes do not carry the authority of Scripture. But they borrow its light. A note sitting below a verse looks like that verse explained. That is what a study Bible is for. And it is why a bad note in that spot does damage that a bad book on a shelf never could. For years this note was where a reader landed when he wanted to know what Acts 17:26 meant.³

So I am not going to rush through this. We are going to open the texts the note cites, and some it does not. We will read them the way the note asked to be read: literally, in context, and out loud.

The Texts Opened

1. One Race, One Image

Start where the Bible starts. Genesis 1 tells how living things were made, and it uses a word for categories over and over. Plants appear “according to its kind.” Sea creatures and birds and land animals come “according to its kind.” The Hebrew word is min. It means something like type or category.

So the argument goes like this. God made creatures in kinds. People come in colors. Therefore the colors are kinds, and mixing them breaks a creation law.

Go back to Genesis 1 and read slowly, watching for that word. It shows up ten times. Every single time it describes plants, fish, birds, or land animals.⁴ Then the text reaches human beings. And the pattern stops.

Man is not made according to his kinds. Man is made in God’s image. The text switches on purpose. Every other creature is sorted by its type. The human creature is sorted by whose likeness it carries.

That is not a small detail. It is the hinge of the whole chapter. And the note built its second reason on the one word Genesis 1 will not use for people.

This was not something Dake missed by accident. Elsewhere in the same Bible he made a numbered list of the created kinds and worked straight down Genesis 1. Grass. Herbs. Fruit. Water creatures. Birds. Land creatures. Cattle. Creeping things. Beasts. Nine true readings. Then came item 10.

Open Genesis 1:26–28 and look. That phrase is not there. It is the one paragraph in the chapter that drops the formula, and it drops it on purpose. Nine rungs of the ladder are nailed to the text. The tenth is nailed to nothing.

The rest of the early chapters keep saying the same thing. Adam names his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all living.”⁶ One mother. After the flood, one family walks off one boat, and the text shuts the door on any other line of descent: “These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated.”

Then comes Genesis 10, the table of nations. Seventy nations, spreading by families and languages and territories. The Bible’s own map of human variety. And it is a family tree. Every nation is a branch, not a separate trunk. When Paul told those philosophers that God made every nation from one blood, he was reading Genesis out loud to Greeks.

2. The Anchor Verse, Clause by Clause

The note claims Acts 17:26 as its own. So take the verse apart, one piece at a time.

“He has made from one blood every nation of men.” Paul is telling pagan philosophers that they and he share a single source.⁷ To an Athenian audience this would have been offensive. They told themselves they had sprung from their own soil, a race apart. Paul takes that away in six words. One family. You are in it. So am I.

“And has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings.” This is the clause the note rests on. Reason 3 quotes it directly.

That much is true. God does govern where peoples live and how long their seasons last. But notice what kind of sentence Paul is making. He is describing what God has done. He is not giving orders to people.

The difference is enormous. God also appoints the day of a person’s death. That is providence. It is not a rule telling us to plan our own funerals. Turning a statement about what God does into a law for human conduct is a move the sentence does not make. The grammar does not allow it. And neither does the rest of the paragraph.⁸

There is also a simple test. If verse 26 orders nations to stay inside their boundaries, then Paul was breaking it while he said it. He was a Jew from Tarsus, standing in Athens, telling Greeks about a Jewish Messiah. The apostle who preached the clause spent his whole career crossing the lines the note reads into it.

“So that they should seek the Lord.” Here is the part the note never touches. Verse 26 is not a finished sentence. It runs straight into verse 27, and verse 27 gives the purpose of everything in verse 26. Why did God spread the nations across the earth and set their times? So they would look for Him. And He is “not far from each one of us.”

Read the whole sentence and the shape is plain. One origin. Many nations. One purpose: that all of them find God. It is a missionary sentence. Thirty reasons for keeping people apart were printed beneath a verse whose own stated goal is that everyone reach the same Father.

