Stephanie Feder
Inspiring for Liberation – Legitimizing for
Occupation. Interpretations of the Exodus from
Southern Africa^1
Introduction
“Its [the Exodus’] enduring appeal is shown by the way it has been ap-
propriated again and again over the centuries, by Puritans and Boers,
Zionists and black South Africans,” writes John Collins (Collins 2005:53)
in The Bible after Babel. The reading of the Exodus by a Boer in 1900
diametrically opposes the reading of the same text by members of Zion-
istic/Messianic churches at the same time. In this paper I focus on these
opposing hermeneutics. To do this I will use examples from Southern
Africa which I will present in a chronological order. While focusing on
the Exodus, I want to bring out the political implications of the Exodus
for those who appropriated the narrative to their purposes.
Firstly, I will analyze three examples using a reception-history point of
view. To do this, I will compare three different readings of the Exodus: a
dispatch from the Boer Paul Kruger in 1900, the person Isaiah Shembe,
his founding of the amaNazaretha church and his effect on his followers
(around 1930), and Musa Dube and her postcolonial reading of Exodus
and Joshua (around 1990). The analysis will focus on rhetorical aspects
paying special attention to the way the Exodus is used within the exam-
ples. Then, I will evaluate these approaches and try to figure out how the
reception history can help to shed light on the ethics of biblical interpre-
tation since the ethics do not lie in the biblical text itself.
The examples I will present differ in quality and in genre. In these ex-
amples, the Exodus is usually not referred to as a consistent narrative
but as a motif, which alludes to different incidents within the Exodus
narrative. However, the intensity and frequency of using the motif and
its interpretation need to be distinguished. I will sometimes refer to the
Exodus motif in connection to a specific incident from the Book of Exo-
dus. Other times, I will refer to aspects which are somehow linked with
the Exodus motif but are never mentioned in the Book of Exodus; the
idea of the ‘promised land’ belongs in this category.
(^1) Many thanks to Duke Grounds who revised this essay.