Abstract
This chapter offers some reflections on the many meanings of the narratives found in the biblical books of Genesis through Judges. It considers how context, history, and place continue to inform our theological approaches to mission and argues that these many meanings are a crucial resource in understanding and reframing theologies of divine favor, identity, land, and settlement as well as attitudes toward migration, exodus, and conquest.
National memory is always the site of the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives … we learn the ambivalence of cultural difference: it is the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identification, and all acts of cultural translation.
—Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 169.
J. Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981), 30. The translation of the Spanish first edition of 1978 was published in 1981.
James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 382.
Kevin Burke, The Ground Beneath the Cross: The Theology of Ignacio Ellacuría (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000), 159.
So, regarding Hernan Cortes, in Elsa Tamez, “The Bible and Five Hundred Years of Conquest,” in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, R.S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006), 13–27, the Spanish interpret the plagues of diseases new to the continent as evidence that they are the instrument for punishing Natives.
Exemplarily argued here by Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
and Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000).
Robert P. Hay, “George Washington: American Moses,” American Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 780–791.
This goes from Paul’s allegory of Sarah and Hagar, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses to liberation theologian’s reading of the exodus, and contemporary rereadings of the women and minor characters in the margins of the text. See Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993),
Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power & Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation etc.
Oduyoye writes: “God had sent a Moses to get us out from under the burdens of colonialism and to make us a free nation with new opportunities for a fuller life.” More ambivalent is her announcement that “God was present in the conquest of Canaan and in the building of the nation and its temple.” Furthermore, in Asante military terminology, “Yahweh would have been called Tufohene, the one who actually directs the battles, fighting alongside his people… In the narratives dealing with the concept of Canaan, no victory was won without God.” Mercy Oduyoye, Beads and Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa (New York: Orbis, 2004), 1, 9–10, and 19.
Dora R. Mbuwayesango, “How Local Divine Powers Were Suppressed: A Case of Mwari of the Shona,” in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 265.
Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation, 58. Fernando Segovia argues that there are various different forms of diaspora: migrant workers are different from international intellectuals, and political refugees, for example. Diaspora might then be described as a form of migration where the migrants do not become dominant in the society they migrate to. Fernando Segovia, “Towards A Hermeneutics of Diaspora,” in Reading From This Place, Vol. 1, ed. Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993–94), 60ff.
Van Seters concludes that the Yahwist’s history “was the work of an ancient Israelite (or more specifically, Judean) scholar living among the exiles in Babylonia… influenced by the Babylonian environment [and] responding to the broader cosmopolitan horizon of the Babylonian empire.” John Van Seters, The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers (Kampen, Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1994), 468.
Vine Jr. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 177–178.
R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 227.
Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Liberation Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989).
Examples of Palestinian, Native American, and Filipino approaches to Exodus have been collected in the revised and expanded third edition of R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006).
Bedford uses Jeremiah’s investment in land (Jeremiah 32–33), and describes it as a “very long-term project” whose commitment to hope could outlast the despair of what is close at hand. Nancy Bedford, “Little Moves Against Destructiveness: Theology and the Practice of Discernment,” in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, ed. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 161–164.
Thus Zornberg articulates the midrashic dissatisfaction with surface meanings. Avivah Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Three Leaves Press, 1995), 7.
See Marc H. Ellis, Toward A Jewish Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987).
This reading does not include a critique of slavery or subjugation of women, and foreigners. Would Levenson suggest this biblical matrix as unchanging or historically adaptive? Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 142–144.
See also Dale Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 133.
Recent historical studies of Atlantic proletariats contest this simpler version. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), especially chap. 1 and 2.
John Lambert, “‘Happy Are Those Who Are Dead’: Crises in African Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Colonial Natal,” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, ed. Benedict Carton, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008), 214.
Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2008), 38.
Norman K. Gottwald, The Politics of Ancient Israel, in Library of Ancient Israel, ed. Douglas A. Knight (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 32, 43, 166, and 169.
David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books, 1997), 143.
This invokes the kind of microcombat of “swarm intelligence” Hardt and Negri describe as one future of war in Multitude. In this scenario, “innumerable independent forces seem to strike from all directions at a particular point and then disappear back into the environment.” See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 91.
Erich Zenger et al., Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995), 127.
Herbert Donner, Geschichte Des Volkes Israel und Seiner Nachbarn in Grundzügen 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 119–120.
Bruce Birch et al., A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 179–180.
This phrase is explored in a central chapter in Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 41–42 passim. In seventeenth and eighteenth century, English use it describes “menial, onerous, and dirty” forms of work, while London artisans in employed it in protests against “deskilling, mechanization, cheap labor and the loss of independence.” Whereas in the biblical texts, Israelites pick the Gibeonites as slave laborers, some in England racialized the ideology and lifted out Jews among others as part of the “distinct race, hewers of wood and drawers of water,” thereby reversing the context of the initial narrative.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grau, M. (2013). Circumambulating Exodus-Migration-Conquest: A Theological Hermeneutics of Migratory Narrativity. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031495_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44130-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03149-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)