Postcolonial Commentary and the Old Testament

Hemchand Gossai

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780567693921
• eBook ISBN: 9780567680990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This is the first volume to provide a wide range of postcolonial interpretations of and commentaries upon significant texts in the Hebrew Bible. The volume intersects with the work of the key theorists in postcolonial studies such as Fanon, Senghor, Said and Spivak as well as with scholars such as Sugirtharajah, Kwok Pui-lan, and Segovia who have applied this theory to biblical studies. Texts have been chosen specifically for their relevance to postcolonial discourse, rather than seeking to cover each biblical document. This volume is designed to demonstrate how historical criticism, postmodernism, and the important concerns of postcolonial readings may be integrated to obtain an informed explanation of the Hebrew Bible and the writings of early Judaism. The chapters are written by scholars who represent a spectrum of national, indigenous, and diasporic contexts. Taken together these perspectives and the interpretations they yield represent a continued expansion of the manner in which Old Testament texts are read and interpreted through postcolonial lenses, reminding readers that the interpretive trajectories of these texts are almost inexhaustible. As such the volume serves as not only an addition to ongoing scholarship on postcolonialism but also as an expansion of the horizon for dialogue.

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Introduction

Hemchand Gossai

This volume stands as a complement to the Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, published also by Bloomsbury in 2007. It provides a wide-ranging collection of essays that address diverse postcolonial issues written by scholars who represent a spectrum of national, indigenous, and diasporic contexts. The volume represents a continued expansion of the manner in which Old Testament texts are read and interpreted through postcolonial lenses, reminding its readers that the interpretive trajectories of the texts are inexhaustible. Among the many contributions this volume makes to the ongoing scholarship on postcolonialism is its relevance as an expansion of the horizon for dialogue.

Opportunities for ongoing dialogue across methodological, ideological, and theological spectra are essential to fostering relationships and building bridges, and there are valuable relationships and bridges in need of construction. The various themes in these essays invite listening, hearing, and engaging with voices that challenge the established orderliness of the status quo; they provide a continuing challenge to ensure that voices from both the traditional margin and center are heard and reckoned with, without a need for full agreement. The authors of these articles are global scholars to whom the text is equally entrusted without the filtering of imperious pronouncements, scholars for whom much of the message has been subsumed, and for whom the various voices of the text are deeply intertwined with the realities of everyday life. Moreover, with the continued emergence of expanded representations of voices and contextual lenses, the depth and richness of this text add to the Old Testament’s already-textured fabric.

The Bible in general, and certainly the Old Testament, has been woven into the fabric of colonialism, and not infrequently are the politics of colonialism and neo-imperialism shaped by interpretations of the Bible. These essays contain some well-known postcolonial themes, such as challenging the empire, but also contain other themes that have been generated by the particularities of the contexts and issues of their authors.

This volume is meant to expand further the horizons for ongoing dialogue. Like any viable and important postcolonial study, the intent is to imagine beyond what is historical or current and to ensure that colonial and quasi-imperial ownership and hermeneutical hegemony do not continue to be set in stone. What we continue to believe is that with the numerous postcolonial and allied interpretations that have emerged in the last two decades, following the advent of Liberation Theology, the ideas are nonetheless penultimate. What this collection of essays contributes is additional testimony that the Bible cannot be considered territorial or owned by one group or society. Moreover, even as the essays invite an expansion of ideas, they also serve as a challenge to those who have already established the Bible as a weapon to be interpreted so as to subdue and silence voices of newness and dissent. While the range of essays spans the general to the particular with respect to themes, all of the essays have a universal claim as they explore existential and human issues that transcend margin and center.