3. Israel’s Separation, and Why It Was Not Racial

The largest group of reasons points to Israel. Reasons 5 through 13 walk through the patriarchs and the law of Moses. Reasons 15 through 18 add the later history. Two are typical.

Israel really was told to stay separate. That is in the text, and no honest reader should deny it. The question is what kind of barrier it was. And on that, the Bible does not leave us guessing. It gives the reason in the same breath as the command.

“For they will turn your sons away from following Me.” That is the whole reason. It is about worship. The danger was idolatry, not ancestry. God was not guarding a bloodline. He was guarding a covenant.

Now here is the part I did not expect to find. Dake’s own note on that verse says the same thing.

Turn to Deuteronomy 7 in his Bible and you will find a numbered note beneath the command. The heading reads “4 reasons for total segregation.” Here are the four.

Count what is in that list. Idolatry. Idolatry again. Holiness. Election. Four reasons. Not one of them is about ancestry, color, or type. The heading says segregation. The contents say worship.

The same thing happens at Joshua 23. Dake gathers the commands there under a heading. And the heading is not about race. It is “8 commands – against backsliding.”

Look at what sits on each side of item 3. Do not name their gods. Do not swear by them. Do not serve them. Cleave to the Lord. Love Him. Every neighbor of that command is about worship. And the heading files the whole list under backsliding, which is a word about faith.

One more. This one gives the case away. On the Ezra pages, where the elders refuse the Samaritans’ offer of help, Dake writes this.

Read the fourth sentence again. “God permitted inter-marriage and even blessed such on rare occasions.”

That sentence cannot live in the same book as reason 1. Reason 1 says any crossing of God’s racial lines is insubordination. This note says God sometimes blessed the crossing. A creation law does not have exceptions God smiles on. A covenant safeguard does.

I am not scoring a point off an inconsistency. I am saying that the man who wrote the thirty reasons knew the right answer when he stood in front of the actual texts. The answer changed when he gathered the references onto one page.

And watch what follows, because it settles the question. If the barrier were racial, it could never be crossed. If it is religious, it can be crossed by faith. And in Israel’s own story, it is crossed again and again.

Rahab was a Canaanite from Jericho, from the very nation Deuteronomy warns about. She believed, and she lived in Israel afterward. Ruth was a Moabite, and Deuteronomy 23 had barred Moabites from the assembly to the tenth generation. She told Naomi, “Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” She married Boaz and became the great-grandmother of King David. When Israel left Egypt, a mixed multitude came out with them.¹²

And God said He planned it that way. Isaiah speaks to the foreigner who fears he has no place, and answers him directly.

Then there is the genealogy of Jesus. Matthew opens his Gospel with the Messiah’s family tree, and he does something unusual for his day. He names women. Tamar. Rahab the Canaanite. Ruth the Moabite. The wife of Uriah.¹³ Foreign women, written into the family line of Christ, on the first page of the New Testament.

That is the covenant commenting on itself. God kept Israel distinct so that true worship would survive. He never sealed it shut. And some of the outsiders who came in ended up in the ancestry of His Son.

4. The Curse That Was Not There

For over a hundred years, defenders of slavery and segregation leaned on Genesis 9, where Noah wakes from his wine and speaks a curse. It became the standard prop for religious racism in America.¹⁴ Many readers assume it must appear somewhere in Dake’s thirty reasons.

It does not. I checked all five photographs of page 159 that this library holds, item by item. No reason in the note cites Genesis 9:20–27. No reason makes that argument.¹⁵ Dake reached for many texts. He did not reach for that one. Fairness says I should say so, and I am glad to.

But I still want to open the passage. Readers who defend the note often bring it up on their own, and the text itself shows how far a misreading can travel.

Read it slowly and count what is missing. Ham is not cursed. Canaan is. Noah speaks the words, not God. There is no mention of skin. No mention of Africa. No mention of race. And Canaan’s descendants are the Canaanites, the people Israel would meet later in the land of promise.¹⁶

Every piece of the famous argument has to be brought in from outside the text. Keep that in mind, because we are about to watch it happen with texts the note actually uses.

