Chapter 21

One Blood

What Scripture says to the thirty reasons

Paul stood among the philosophers of Athens and told them where every nation came from.¹

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; . . . Acts 17:26–27 (NKJV)

In the original printings of the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, a reader who followed the note letter beside verse 26 was sent to New Testament page 159. There, at the head of a page of notes on Acts, he found a numbered list under this title: “30 reasons for segregation of races: (Acts 17:26).”² The first reason set the terms for the rest.

God wills all races to be as He made them. Any violation of God's original purpose manifests insubordination to Him (17:26; Rom. 9:19-24) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 1

So the question is a simple one. What had to be done to a verse about one blood, and about God’s wish that every nation seek Him, to get thirty reasons for keeping the races apart? Each reason takes a passage out of its setting and makes it say something it does not say, and the way to see that is to take the reasons back to the passages they cite.

My verdict is the one I gave in Chapter 20. The note is racism, taught as the meaning of God’s Word. It is false teaching, and it is sin. Scripture contradicts it from Genesis 1 to Revelation 7, beginning with the very verse the note claims. Chapter 20 shows the page and the notes that led to it, and Appendix B transcribes all thirty reasons, so you can check every quotation below against the whole.

The note has to be answered from the Bible because it claims to be Bible teaching. It was printed in a reference Bible, with a Scripture reference after every claim, for Sunday school teachers to use with the weekly lesson. A believer who was taught from it, or who was told from it that God wanted him kept apart from his brothers and sisters, deserves to see what those passages actually say.

One race made in one image

The note starts at creation, and so does the answer. Reason 2 builds the case on one word from Genesis 1.

God made everything to reproduce "after his own kind" (Gen. 1:11-12, 21-25; 6:20; 7:14). Kind means type and color or He would have kept them all alike to begin with Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 2

The Hebrew word behind “kind” is min. Genesis 1 uses it for grass, herbs, fruit trees, sea creatures, birds, cattle, creeping things and beasts.³ Every reference in reason 2 is to plants or animals. When the chapter comes to human beings, the word drops out, and the text says something else.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; . . .” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Genesis 1:26–27 (NKJV)

Every other creature in Genesis 1 is described by its kind. Man is described by whose image he bears. The note built its second reason on the one word Genesis does not use for people. A list elsewhere in the same Bible makes the move openly. Its first nine items follow Genesis 1 through the plants and animals, and item 10 reads “Man after his kind (Gen. 1:26-28; 5:1-3; 9:6; Jas. 3:9).”⁴ None of the verses it cites says that. Genesis 1:26–28 is the paragraph where the formula stops.

The last clause of reason 2, “or He would have kept them all alike to begin with,” comes from no verse. It guesses at God’s motive from the fact that people look different. Reason 4 does the same thing when it begins by defining a modern term for the mixing of races and then says that “The Bible even goes farther than opposing this.”⁵

The rest of the early chapters of Genesis say what Genesis 1 says. Adam called his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all living.” After the flood, the whole human race came from one family: “These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated.”⁶ Genesis 10 then lists the nations by their families, languages and lands. It is the Bible’s own account of human variety, and it is drawn as a family tree with every nation on one trunk. Dake knew this. On the Acts 17 page itself, his summary of what the chapter teaches about God includes “Made all men of one kind (v 26),” and his note on the word “offspring” on page 159 says, “All descended from Adam who was created by God to reproduce his kind (Gen. 1:26-28).”⁷

Acts 17:26–27, clause by clause

The note claims Acts 17:26 as its anchor, so the verse deserves to be read the way Paul spoke it.

“He has made from one blood every nation of men.” Paul, a Jew from Tarsus, is speaking to Athenians, who prided themselves on having sprung from their own soil. He tells them that they and he, and every other nation, share one origin.⁸ That is the clause the verse opens with, and it is the clause the thirty reasons never quote.

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

God originally determined the bounds of the habitations of nations (17:26; Gen. 10:5, 32; 11:8; Dt. 32:8) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 3

That much is true. God rules over where peoples live and how long their nations last. But Paul is describing what God has done. He is not giving orders to anyone, and nothing in the sentence commands a nation to stay inside its borders or forbids people of different nations to marry.⁹ God also sets the length of each person’s life, and no one reads that as a command about how to live. If the clause were a law of separation, Paul broke it while he spoke it. He was standing in Athens telling Greeks about a Jewish Messiah, and he spent his life crossing the lines the note draws.

