Preaching the Bible on Turtle Island [4 of 6]
Scripture: 1 Kings 21:1-29
This is not a happy story; it is a very familiar story.1
The king does not come with soldiers. He comes with a proposal—a better vineyard somewhere else, or the going rate in silver, whatever you think is right. By every measure our world calls reasonable, it is a reasonable offer. Assuming a willing buyer and a willing seller. And Naboth says “no.”
He doesn’t say “Let me think about it,” or “Name a higher price.” He says, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors.”
The property Naboth refuses to sell is the portion handed down to him by those who came before, entrusted to those who were not yet born. Under the law of Israel, this place could not be sold in perpetuity, because it was never his to sell. It belonged to the covenant. When he refused the king, he wasn’t being stubborn; he was being faithful.
He reminds me of so many of our leaders in recent years—really, for the last 500-plus years: Elijah Harper, who refused to sell out Indigenous rights during constitutional negotiations. The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy, who successfully challenged the province of Alberta’s separatist petition processes in court. The Wet’suwet’en land defenders, including all five clans and hereditary chiefs, who oppose their elected leaders, corporate interests, and provincial and federal governments, asserting that the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline violates their rights. The #NoDAPL protests at Standing Rock. The Waorani people in Puyu, Pastaza province, Ecuador, who are demanding that the government resolve its non-compliance in protecting Yasuni National Park and Indigenous rights.
The story of Naboth’s vineyard ends in violence; so many of the struggles of Indigenous Peoples do too. It’s not surprising that the powerful scheme to eliminate the obstacle that Naboth’s faithfulness presents to the powers that be.
But for me, the real violence in the story precedes Naboth’s murder. There is already violence in the offer itself—the quiet, civilized assumption that everything has a price, that any relationship can be converted into a transaction, that a person’s refusal to sell out is a problem to be solved rather than a truth to be honored. Ahab cannot hear Naboth’s “no” as anything but an obstacle.
So Ahab goes home to sulk. But Jezebel knows how to work the system in Ahab’s favor. And this is familiar too. She writes letters in the king’s name, sealed with the king’s seal. She proclaims a fast and calls a solemn religious assembly. She seats Naboth at the head of the table, in the place of honor. But she arranges for two “witnesses” to stand and swear that this faithful man has cursed God and king. And then the system functions according to its work; with the paperwork in order and the authorities satisfied, Naboth is taken outside the city and stoned to death. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
Just like always, the land isn’t stolen at the point of a sword; it is stolen with signed papers.
That is how otherwise “good and orderly people” could dispossess a whole nation and go home to dinner untroubled. Dispossession doesn’t usually arrive as a monster. It arrives as a policy. It comes with witnesses and a seal, sometimes with a religious service to bless it. It comes dressed as the law, because the law can be made to serve whoever holds the seal. Residential schools had paperwork. Treaties that have since been repeatedly broken have signatures. The vineyard often changes hands legally (at least in the eyes of the colonizers).
You already know this. I do not have to convince you. This is not a metaphor we have to work to understand—it is a history we carry in our own names, in the silences in our family stories, in the maps that were redrawn while our grandparents were told to be grateful.
Back to our Bible story … Then Ahab does the thing that damns him. He gets up. He brushes himself off. And he goes down to take possession of the vineyard.
But God does not let him walk in peace. God sends Elijah to be standing there, waiting, in the middle of the stolen vineyard, with one question sharp enough to cut through every seal and every sworn oath:
“Have you killed, and have you taken possession?”
Beloved, that question is not asked of us as Indigenous Peoples. It is asked for us. It is God standing in the vineyard our ancestors were driven from and refusing—refusing—to call the theft legal. Every court that ruled it lawful, every register that recorded the transfer, every act of worship that blessed it—heaven kept a different record. God noticed Naboth. Just as God notices our people.
And notice this too: Nowhere in this story does God call Naboth unreasonable. He is never scolded for refusing to sell. His “no”—“The Lord forbid that I should give away the inheritance of my ancestors”—is the most faithful thing anyone says in the whole chapter. It is the one voice telling the truth about what land is. When our grandmothers refused to stop speaking our languages, when our people kept singing the songs that were outlawed, whenever someone in our communities said “This is not for sale” and paid for it—that was not stubbornness. That was Naboth’s faithfulness, alive in our people.
The vineyard was taken. The story does not pretend otherwise, and neither will we. But Naboth’s “no” does not die with him. It is still echoing. It echoes every time sacred ground is honored as sacred again, every time something the market swears has a price is declared, once more, to be beyond price. It is held in trust—the way it was always meant to be held—for seven generations.
So I pray we do see ourselves today as people who have only been robbed. I pray we see ourselves as Naboth’s kin: the ones who know what a reciprocal relationship with land is, who kept that knowing through everything done to unmake it, and who carry the “no” of faithful Naboth, calling God to come stand with us in our continued demands for justice.
Walis Ǧiáxsix̌a. Amen.
Notes
- This article is part of the six-part series, Preaching the Bible on Turtle Island.