It might be easy and convenient, and perhaps even advisable, to have the essays clustered into historical divisions. However, as the themes and trajectories in these essays indicate, there is an inherent challenge to “order,” and the boundaries as such in these essays not only overlap, but intersect so as to be located in more than one grouping. Moreover, by classifying the essays into particular groups, the very designation will conceivably guide the reader to read and interpret the essays in historically defined ways. The ongoing scholarship from the margins, including postcolonial orientation, should not seek to switch places from margin to center nor for that matter create “new” centers. Rather, the content and arrangement of the articles seek to weave together center and margin. Displacement of one for the other has shown a troubling level of continued oppression and marginalization, with the subjects and the objects merely changing places. This is expressed in different forms with different names for the cycle of oppressor and oppressed. The direction of these essays and other postcolonial studies is not to seek displacement and the re-characterization of roles, replacing one dominant group with another. That defeats the purpose of these new interpretive lenses. To be sure, leaving in place colonial tendencies and their oppressive biblical interpretation is not an option, but neither is the use of the new and wide-ranging possibilities that continue to emerge to punish those who have embodied such insidious and destructive colonial misappropriations for political, economic, and nationalistic hegemony. One of the many challenges is that even as margins are being redefined, there continues to be an insistent center of privilege for the historically dominant voice. And this must be challenged.

The voices in these essays do not seek to be uniform. They are not reflective of a set convention, but rather, they represent an essential presence of contextual and personal realities which, without a doubt, shape the manner in which we hear and resonate with the text. It is easily discernible from these essays that there is no such notion of a purely objective reading. To allow the text to stagnate into a so-called historical time with little influence and meaning for the present, unless so doing is ideologically beneficial, is to place blinders on the text. That only benefits those who seek to sustain the status quo.

R. S. Wafula in his essay suggests that the Exodus narrative is a convoluted double story that speaks of liberation, freedom, and a desire to end violence. While this theme is not uncommon and is one that has been co-opted by the “center,” Wafula argues that the issue here is the end of the circle of violence that is instead met with more violence to justify, thus ensuring the imperial, divine, and surrogate powers are kept intact. Ending violence is enmeshed in narratives of violence. In the end, destroying violence becomes a story of oppression and never-ending, vicious, additional layers of violence. In this regard, the Exodus story can be instrumental in understanding and mitigating the forces that threaten world civilizations today. It is not enough to point out that violence is an abhorrent quality, and one that needs eradicating, but one must have the courage to observe that the violence in Exodus has its genesis in God, who, Wafula argues, perpetuates such violence by aligning with the powerful. Often embedded within the narratives of peace is an undercurrent narrative that feeds the vices which generate violence.

Alice Laffey argues that the postcolonial quality in the book of Leviticus lies in three strata. First, some conquered people of Israel and Judah likely used the book quite consciously to support their identity, emphasizing religious independence in the face of political and economic domination. Second, some likely, simultaneously, revered the book despite imperial power and a postcolonial setting. A third stratum may have valued the book selectively and in so doing, resisted not only the empire but also the priests and their willingness to serve as handmaids of imperial power. It is the marked delineation of the role set aside for some on the basis of inherent qualities that extends the division between those with particular powers and others who by the dint of gender and class must serve in other roles. Laffey brings to bear these strata on the historical and contemporary women of the Roman Catholic Church who have been denied the possibility of ordination to the priesthood, those who experience the liturgical power of priests as a form of contemporary imperialism.

Dora Mbuwayesango notes that in Numbers, Israel as a nation colonized a land already inhabited by other peoples. The book is both an anti-conquest and patriarchal narrative in that it utilizes certain literary and ideological strategies in a manner that secures the innocence of the Israelite colonizers while sanctioning a patriarchal ideology. In this regard, the central trajectories of the book would in many respects seek to sustain a colonialization and power theme. The persistent quest for acquisition of land by those with the power to do so is not a far-removed idea from the eminent domain; this makes the book one of ongoing relevance. Exploring Numbers with a different set of lenses, Jione Havea reminds us that even when the central theme might be about the acquisition of land, the particularities of the land also matter. In this regard, he examines the manner in which hinterland and wilderness in Numbers might be interpreted in the context of native Pasifika islander realities. The colonial perception of what hinterland and wilderness have to do with barrenness and emptiness is misconstrued, and shows a myopic attention to the essential life that indigenous peoples and cultures have in the wilderness, and the fact that the wilderness was significant for the life of Palestine.