“So that they should seek the Lord.” Verse 26 does not end the sentence. It runs into verse 27, and verse 27 gives the reason for everything in verse 26. God set the times and places of the nations so that they would look for Him and find Him, “though He is not far from each one of us.” Read whole, the sentence moves from one origin, through many nations, to one purpose. It is a missionary sentence. The list printed under its reference used it to keep people apart.

Israel’s separation was about worship

The largest group of reasons draws on Israel. Reasons 5 through 13 walk through the patriarchs and the law of Moses, and reasons 15 through 18 carry on into Israel’s later history. Two of them state the claim directly.

God forbad intermarriage between Israel and all other nations (Ex. 34:12-16; Dt. 7:3-6) . . . God commanded Israel to be segregated (Lev. 20:24; Num. 23:9; 1 Ki. 8:53) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reasons 12 and 18

Israel really was told to stay separate, and no honest reader should deny it. The question is what kind of separation it was, and the Bible gives the reason in the same breath as the command.

Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; . . . Deuteronomy 7:3–4 (NKJV)

The danger was other gods. The command guarded Israel’s worship, and it said nothing about ancestry or color. Dake’s own note on this passage, printed in full in Chapter 20, gives four reasons under the heading “4 reasons for total segregation.” The first two are “They will turn away your children from following Me (v 4)” and “They will cause them to become idol worshippers, so that I will have to destroy them.” The other two are “You are a holy people unto Me” and that God had chosen Israel “to be a special people unto Me.”¹⁰ All four concern idolatry, holiness and God’s choice of Israel. None of them concerns race.

Reason 13 sends the reader to Joshua 23, where Joshua warns Israel not to marry the nations left in the land. Dake’s note on that chapter gathers its commands under a heading about faith, “8 commands - against backsliding:”

1 Be very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the law of Moses (v 6)
2 Turn not from it to the right or to the left hand
3 Do not integrate with the nations that remain among you (v 7)
4 Do not mention the name of their gods
5 Do not swear by them
6 Do not serve or bow down yourselves to them
7 Cleave to the Lord, as you are doing this day (v 8)
8 Take good heed to yourselves that you love the Lord your God (v 11) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, O.T. p. 262, note h (Joshua 23)¹¹

Item 3, the command not to “integrate,” sits between the command to keep the law of Moses and the commands not to name, swear by, or serve the gods of those nations. The items after it tell Israel to cleave to the Lord and love Him. Everything around the command is about worship, and Dake filed the whole list under backsliding. The same page carries note s, which says, “Marrying those of other nations was always a curse to Israel (v 12; Dt. 7:3; Neh. 13:27).” That is the note the index lists as “Integration, a curse to Israel.” The verse it cites tells what kind of curse Joshua meant. Israel would “go back” from the Lord, and the nations would become “snares and traps” to them, as the nations’ gods always did.¹²

The plainest statement comes in the notes on Ezra. When the Samaritans offered to help rebuild the temple and the elders refused them, Dake wrote this.

This was what God had required of Israel from the very beginning. They were to be a segregated people in all phases of life and an example of God to all nations. On the whole, they have never inter-married. God permitted inter-marriage and even blessed such on rare occasions, but the practice for the nation was contrary to His law and will (Dt. 7:3) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, O.T. p. 490, note c (Ezra 4:3)¹³

“God permitted inter-marriage and even blessed such on rare occasions.” That sentence cannot stand beside reason 1, which calls any violation of God’s purpose for the races “insubordination to Him.” A law of creation does not have exceptions that God blesses. A safeguard for a covenant people does, because a stranger who turns to Israel’s God is no longer a danger to Israel’s worship. When Dake wrote on the passages one at a time, his notes gave the religious reason. When he gathered the references onto page 159, the reason became race.

Israel’s own history shows the separation being crossed by faith. Rahab was a Canaanite of Jericho, from the very peoples Deuteronomy 7 names. She hid the spies, believed, and lived in Israel. Ruth was a Moabite, of a people barred from the assembly, and 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 went up with them also.”¹⁴ The prophets said that God meant it this way. Isaiah speaks to the foreigner who fears that “The LORD has utterly separated me from His people,” and answers him.

Even them I will bring to My holy mountain, And make them joyful in My house of prayer. . . . For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Isaiah 56:7 (NKJV)

Matthew opens the New Testament with the family line of Jesus, and he names four women in it: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “her who had been the wife of Uriah.”¹⁵ Rahab was a Canaanite and Ruth a Moabite, and both stand in the ancestry of the Messiah. God kept Israel distinct so that true worship would survive in the world. He never sealed it against people of other nations who came to Him in faith.

