Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 57

The above-quoted speech by President Obama connects with a complicated history of African Americans and the Bible. On the one hand, African Americans have seen the Bible used against them. In particular, slaveholders reinterpreted the story of Noah’s curse of Ham (Gen 9:20–7) as an eternal curse of Africans to slavery, and they noted that slavery is assumed as an ongoing reality in a number of biblical writings (e.g. Lev 25:44–6). On the other hand, African Americans have also found encouragement in the Bible’s story of God’s liberation of slaves from Egypt, calls for justice in prophets like Amos, and the Bible’s picture of Jesus.

African American scholars have engaged in multiple ways with this complicated history. To start, a number of scholars highlighted the presence of African characters in the Bible and countered racist interpretations of stories like the curse of Ham. More recently, a number of studies have analyzed the diverse ways that the Bible, especially elements like the story of exodus from Egyptian slavery, have functioned in African American religion and culture. For one survey of the broader field of critical African American interpretation, see Mitzi J. Smith, Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017). We will return to themes of African American interpretation in later chapters, starting with the next chapter’s discussion of Afrocentric and womanist interpretation and the biblical Song of Songs.

Yet again we must remember that the exodus story (or stories) that ancient Israelites claimed was not identical with the story found in the Bible in Exodus 1–15. No one would have been writing such texts in the villages of early Israel. Moreover, there are numerous signs – to be discussed elsewhere in this book – that these stories in the book of Exodus were shaped into their present form by much later Israelites rereading the story of exodus in relation to ever new “pharaohs”: the “pharaoh” of Solomon and his kingdom, the “pharaoh” of Assyrian and Babylonian superpowers, etc. This process of merging of stories described by Barack Obama has been going on a very long time.

That said, there are some trickster elements in the biblical exodus story that may point to a few early oral elements lying in some form behind the text in Exodus 1–15. Take, for example, the tale of the tricky midwives, Shiphrah and Puah (Exod 1:15–22), who disobey Pharaoh’s command to kill all male Israelite babies, claiming “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are so strong that they give birth before the midwife has a chance to get to them.” Later on, fully intending to depart for good, Moses nevertheless tries to get the Israelites free by asking Pharaoh for a three-day vacation in the wilderness so they can fulfill God’s command to worship there (Exod 5:1–5). Later, when Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelites have a three-day festival in Egypt rather than going away, Moses claims that they cannot do so because the Israelite sacrifices would be too distasteful to the Egyptians (8:21–3). When the plagues finally persuade Pharaoh to let the male Israelites go on their supposed worship pilgrimage, Moses slyly insists that the men cannot adequately observe this particular festival without all of their families and livestock along (10:7–10). These elements are now found in later, written biblical texts (some composed amidst later contexts of cultural resistance). Nevertheless, these stories about the exodus reflect a tone of trickery particularly characteristic of early oral traditions.

READING

Judges 5 (note that this probable early poem is different from the later account in Judges 4).