Kåre Berge explores two basic but seemingly conflicting aspects of Deuteronomy: the first is the “All Israel” identity formation through “Othering”; the second is the fact that Deuteronomy originated among a small, marginalized ethnic or religious group under the domain of the Persian Empire. On the one hand, initially the book seems to create an ethnic/national identity through “essentializing” (Said) and even militating against another ethnic group called “The Canaanites.” For territorial and religious purposes, this group has to be exterminated (“banned”) by the Israelites as they enter the Promised Land. Berge argues that in times of imperial hegemony and control, those working for social/religious power must walk a narrow path between imperial sanctions and local acceptance, and in his estimation, Deuteronomy is the result of such a “narrow walk.” He further argues that Deuteronomy presents a utopia of “Whole Israel” reading and studying the Torah (the book of the law of Moses). By giving due attention to the way this concept creates ethnic identity and legitimates local power, it is possible to present a view of how the author group is coping with an instance of ancient Persian colonialism.

The two essays by Cristina García-Alfonso and Diandra Chretain Erickson extend the interpretive breadth of Judges and further illuminate what the lenses of postcolonialism may bring to the text. The Cuban context and reality that subaltern people face on the island constitute García-Alfonso’s hermeneutical lenses through which she reads the stories of Jael and Jephthah’s daughter. She argues that these are stories of survival in the context of oppressive powers. Specifically, she sets her interpretation in the context of Cuba and has coined the term “resolviendo,” pointing to where powerless Cubans find the power and agency to face their daily lives. Diandra Chretain Erickson identifies and examines characters, incidents, and voices in the book of Judges that illustrate mimicry and ambivalence. She demonstrates how these characters reflect the ancient Israelites’ hybrid identities and the sociopolitical positions of their scribes who produced the texts in the shadow of empire. Chretain focuses principally on the literary dimension of Judges and brings to the forefront how the unstable and ambiguous characterizations of various figures in the book are directly influenced by the scribes’ experiences of colonization.

Kari Latvus analyzes the imperial nature of the story of Solomon, and pays special attention to the evaluation of the imperial and colonial rhetoric. The image created contains elements that proudly present Solomon as an imperial ruler who governed large geographical areas, acted as a suzerain, possessed a huge fortune, and represented a wise and ideal ruler. Anything referring to Solomon as a tribal leader in Judah is missing as well as any elements of little traditions. The writer(s) of 1 Kings 3–11 wanted to show that Solomon was the ruler of a great empire, a true colonial player who exploited faraway regions and belonged to the circle of great kings of his time. The imperial rhetoric includes only a positive interpretation about colonial power: imperial power at its best could offer peace and prosperity, at least for the insiders. Latvus challenges this long-established notion of Solomonic imperialism and paints a picture of a complex character whose idea of imperial peace is predicated on the enslavement of his own people, where order takes precedence over justice and neighborliness.

Gerrie Snyman argues that in Chronicles the point of departure is decoloniality, reading the book in terms of coloniality and its effect on the world in which the text was produced. The essay focuses on three principal themes: an explanation of the notion of decoloniality; a reading of Chronicles in terms of Yehud as a colony within the Persian Empire—playing to the tune of the empire’s public transcript; and resistance to the colonial power—evidence of a hidden transcript of those affected by coloniality. Snyman observes the well-established mythic norm prevalent in biblical interpretation, namely that of a white, Western, wealthy, heterosexual, Christian, masculine reader. The norm, he argues, has been constructed in the process of European colonialism since 1492 and the parallel development of Eurocentrification. He suggests that readers find a structural resonance between the meanings they construct on the basis of the biblical text, the society depicted in the biblical text, and the context of reading itself. He argues that the privileged position of the economically secure Israelite (heterosexual) male head of household became the default position of the white male reader of the biblical text. This is what makes a postcolonial reading of Chronicles markedly germane to contemporary society.