The curse that was not there

Many readers expect to find Noah’s curse among the thirty reasons. For generations, defenders of slavery and then of segregation in America claimed that Genesis 9 put a curse on Ham and his descendants and tied it to dark skin.¹⁶ None of the thirty reasons cites Genesis 9:20–27, and none argues from a curse on Ham. Dake’s note on the mark of Cain also rejects the older claim that the mark was a change of color.¹⁷ That is to his credit, and it should be said.

Readers who defend the note sometimes raise Genesis 9 on their own, so it is worth seeing what the verse says.

Then he said: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants He shall be to his brethren.” Genesis 9:25 (NKJV)

The curse is spoken by Noah, and it falls on Canaan, the son of Ham, not on Ham himself. It says nothing about skin, color or Africa. Canaan’s descendants were the Canaanites, the peoples Israel later met in the promised land.¹⁸ Every part of the racial reading has to be carried into the text from outside it, and the same thing happens with the passages the note does cite.

The remaining reasons

The rest of the thirty fall into a few groups, and each group misuses its passages in a different way.

Seed, cattle and cloth

Segregation was so strong in the O. T. that an ox and an ass could not be worked together (Dt. 22:10) . . . Stock was forbidden to be bred with other kinds (Lev. 19:19) . . . Sowing mixed seed in the same field was unlawful (Lev. 19:19) . . . Wearing garments of mixed fabrics forbidden (Dt. 22:11; Lev. 19:19) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reasons 24, 26, 27 and 29

These laws are real, and they belong to the ceremonial law that taught Israel holiness in the ordinary things of life: a field, a garment, a team of animals. Leviticus 19 frames them with God’s own words, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”¹⁹ They say nothing about people. To move from seed and wool to human marriage, a reader has to treat people of different colors as different species. Dake’s note on Deuteronomy 22 does exactly that.

The truth is that God wanted each species of man, animals, and even seeds to be kept as segregated from each other as possible, so that there would be no defilement of mixing them in reproduction and work. Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, O.T. p. 221, note f (Deuteronomy 22:9–11)²⁰

The whole argument rests on the words “each species of man,” and Genesis 1 has already ruled them out. Mankind is one creature in one image.

The same page 159 holds a second problem. Directly after reason 30, Dake printed a note on why Christians need not keep the Sabbath, titled “10 reasons 4th commandment left out: (Acts 15:24).” Here are its third and fourth reasons.

3 The old Jewish sabbath was part of the contract between God and Israel and a token and sign of that covenant (Ex. 20:8-11; 31:13-18; Ezek. 20:12-20). The contract was not made with men before Moses (Dt. 5:2-3), or with Gentiles and the church (Rom. 2:14; Dt. 4:7-10). The sabbath was not for them
4 The 4th commandment was the only one of the ten that was a ceremonial, not a moral law. Its sole purpose was to commemorate the deliverance from Egyptian bondage when Israel had no rest (Dt. 5:15). It was only a type of future and eternal rest (Col. 2:14-17; Heb. 4:1-11; 10:1). It was natural for it to be left out of the new contract when the reality of rest came of which it was a shadow (Mt. 11:28-29; Col. 2:14-17). The physical and spiritual benefits of a rest day can be realized on any other day as well as on Saturday Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, “10 reasons 4th commandment left out: (Acts 15:24),” reasons 3 and 4²¹

On one part of the page, a ceremonial law given to Israel is a shadow that was never made with Gentiles and the church. On another part of the same page, ceremonial laws about cattle, seed and cloth bind Christians of every nation to racial separation. Dake applied one rule to the Sabbath and the opposite rule to race. If his Sabbath note is right, the mixture laws in reasons 24 through 29 do not reach the church at all.

A massacre offered as an example

Jacob's sons destroyed a whole city to maintain segregation (Gen. 34). Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 11

Genesis 34 tells how Simeon and Levi deceived the men of Shechem and killed them while they were still in pain from circumcision. The note offers this as an example of God’s people keeping a law. The Bible does not. Jacob rebuked his sons at once for making him “obnoxious among the inhabitants of the land.”²² Years later, on his deathbed, he came back to it.

Simeon and Levi are brothers; Instruments of cruelty are in their dwelling place. . . . Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce; And their wrath, for it is cruel! Genesis 49:5, 7 (NKJV)

Scripture records the massacre and then condemns it through the dying patriarch, so it cannot be read as an example God approved.