5. The Remaining Reasons, by Type

The mixture laws. Six of the reasons point to Israel’s rules about keeping things unmixed.

These laws are real. They are also ceremonial. They belong to a body of teaching that made holiness visible in ordinary life: a field, a garment, a yoke.¹⁷ To move from a rule about seed and wool to a rule about human beings, you have to treat people of different colors as different species.

“Each species of man.” There it is, said plainly. The whole argument rests on that phrase. And Genesis 1 has already refused it. There is one species of man. Made in the image of God, male and female. The Bible never divides him further.

But there is a sharper problem, and it sits on the same page. A few inches away from the segregation note, in the next column, Dake printed a note titled “10 reasons 4th commandment left out.” He is arguing that Christians are not bound to keep the Sabbath. Here is part of how he argues it.

Now read the two notes together. On one part of page 159, ceremonial law given to Israel is a shadow that does not bind the church. On another part of the same page, ceremonial law about cloth and seed and cattle binds modern people to racial separation.

Same page. Same man. Same category of law. Opposite conclusions. I do not think he noticed. That is what makes it worth pointing out.

The reasons drawn from stories. Several of the thirty point not to commands but to events. Reason 11 is the clearest.

Genesis 34 is the story of Simeon and Levi tricking the men of Shechem and slaughtering them while they were helpless. The note offers this as evidence that God’s people kept a segregation law. So read to the end and see how the Bible files it. Jacob rebukes them on the spot.¹⁹ Then years later, on his deathbed, he comes back to it. He curses what they did.

A massacre that the dying patriarch cursed with his last breath is offered as a reason God wills segregation. Scripture records the act. It does not approve it. A story is not a command. And this story comes with the verdict already attached.

Set aside the long argument about what Genesis 6 describes. Chapter 19 covers that, and Dake has a great deal to say there.²⁰ Take his reading for the moment. On his account the sin is that creatures of one order crossed into another order entirely. Angels are not human beings. That is the whole horror of the passage as he reads it.

But look at what the reason needs. For angels to teach us something about human marriage, people of different nations would have to stand in relation to each other roughly the way angels stand to humans: as different orders of being. Genesis 1 shut that door on its first page. We are one creature, made in one image. The argument only works if the conclusion it wants is already hidden in the premise.

Read the middle of reason 19 carefully: “Equal rights in the gospel gives no right to break this eternal law.” That sentence sees the gospel and then overrules it. Yes, it says, the gospel gives equality. But no, that equality does not reach here. Something stands above the gospel, and it is separation.

Reason 23 pushes the claim into the next world. Heaven itself will be segregated in worship. I have read that line many times. It still stops me. We will come back to it, because Revelation answers it in as many words.

The reasons that turn Babel upside down. Reason 3 sends the reader to Genesis 11, and the notes there show the reading. In Dake’s Bible, Babel is a story about integration.

Open Genesis 11 and see what the builders actually say. Two things. “Let us make a name for ourselves.” And “lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”²²

Pride, and a refusal to fill the earth as God had said. That is the sin. Not one syllable of it is about types or colors. Being one people is not the crime. God will spend the rest of the Bible making one people.

And look at what God does with Babel later. At Pentecost every man hears the wonders of God in his own tongue. The scattering is not undone by forcing everyone to sound the same. It is healed by a gospel that speaks every language at once.

The reasons that are not from Scripture at all. Some of the thirty carry claims no verse supplies. Reason 2 ends, “or He would have kept them all alike to begin with.” That is not exegesis. It is a guess about God’s motives, drawn from the fact that people look different. Reason 4 defines a modern social term and then reports what “the Bible” opposes.²³

This is worth naming out loud. The format of a study Bible lends the weight of the page to whatever is printed on it. When claims that come from outside Scripture show up in that space, in that typeface, under that verse, they arrive wearing borrowed clothes. A reader has no way to tell which sentences came from the text and which came from the era.