Roland Boer argues that Nehemiah appears as a text responding to the complexities of colonized space, and it does so in terms of the dynamics of foreign and local ruling classes, in which the local ruling class seeks to shore up its importance through sanction by the colonizer, and yet simultaneously challenges the colonizer. In particular, Nehemiah evinces a process whereby the society in question is reshaped in a new image, which entails systematic patterns of inclusion and exclusion. In the analysis of Nehemiah, Boer identifies the main features of the regimes of plunder and subsistence, before examining in more detail three issues: the primacy and indeed shortage of labor in reference to deportations; the specific economic features of the marginal zone of the Southern Levant; and how economic resistance from a subsistence perspective is mediated and deflected in the text of Nehemiah.

Daniel Smith-Christopher reads Esther in a context of subordination and unequal power, and raises questions about agency. While diaspora tales have been read from a perspective of resistance in its various forms, Daniel Smith-Christopher brings the book of Esther into dialogue with recent work on collaboration studies. This essay using postcolonial lenses takes into consideration collaboration studies in both history and biblical studies. Smith-Christopher argues that the concerns of such studies include reading literature from contexts where a subordinated people are attempting to negotiate different levels of power as a result of military and/or economic impositions by a stronger sociopolitical group, but also examining how they continue to deal with those realities once the social circumstances have changed. This does not imply that the subordination of a people has ceased, even if the political dynamics have changed. In this regard, Smith-Christopher addresses biblical literature with questions related to circumstances of social, military, or economic conquest, as well as oppression, exploitation, and domination in history—such is his particular and pertinent understanding of the role of postcolonialism—but the contemporary implications are obvious.

Royce M. Victor argues that modern colonialism has given a new meaning to the phrase “God who is enthroned to rule the universe” mentioned in the Psalms. This new meaning became a mandate for colonization and legitimized all the colonial endeavors. This essay looks at the enthronement psalms from a postcolonial perspective, and reveals the manner in which colonialism and imperialism are expressed in these texts, and how the modern colonial and imperial powers made use of these texts to realize their interests. Victor observes that while there might not be the abundance of colonized land there once was, nonetheless, the idea of colonialism still continues to exercise its power and authority in several forms in the contemporary world. In this regard, he views colonialism as the way in which unequal international relations of econ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction Hemchand Gossai
• 2 Foreword Samuel E. Balentine
• 3 The Exodus Story as a Foundation of the God of the “Fathers” R. S. Wafula
• 4 Leviticus Alice Laffey
• 5 Numbing Numbers: Land and People of the Wilderness Jione Havea
• 6 Numbers Dora Rudo Mbuwayesango
• 7 The Empire, the Local, and its Mediators: Deuteronomy Kåre Berge
• 8 Judges: Subaltern Women Cristina García-Alfonso
• 9 Judges Diandra Chretain Erickson
• 10 Subaltern Existence as the Path to Perfect Empire: Wisdom of Solomon Daniel C. Timmer
• 11 The Empire of Solomon: An Analysis of Imperial Rhetoric in 1 Kings 3–11 Kari Latvus
• 12 The Chronicler’s Narrative on Saul (1 Chron. 10:1-14): A Decolonial Reading of Chronicles Gerrie Snyman
• 13 Nehemiah Roland Boer
• 14 Esther on Trial: Resistance or “Collaboration Horizontale”? Daniel L. Smith-Christopher
• 15 The Enthronement Psalms: The Poetic Metanarrative of Imperialism Royce M. Victor
• 16 The Empire and First Isaiah D. N. Premnath
• 17 Jeremiah’s Welfare Ethic: Challenging Imperial Militarism Hemchand Gossai
• 18 The Collecting Impulse in Lamentations: Postcolonial Traumata Made Miniature in Word-Objects Gregory Lee Cuéllar
• 19 Jonah Steed Vernyl Davidson
• 20 Reading Nahum with the Oppressed: Power as a Social Justice Issue Wilhelm J. Wessels
• Index
• Copyright