Excavating Exodus

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses’ loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

Collective identity creates a sense of “us-ness” in people. It may be fleeting and situational or long-lasting and deeply ingrained. Competition, shared belief, tragedy, or a myriad of other factors may contribute to the formation of such group identity. Even people detached from one another by space, anonymity, or time, may find themselves in a context in which individual self-concept is replaced by a collective one. How is collective identity, particularly the long-lasting kind, created and maintained? Many literary and biblical studies have demonstrated that shared stories often lie at the heart of it. This book examines the most repeated story of the Hebrew Bible—the exodus story—to see how it may have functioned to construct and reinforce an enduring collective identity in ancient Israel. A tool based on the principles of the social identity approach is created and used to expose identity construction at a rhetorical level. The author shows that exodus stories are characterized by recognizable language and narrative structures that invite ongoing collective identification.

Examining how economic change influences religion, and the way literature mediates that influence, this book provides a thorough reassessment of modern American culture. Focusing on the period 1840-1940, the author shows how the development of capitalism reshaped American Protestantism and addresses the necessary role of literature in that process. Arguing that the “spirit of capitalism” was not fostered by traditional Puritanism, Ball explores the ways that Christianity was transformed by the market and industrial revolutions. This book refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that modernity was a time when new forms of the sacred proliferated, and that this religious flourishing was essential to the production of American culture. Ball draws from the work of Émile Durkheim and cultural sociology to interpret modern social upheavals like religious awakenings, revivalism, and the labor movement. Examining work from writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Jack London, and Countee Cullen, he shows how concepts of salvation fundamentally intersect with matters of race, gender, and class, and proposes a theory that explains the enchantment of modern American society.

The Eerdmans Critical Commentary offers the best of contemporary Old and New Testament scholarship, seeking to give modern readers clear insight into the biblical text, including its background, its interpretation, and its application. Contributors to the ECC series are among the foremost authorities in biblical scholarship worldwide. Accessible to serious general readers and scholars alike, each volume includes the author's own translation, critical notes, and commentary on literary, historical, cultural, and theological aspects of the text. - Back cover.

This book traces the theme of justice throughout the narrative of Exodus in order to explicate how yhwh’s reclamation of Israel for service-worship reveals a distinct theological ethic of justice grounded in yhwh’s character and Israel’s calling within yhwh’s creational agenda. Adopting a synchronic, text-immanent interpretive strategy that focuses on canonical and inner-biblical connections, Nathan Bills identifies two overlapping motifs that illuminate the theme of justice in Exodus. First, Bills considers the importance of Israel’s creation traditions for grounding Exodus’s theology of justice. Reading Exodus against the backdrop of creation theology and as a continuation of the plot of Genesis, Bills shows that the ethical disposition of justice imprinted on Israel in Exodus is an application of yhwh’s creational agenda of justice. Second, Bills identifies an educational agenda woven throughout the text. The narrative gives heightened attention to the way yhwh catechizes Israel in what it means to be the particular beneficiary and creational emissary of yhwh’s justice. These interpretative lenses of creation theology and pedagogy help to explain why Israel’s salvation and shaping embody a programmatic applicability of yhwh’s justice for the wider world. This volume will be of substantial interest to divinity students and religious professionals interested in the themes of exodus, exile, and return.

Current notions of nationhood, communal identity, territorial entitlement, and collective destiny are deeply rooted in historic interpretations of the Bible. Interweaving elements of history, theology, literary criticism, and cultural theory, the essays in this volume discuss the ways in which biblical understandings have shaped Western – and particularly European and North American – assumptions about the nature and meaning of the nation. Part of the Green College Lecture Series, this wide-ranging collection moves from the earliest Pauline and Rabbinic exegesis through Christian imperial and missionary narratives of the late Roman, medieval, and early modern periods to the entangled identity politics of 'mainstream' nineteenth-and twentieth-century North America. Taken together, the essays show that, while theories of globalization, postmodernism, and postcolonialism have all offered critiques of identity politics and the nation-state, the global present remains heavily informed by biblical-historical intuitions of nationhood.

The history of Israel is a much-debated topic in Old Testament studies. On one side are minimalists who find little of historical value in the Hebrew Bible. On the other side are those who assume the biblical text is a precise historical record. Many serious students of the Bible find themselves between these two positions and would benefit from a careful exploration of issues in Israelite history. This substantive history of Israel textbook values the Bible's historical contribution without overlooking critical issues and challenges. Featuring the latest scholarship, the book introduces students to the current state of research on issues relevant to the study of ancient Israel. The editors and contributors, all top biblical scholars and historians, discuss historical evidence in a readable manner, using both canonical and chronological lenses to explore Israelite history. Illustrative items, such as maps and images, visually support the book's content. Tables and sidebars are also included.

The Exodus from Egypt has been as source of controversy for millennia as different groups of scholars have debated both the historicity and the date of the event. Due to a lack of Egyptian inscriptions that mention the Exodus, during the 15th Century B.C., most scholars have abandoned the Biblical timeline, shifted the event to another period, attempted to radically change Egyptian chronologies, or declared the event a myth or fabrication. This manuscript compares the timelines of the Biblical narrative and Conventional Egyptian chronologies and reviews data from archaeological, bioanthropological, philological, and historical sources in Egypt and Canaan. The analysis suggests that the Exodus occurred as the Biblical narrative suggests, in the 15th Century B.C., specifically during the reign of Thutmose II.