There was disunity in Numbers 12. The note is right about that much. So open the chapter and find out who caused it.

Moses married a Cushite woman.²⁵ The marriage is reported in one verse and causes no one any trouble. Then his sister and brother start talking. The disunity begins in verse 1. It begins in their mouths.

God hears it. He calls all three of them to the tabernacle, defends Moses in the strongest possible terms, and leaves in anger. Then this happens.

The judgment does not fall on the marriage. It falls on the woman who complained about it. God took the side of the couple, not the critic. And He marked the critic in her own body.²⁶

The note has the chapter backwards. Yes, a mixed marriage caused disunity among God’s people. It caused disunity because two people objected to it, and God settled the argument against them.

6. Where the Gospel Ends Up

Paul writes to the Ephesians about the deepest human division his world knew: the wall between Jew and Gentile. There was a real wall in the temple, with an inscription warning that a Gentile who crossed it had himself to blame for his death.²⁷ Here is what Paul says Christ did with it.

One new man from the two. Not two kept tidy in their places. Christ did not manage the wall. He broke it down. The cross is where He did it.

The same note sounds everywhere Paul writes. “There is neither Jew nor Greek . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” To the Colossians he goes further and names the ethnic slur of his day: barbarian, Scythian. The people everyone else looked down on.²⁸

Then there is Acts 8, and I find it hard to read this passage next to reason 22 without feeling something shift. Reason 22 says that certain people in Israel were not even allowed to worship with others, and it cites Deuteronomy 23:1–3.²⁹ That law excluded eunuchs and Moabites from the assembly.

So God sends Philip down a desert road to meet an Ethiopian eunuch. A man excluded twice over by the very verses reason 22 quotes. He is reading Isaiah. Philip explains the gospel to him. They come to water, and the man asks the question the whole scene exists to raise: “What hinders me from being baptized?”³⁰

Nothing hinders him. He goes on his way rejoicing. And Isaiah, the book he was reading, had promised exactly this to the foreigner and the eunuch, centuries before.

Two chapters later Peter stands in a Gentile house and says out loud what he has just learned: “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him.”³¹

And then the end. Reason 23 said that even in heaven certain groups will not be allowed to worship together. Here is what John actually saw.

All nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues. One multitude. One throne. Standing together. A few chapters earlier, John hears why they are there: the Lamb redeemed them “out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.”³² The blood that made them one at the beginning is not the blood that gathers them at the end. The first was Adam’s. The last is Christ’s. But both make one people.

The Answer Continues

7. How a Page Like This Gets Made

I have spent a long time with these notes. And I no longer think this page came from hatred. I think it came from method. That is harder to say, and more useful.

Look at how the thirty are built. Not one of them asks what Paul meant in Acts 17:26. Not one considers who he was talking to, or how the sentence ends. The verse shows up twice inside the list. Both times it is cited for the boundaries clause. Neither time does it quote the one-blood clause the verse opens with.³³

What the note does is collect. It runs the whole Bible looking for anything that separates, and stacks the results. Marriages the patriarchs refused. Cities Israel would not enter. Cattle, seed, cloth, oxen. Each item is a real verse. Together they make an argument no single verse makes.

That is why his own notes disagree with the list. At Deuteronomy 7 he gave four religious reasons. At Ezra he admitted God had blessed mixed marriages. At Joshua 23 he filed the command under backsliding. Then he gathered it all onto one page, and the page said what none of those notes had said.

That method has a name in this book. Chapter 4 traced how his reading style lets a chain of references stand in for the reading of a text. Page 159 is that method applied to a subject his world had already settled for him.

Here is the warning I want to leave, because it goes past Dake. The conclusion came first. The concordance came second. The verses came third, selected because they matched, not because they meant. A person can do that with an open Bible and never feel dishonest about it.

