The discussion in class about kebra negast took me by surprise. In reading, I had missed most of the intentions of the text and its underlying intention of including Ethiopia in the christian history. I had seen it as a somewhat bizarre and inconsistent story about the goodness of Solomon and how he spread his righteous seed. It had seemed to me a very strange story, but I accepted my interpretations because it fit with many of my assumptions of what religious stories are: a little nonsensical, a little strange, but you just have to take them as a moral and ignore the counter intuitive details.
However, my interpretation was entirely wrong. Instead of searching for meaning in the text, I passed it off simply because it was religious. It is this prejudice that I'm trying to battle in this class. We looked beyond the surface of the text, like the Torah's garment, to the moral, political and social motivations of the text. I am too quick to label something as "justifying the desired status quo" (aka, genesis justifying sexism and domination of the earth) or as political jargon to control a faithful public. When I make these decisions I often stop thinking, satisfied that I understand enough. I'm learning my lesson, though, and in future readings I will think harder before I dismiss the text out of hand.