The angels of Genesis 6

God cursed angels for leaving their own "first estate" and "their own habitation" to marry the daughters of men (Gen. 6:1-4; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6-7) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 14

Chapter 19 takes up Dake’s reading of Genesis 6. Even on his own reading, the sin he describes is that spirit beings left their own order of creation for another, as Jude says the angels “left their own abode.”²³ For that to teach anything about human marriage, people of different nations would have to differ from one another the way angels differ from men. Genesis 1 has already said they do not, so the reason assumes the very thing it sets out to prove.

Babel read as a sin of integration

Reason 3 cites Genesis 11:8, and Dake’s notes on the ages of history explain how he read Babel.

Instead of segregating and scattering abroad on the earth according to distinct types and colors as they began to be born, men wanted to integrate and be one people to defy God and cause His plan to fail (11:1-9) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, O.T. p. 60, “Dispensation of Human Government,” point 7, item (4)²⁴

The builders of Babel state their own purpose: “let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”²⁵ Their sin was pride, and a refusal to fill the earth as God had told Noah’s sons to do. The text says nothing about types or colors. Being one people was never the crime, and the rest of the Bible tells how God makes one people out of all nations. At Pentecost, people “from every nation under heaven” heard the apostles speak the wonderful works of God, each in his own language. God’s answer to Babel was a gospel spoken in every tongue.²⁶

Moses’ Cushite wife

Miscegenation caused disunity among God's people (Num. 12) Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, 1979 Large Note Edition, N.T. p. 159, reason 25²⁷

There was disunity in Numbers 12. The chapter says who caused it.

Then Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married; for he had married an Ethiopian woman. Numbers 12:1 (NKJV)

Moses had married a Cushite woman, a woman from the land south of Egypt.²⁸ The marriage itself troubled no one in the story until his sister and brother spoke against him. God heard them, called all three to the tabernacle, defended Moses in unusually strong terms, and left in anger.

And when the cloud departed from above the tabernacle, suddenly Miriam became leprous, as white as snow. . . . Numbers 12:10 (NKJV)

The judgment fell on the one who objected to the marriage. God took the side of Moses and his wife, and Moses had to pray for his sister’s healing.²⁹ Reason 25 turns the chapter around and lays the blame on the couple. The newer typeset edition still prints the claim, in the note that replaced this one: “Intermarriage caused disunity among God's people (Num. 12).”³⁰

Separation forever

A small group of reasons carries the separation past history and into eternity.

Reason 19 grants that the gospel gives equal rights and then sets a law above the gospel: “Equal rights in the gospel gives no right to break this eternal law.” Reason 21 keeps the nations apart forever, and reason 23 carries the separation into the worship of heaven. Reason 22 adds that “Certain people in Israel were not even to worship with others,” citing Deuteronomy 23, which kept eunuchs and Moabites out of the assembly.³¹ These are the largest claims in the list, and the New Testament answers every one of them.

Where the gospel ends up

The deepest division in Paul’s world was the one between Jew and Gentile. In the temple at Jerusalem a stone barrier kept Gentiles out of the inner courts, with notices warning that a foreigner who passed it would have only himself to blame for his death.³² Paul tells the Ephesians what Christ did with that wall.

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, . . . so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, . . . Ephesians 2:14–15 (NKJV)

Christ made one new man out of the two peoples, and He did it at the cross. Paul says the same to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” “for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” and to the Colossians he names the people the Greek world despised most: “barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.”³³

The Book of Acts shows it happening. Reason 22 cites the law that kept eunuchs and foreigners out of Israel’s assembly. In Acts 8 the Spirit sends Philip to an Ethiopian eunuch, a man shut out on both counts, who is reading Isaiah on his way home from Jerusalem. Philip tells him about Jesus, and when they come to water the eunuch asks, “What hinders me from being baptized?” Nothing hindered him, and he was baptized and “went on his way rejoicing.”³⁴ Isaiah had promised the eunuch and the foreigner a place in God’s house, and Acts records God keeping the promise. Two chapters later Peter stood in a Gentile’s house and said, “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality. But in every nation whoever fears Him and works righteousness is accepted by Him.”³⁵

Reason 23 says that in heaven certain groups will not be allowed to worship together. John saw heaven’s worship, and this is what he saw.