Every generation reads with its own hands on the text. Dake’s generation handed him a settled answer about race, and he found it in the Scriptures. I do not stand above that danger. Neither do you. The only protection is the habit the Bereans had: going back to the text and checking whether these things are so.³⁴

8. What to Do with a Page Like This

Some of you grew up in churches where this Bible sat on the pulpit. You may be feeling something heavy right now. I am not going to talk you out of it.

There is a scene in 2 Chronicles that I think about whenever this subject comes up. Workmen repairing the temple find the Book of the Law, lost under the rubble of a building God’s people were still using. They bring it to King Josiah and read it to him. He does not explain it away. He tears his clothes.³⁵

That is the right response to finding out what was printed under a verse. Not a shrug. Not a defense. Grief first, then the open Book.

And notice what Josiah did next. He did not throw out the Scriptures because they had been lost. He read them and he cleaned house. That is the difference this whole book is asking you to hold. The Bible on your table is not the problem. The notes around the text are notes.

Some of you are reading from the other side. Someone taught you, from a Bible, that God wanted you kept apart. And you have carried that. I want to say something to you carefully, because it is not mine to say lightly.

What that page said about you, the verse above it had already answered. One blood. Same Father. Same image. The note was printed later, by a man, in small type. It has since been quietly rewritten and then removed by his own publishers.³⁶ The verse has not moved. It was true while the note sat beneath it, and it is still true now.

Answering the Defenses

Three replies come back whenever I teach this material. Each one deserves its strongest form before I answer it.

The clause is there. God does govern where nations rise and how long they last. But Paul is telling Athenians what God has done in history. He is not issuing them a policy. Taking a description of providence and turning it into a command for human behavior is a move the sentence never makes.

And the sentence does not stop there. The purpose clause in verse 27 controls the whole thing: God did all of it so people would seek Him and find Him. A defense built on half of verse 26 has to stop reading before the sentence is finished. That is actually the mirror image of the charge, and it belongs to the note, not to its critics.

God did set Israel apart. But Deuteronomy 7 gives the reason in the same breath as the command, and the reason is worship. Dake’s own note on that verse gives four reasons. All four are about religion. A religious barrier can be crossed by conversion. A racial one cannot be crossed at all.

And Israel’s own records show the barrier being crossed, with God’s approval, over and over. Rahab. Ruth. The mixed multitude. The foreigner in Isaiah 56. A wall God meant to keep standing would not have that many doors built into it.

Partly true. And no defense at all. Chapter 24 takes this up in full, since it really applies to the whole book. Here I answer only where it touches these texts.

Two things are wrong with it. First, the history. His world was not unanimous. The movement Dake belonged to was born in an interracial revival. In 1906, in Los Angeles, a Black preacher named William J. Seymour led meetings where Black and white believers worshipped side by side, during a period when the law kept them apart nearly everywhere else. Charles Parham, who had taught Seymour, came and objected to exactly that mixing.³⁷ The argument was live inside Pentecostalism from its first day. Dake’s own denominational family tells that story about itself.

The second problem is simpler. His contemporaries had Acts 17:26 too. So did he. The verse was on the same page, four inches above the note, in the same ink. The defense asks me to excuse a man for not knowing something the top of his own page said plainly.

I will say the fair thing alongside it. Dake was not writing in a vacuum. Many godly people of his generation held views they would be ashamed of today. That is a reason for humility about our own blind spots. It is not a reason to leave a doctrine unanswered in a Bible that is still in print.

Conclusion

Genesis makes one humanity in one image and withholds from people the very word for “kinds” that the note needed. One mother of all living. One family off one boat. One table of nations that is a family tree. Paul stands among strangers and tells them they are relatives, and says God arranged history so they would look for Him. Israel’s separation turns out to be about worship, porous to anyone who came in faith. Two women from forbidden nations end up in the genealogy of Jesus. Numbers 12 strikes the critic, not the couple. Dake’s own notes on Deuteronomy 7, Joshua 23, and Ezra say the reason was religion. The gospel breaks the wall and makes one new man. And at the end, every tribe and tongue stands in one place before one throne.

