A common opinion held by some pagan people in Africa is that Christianity and Judaism are foreign religions that have nothing to do with Africans. Those who hold to this view claim that God revealed Himself to the Jews through Judaism, to Europeans through Christianity and to Africans through African traditional religions.
However, from Genesis to Revelation we find many stories of how people of different races and ethnicities affected Israel, Judaism, and Christianity. The stories of the Bible took place in and around the geographical area we now call the Middle East. People moved in and out of it based on their relationship with the nations of ancient Israel and Judah. I’ve decided in this presentation to highlight a few biblical persons and lands of Africa and their relationships with Israel.
I must quickly note that the assertion that Africans are linked to the Bible is justifiable by linguistic and archaeological evidences. There is a strong tradition that some of the descendants of Noah through his son Ham were black or people of colour. Ham had a son named Cush, which means “black” in Hebrew. Cush is the most common term designating colour in reference to persons, people or lands used in the Bible. The Greek and Latin word for Cush is Ethiopia. In classical literature, Greek and Roman authors describe Ethiopians as black. Archaeology has found these people to be black. The first African civilization after Egypt was the Cush Kingdom, a state of Nubia which existed in the region of modern southern Egypt and northern Sudan, along the Nile with a history going back 5,000 years in time.
Genesis 10:6-20 describes the descendants of Ham as being located in North Africa, Central Africa and in parts of southern Asia. Psalm 105:23 mentions the “land of Ham” in Egypt, and Psalm 78:51 connect the “tents of Ham” with Egypt. From these evidences we are able to identify certain people in the Old and New Testaments as African.
Prominent African people in the Bible linked to Israel
1. The Queen of Sheba: The queen of Sheba is also referred to as the queen of the south by Jesus in Matthew 12:42. She is believed by some historians to be a woman of colour. Sheba is descended from Cush (Genesis 10:7), the son of Ham who founded Ethiopia. The queen of Sheba ruled a land known for its international trade in spices, gold, and precious stones (1 Kings 10) which is how she heard of Solomon. Some commentators locate the land of Sheba in East Africa while others suggest Southern Arabia. But most commentators agree that she must have been a woman of colour.
2. Ebed-Melech, the Ethiopian: He served as a palace official during the reign of the Israelite king Zedekiah (in about 597-586 BC). In ancient times eunuchs where employed as keepers of the royal harem. He was responsible for the rescue of the Prophet Jeremiah from a muddy cistern after he was unjustly thrown there for his prophecies concerning Israel (Jeremiah 38:7-13).
The New Testament also contains ample evidence of African people interacting with Israel.
3. Simon of Cyrene: Cyrene was founded by Greek colonists in north-western Libya in 631 B.C. The Greeks often took the lands forcefully from these descendants of Phut, the son of Ham. But they also intermarried with them to form a mixed people of Africa. It is believed that some of the Jews fleeing from Babylonian invasion in 588-586 B.C eventually settled here as well. From these interracial marriages descended Simon of Cyrene who was forced by the Romans to relieve Jesus of the heavy load of the cross on his way to Golgotha. Simon was either a Cyrenian on a visit to the city for the feast or was perhaps a member of the Jerusalem synagogue of the Cyrenians.
4. Ethiopian eunuch:
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