Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus

by Kenneth N Ngwa

Let My People Live reengages the narrative of Exodus through a critical, life-affirming Africana hermeneutic that seeks to create and sustain a vision of not just the survival but the thriving of Black communities. While the field of biblical studies has habitually divided "objective" interpretations from culturally informed ones, Kenneth Ngwa argues that doing interpretive work through an activist, culturally grounded lens rightly recognizes how communities of readers actively shape the priorities of any biblical interpretation. In the Africana context, communities whose identities were made disposable by the forces of empire and colonialism―both in Africa and in the African diaspora across the globe―likewise suffered the stripping away of the right to interpretation, of both sacred texts and of themselves. Ngwa shows how an Africana approach to the biblical text can intervene in this narrative of breakage, as a mode of resistance. By emphasizing the irreducible life force and resources nurtured in the Africana community, which have always preceded colonial oppression, the Africana hermeneutic is able to stretch from the past into the future to sustain and support generations to come. Ngwa reimagines the Exodus story through this framework, elaborating the motifs of the narrative as they are shaped by Africana interpretative values and approaches that identify three animating threats in the erasure (undermining the community's very existence), alienation (separating from the space of home and from the ecosystem), and singularity (holding up the individual over the collective). He argues that what he calls "badass womanism"―an intergenerational and interregional life force and epistemology of the people embodied in the midwives, Miriam, the Egyptian princess, and other female figures in the story―have challenged these threats. He shows how badass womanist triple consciousness creates, and is informed by, communal approaches to hermeneutics that emphasize survival over erasure, integration over alienation, and multiplicity over singularity. This triple consciousness surfaces throughout the Exodus narrative and informs the narrative portraits of other characters, including Moses and Yahweh. As the Hebrew people navigate the exodus journey, Ngwa investigates how these forces of oppression and resistance shift and take new shapes across the geographies of Egypt, the wilderness, and the mountain area preceding their passage into the promised land. For Africana, these geographies also represent colonial, global, and imperial sites where new subjectivities and epistemologies develop.

320 pages, Paperback

Published April 12, 2022

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 stars for this post-colonial Africana hermeneutical look at Exodus through the triple consciousness of erasure, alienation, and singularity. I read this for a ministry class I am taking on Exodus and, as an academic text, this packs a lot of theology into a rather short volume. I do think that the metaphors get pushed a little too far in some places (particularly in the discussion of "water") and the author's vocabulary seems, at times, performatively academic. But anyway, I'm glad I finished it and am looking forward to unpacking it in our class.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this for a course on interpretation of the Old Testament and it was a struggle. I am not new to critical theory (my background is in literature and literary theory), but this book, as someone else aptly put it, “performs” academic jargon in such a way that it obfuscates— and thus detracts from—the author’s main points and argument. You don’t need to impress us with a technical term every other word just to prove yourself to the academy. Making your case in concise statements is more rhetorically sound and effective than using words in a decorative manner. The author’s argument is further derailed by the fact that it’s forced at times by repetition.

I think there’s a very valid and important interpretation going on here at the intersections of postcolonial, womanist, ecological, and Africana hermeneutics, but I think it could have been executed in a clearer, more concise, more effective way. When I keep saying to myself over and over, “What is this author trying to tell me?” that’s not a good sign—and this is too important a perspective for me to be left wondering that.