Set that beside a note that said equal rights in the gospel give no right to break an eternal law of separation. These are not two emphases within the same faith. They are two different stories about what God is doing in the world.

One word before I close. The note used “kind” as though Genesis had given it a category for human color. Genesis gives no such category. It gives image. Every person you will meet today is not a type. He is a bearer of the likeness of God. And the only sorting Scripture finally does is between those who are in Christ and those who are not.

Chapter 22 takes up what happened to this page after Dake died, when his publishers removed it without telling anyone. That is a story about honesty, and it needs its own chapter.

But I want to end here, on the verse. My friend Ray has taught from a Dake Bible for thirty years. When I first showed him page 159, he was quiet a long time.³⁸ Then he said, “Read me the verse again.”

One blood. Every nation. Made to seek Him, and He is not far from any one of us. That was true on the page before the note was printed. It stayed true underneath it the whole time. And it is true now that the note is gone. The God who made us from one blood is bigger than the men who try to annotate Him. Keep the Bible. Read the notes with your eyes open. And when a note and the verse above it disagree, you already know which one is Scripture.

Notes

↑ 1. Acts 17:16–34 records Paul’s address at the Areopagus. Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version unless noted; see master convention on translations. Dake’s own printed text is KJV and is reproduced as he set it wherever his notes quote Scripture.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), N.T., p. 159, note on Acts 17:26, heading. Running head on the photographed page: “NOTES ON ACTS OF THE APOSTLES CONTINUED 159.” Edition: pre-1988 printing, established by the presence of this note, which post-1987 printings do not carry; no dated title or copyright page is resident in the library. The transcription used throughout this chapter is the canonical one established in Appendix B, which rests on scans of two separate printings, identified by their supplier as 1965 and 1976, alongside the earlier library photographs. Two readings quoted in an earlier draft of this chapter have been corrected against it: reason 24 reads “so strong,” not “so strict,” and reason 25 reads “disunity,” not “leprosy.” Both were re-checked by eye at eight times magnification on both printings for this revision.

↑ 3. On the reach of the Dake Bible in Pentecostal and charismatic churches, and on the labor claims its own advertising makes, see Chapter 2. On the note’s date of printing and the era in which it circulated, see Chapter 20.

↑ 4. Hebrew min, conventionally rendered “kind” in the KJV and NKJV, marks a category or type of living thing; Genesis does not define it further. It occurs at Genesis 1:11, 12 (twice), 21 (twice), 24, 25 (three times). The distribution is the point: vegetation, sea creatures, birds, cattle, creeping things, and beasts. Verses 26–27 introduce humanity with no min formula at all, substituting “in Our image, according to Our likeness.”

↑ 5. “31 facts: segregation in Moses’ writings (19:19),” O.T. p. 148, item 10, pre-1988 printing. Items 1 through 9 run down Genesis 1 accurately. The list is printed and discussed in Chapter 20, which also records the machine-reading confidences behind it and the outstanding eye confirmation. The note on Leviticus 19:19 at O.T. p. 140 points readers to this list.

↑ 6. Genesis 3:20 (NKJV), and Genesis 9:19, “These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated” (cf. 9:18).

↑ 7. Acts 17:26. Greek ex henos, “from one.” The word “blood” is present in the Byzantine and Textus Receptus tradition followed by the KJV and NKJV and absent from the Alexandrian witnesses followed by most modern versions, which read “from one man.” The variation does not affect the argument. The reading Dake’s own KJV text carries is the fuller one: “of one blood.”

↑ 8. Greek horisas (“having determined”) with prostetagmenous kairous (“appointed times”) and horothesias (“boundaries”): participles describing action God has already taken. There is no imperative in the sentence and no addressee being commanded. Acts 17:27 then opens with a purpose construction dependent on v. 26. Verses 26 and 27 form a single sentence in the Greek, and the KJV Dake printed keeps them joined.