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, . . . Revelation 7:9 (NKJV)

They stand together, in one multitude, before one throne, and they cry out together, “Salvation belongs to our God.” Two chapters earlier the song of heaven gives the reason they are there. The Lamb redeemed them by His blood “Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.”³⁶

How the list was built

Acts 17:26 itself plays a small part in the thirty reasons. The verse appears twice inside the list, in reasons 3 and 21, and both times it is cited for the boundaries clause, beside Genesis 10, Genesis 11 and Deuteronomy 32:8. The one-blood clause that opens the verse, and the purpose clause that closes the sentence, are not quoted or explained anywhere in the thirty.³⁷

The list was built by gathering. It goes through the Bible collecting passages in which something is kept apart. It takes the wives the patriarchs refused and the nations Israel was told not to marry, then the cattle, seed and cloth of the ceremonial law, and then the angels of Genesis 6. Each item is a real verse. Set side by side under one heading, they seem to make an argument that none of them makes alone. That is why Dake’s notes on the passages themselves disagree with the list. At Deuteronomy 7, Joshua 23 and Ezra 4 he gave the reasons the text gives. On page 159 he began with a conclusion his world had already reached, and the references were chosen because they fit it.

Chapter 4 describes the method that let a chain of references stand in for the reading of a text. The remedy is the one Acts 17 itself commends. The Bereans “searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.”³⁸ Every reason on page 159 gives its references, and those references, read in their own settings, do not teach what the list draws from them.

Questions a reader will ask

Didn’t Dake simply take the second half of the verse seriously?

A defender may say that Acts 17:26 really does say God set the boundaries of the nations, that Dake did not invent the clause, and that his critics quote only the first half. The clause is there, and God does rule the times and places of the nations. But the clause describes what God has done in history. It gives no command to anyone. The sentence also does not stop there. Verse 27 tells why God set those times and places, so that the nations would seek Him. A reading that keeps the boundaries and drops both the one blood before them and the purpose after them is the one that has taken half the verse.

Doesn’t Israel prove that God separates peoples?

God did set Israel apart, and He told Israel not to marry the nations of Canaan. But Deuteronomy 7 gives the reason in the same sentence as the command, and the reason is that those marriages would turn Israel’s children to other gods. Dake’s own four reasons say the same. A separation for the sake of worship can be crossed by faith, and Rahab, Ruth and the mixed multitude crossed it, with God’s blessing. A separation by race could never be crossed at all. And in Christ the wall between Israel and the nations has been broken down.

Wasn’t he a man of his time?

This is the most common defense, and it fails on two counts. First, his time was not of one mind, even in his own movement. The Pentecostal revival that began at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles in 1906 was led by a Black preacher, William J. Seymour, and Black and white believers worshipped there together. Charles Parham, who had taught Seymour, came to the mission and objected to that mixing.³⁹ The argument over race was alive among Pentecostals from the beginning, and people on both sides of it read the same Bible.

Second, Dake had the answer in his own book. His note on Rebekah says that “the church includes all races.” His summary of Acts 17 says God “Made all men of one kind (v 26),” and his note on the word “offspring,” on page 159 itself, says that all are “descended from Adam.”⁴⁰ The list was printed in a Bible copyrighted in 1963, during the civil rights years, and it was still being printed in 1979, as Chapter 20 shows. A man of any time can be wrong. That does not turn what he taught into Bible teaching, and it does not excuse leaving it unanswered.

One blood

The note claimed a verse, and the verse answers the note. Genesis makes one humanity in one image and does not use the word “kind” of people at all. Paul tells the Athenians that every nation comes from one blood and that God placed them all so that they would seek Him. Israel’s separation was about worship, and Dake’s own notes say so. Numbers 12 judges the one who objected to the marriage. The gospel breaks down the dividing wall and makes one new man, and heaven’s worship is one multitude from every nation before one throne. Against all of that, the thirty reasons teach that God divides the human family by race forever. That is racism taught as the meaning of God’s Word. It is false teaching, and it is sin.

If you once taught from this page, the right response is the one King Josiah showed when the lost Book of the Law was read to him. He did not explain it away. He grieved, and then he did what the Book said.⁴¹ The Scriptures you taught from were never the problem; the note was. If you were ever told, from a Bible, that God wanted you kept apart from your brothers and sisters, the verse that note claimed had already answered it. You were made in the image of God, from the same blood as every other person on earth, and in Christ you belong to one people with every believer of every nation.

The God of Acts 17 made one human family. He set each nation in its time and place so that all of them would seek Him, and He is not far from any one of us. Chapter 22 tells what became of page 159 after Dake died.