↑ 9. Note on Deuteronomy 7, O.T. p. 207, pre-1988 printing, following a summary of the commands of vv. 1 to 6. Printed in full in Chapter 20, where the reading and its confidence are recorded. The heading is the note’s own.

↑ 10. Note on Joshua 23, O.T. p. 262, pre-1988 printing. Machine-read at line confidences between 82 and 96; eye confirmation outstanding. The same page carries a pointer to the thirty reasons at N.T. p. 159, and the Cyclopedic Index at p. 60 files this page under the headword “Integration, a curse to Israel,” with a cross-reference to “Segregation.” Both are documented in Chapter 20. The irony is on the page: the index calls it a curse; the note calls it backsliding.

↑ 11. Note c on Ezra 4, O.T. p. 490, pre-1988 printing, on the rejection of the Samaritans’ offer at Ezra 4:1 to 3. Machine-read at line confidences between 74 and 96; eye confirmation outstanding. The closing reference is to Deuteronomy 7:3, the verse whose own note is quoted above.

↑ 12. Exodus 12:38, “A mixed multitude went up with them also.”

↑ 13. Matthew 1:3, 5, 6. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “her who had been the wife of Uriah.” Naming women in a Jewish genealogy is unusual; naming these women is pointed.

↑ 14. The so-called curse of Ham was a standard defense of slavery and later of segregation in American religious argument. This is well-established history and is stated here at that level; no page-pinned quotation from the secondary literature is offered, in keeping with this book’s rule on sources it does not hold.

↑ 15. Verified item by item across all five resident photographs of N.T. p. 159 listed in note 2. No reason in the thirty cites Genesis 9:20–27, and none argues from a curse on Ham or on his descendants generally. The scriptural chain in the note runs instead through Genesis 1 (kinds), Genesis 10 and 11 with Deuteronomy 32:8 (boundaries), the patriarchal marriage narratives, the Mosaic separation and mixture laws, the post-exilic reforms, and a set of prophetic and Revelation passages read as permanent national division.

↑ 16. Genesis 9:20–27; the Canaanite line is traced in Genesis 10:15–19, which locates it in the territory Israel later entered. Ham’s other sons, including Cush and Mizraim, are not named in the curse at all.

↑ 17. Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9–11. These belong to the body of Israelite law that taught holiness by visible separateness in ordinary objects. Leviticus 19:19 itself gives no rationale beyond the command; the surrounding chapter frames the whole section with “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2).

↑ 18. Note f on Deuteronomy 22:9 to 11, O.T. p. 221, pre-1988 printing. The note is headed “3 commands – segregation” and closes “See Segregation in Index.” Machine-read at line confidences between 82 and 96; eye confirmation outstanding. The fuller passage, and the parallel statement of the same principle at Leviticus 19:19, are printed in Chapter 20.

↑ 19. Genesis 34:30, where Jacob charges Simeon and Levi with making him “obnoxious among the inhabitants of the land,” and Genesis 49:5–7, his deathbed oracle over them. The oracle ends by scattering them in Israel, which the narrative treats as the consequence of the deed at Shechem.

↑ 20. Genesis 6:1–4 with 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6–7. Dake’s angelology, including his handling of the “sons of God” and his account of what these beings did, is documented in Chapter 19. The point here does not depend on adjudicating that reading; it holds on Dake’s own interpretation, which is the fairest ground on which to test his inference.

↑ 21. Dispensational note, O.T. p. 60, pre-1988 printing. Machine-read at line confidences between 88 and 96; eye confirmation outstanding. The same reading appears as item 15 of the “31 facts” list at O.T. p. 148, which glosses Genesis 11:4 with the parenthesis “(integrate and be one people contrary to God’s plan of segregation).”

↑ 22. Genesis 11:4 (NKJV). The builders give both motives in one verse, and the second is a refusal of the command of Genesis 9:1 to fill the earth. God’s stated concern in vv. 6 to 7 is what unrestrained human ambition will attempt, not what colors are standing in the plain. On the answer to Babel, see Acts 2:5 to 11. The crowd is listed by nation and hears “the wonderful works of God” each in his own language. Luke’s scene is widely read as the answer to Babel. The answer is not one language imposed but every language understood.

↑ 23. Reason 4 opens by defining a modern social term and identifying the races it principally has in view, then asserts that the Bible opposes marriage even “between different branches of the same stock.” The definition is not drawn from any cited verse. Quoted in full in Appendix B; historical racial terminology is reproduced there as printed and is not adopted into this book’s own voice.

↑ 24. Reason 25 as printed. An earlier working transcription in this project read “leprosy” here, and that reading was wrong; both printings read “disunity,” and reason 24 reads “so strong” rather than “so strict.” See note 2 above and Appendix B. The correction sharpens the point rather than blunting it.

↑ 25. Numbers 12:1. The Hebrew is kushit, a woman of Cush, the region south of Egypt; the KJV and NKJV render it “Ethiopian.” Whether she is Zipporah the Midianite or a second wife is disputed and does not affect the point, since the objection recorded in the text is explicitly to her origin.

↑ 26. Numbers 12:4–10. God’s defense of Moses in vv. 6–8 is unusually strong, and the judgment falls in v. 10 on Miriam alone. Moses then intercedes for her (v. 13).

↑ 27. The temple’s barrier separating the court of the Gentiles, and the inscription warning that a foreigner passing it would have himself to blame for his death, are attested in the ancient sources and by surviving stone fragments of the inscription. Stated here at the level of well-established fact.

↑ 28. Galatians 3:28 (NKJV). Colossians 3:11 (NKJV): “where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.” “Scythian” carried roughly the force of a byword for the most foreign and least civilized people the Greek world could name.

↑ 29. Reason 22 reads: “Certain people in Israel were not even to worship with others (Dt. 23:1-3; Ezra 10:8; Neh. 9:2; 10:28; 13:3).” Deuteronomy 23:1 concerns the emasculated; 23:3 the Ammonite and Moabite.

↑ 30. Acts 8:26–39; the question is at v. 36, the baptism at v. 38, and the rejoicing at v. 39. He was reading Isaiah 53:7–8 (Acts 8:32–33). The promise to the eunuch and the foreigner who joins himself to the Lord stands at Isaiah 56:3–8, three chapters later in the same scroll.

↑ 31. Acts 10:34–35 (NKJV). The whole episode, from Peter’s vision in 10:9–16 to the Spirit falling on Gentiles in 10:44–48, is Luke’s account of the church being taught this lesson against its own instincts.

↑ 32. Revelation 5:9 (NKJV); the multitude of 7:9 is described as standing together before the throne, in one company, with no hint of separated groups.

↑ 33. Reasons 3 and 21 both cite “17:26,” and both cite it alongside Genesis 10:5, 32; 11:8–9 and Deuteronomy 32:8, the boundaries texts. The “one blood” clause that opens the verse is not quoted, discussed, or answered anywhere in the thirty.

↑ 34. Acts 17:11, two chapters and a few pages before the note itself, commends the Bereans for searching the Scriptures daily “to find out whether these things were so.” The full pastoral use of that verse belongs to Chapter 25.

↑ 35. 2 Chronicles 34:14–21; the tearing of the clothes is at v. 19, and the reforms follow through chapter 35. The parallel account is 2 Kings 22.

↑ 36. The removal of the note in printings from 1988 onward, and the replacement material that now stands at Acts 17:26, are documented from both editions in Chapter 22, with the edition-by-edition table in Appendix C.

↑ 37. The Azusa Street revival began in Los Angeles in April 1906 under the leadership of William J. Seymour, an African-American preacher, and drew an interracial congregation during a period of legal segregation; Charles Parham, under whom Seymour had studied, visited later that year and objected to the racial mixing. Stated here at the level of well-established movement history, as this book’s rule requires for sources it does not hold; the Assemblies of God’s own historical materials recount it.

↑ 38. Ray is introduced in Chapter 1, where his composite character is explained, and he returns in Chapter 25.