Reviews of Books

Old Testament Tales

Reviewed by Kimberley L. Phillips, College of William and Mary

From the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley to the twentieth-century reggae artist Bob Marley, people of African descent throughout the Americas have retold the biblical story of the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt as a narrative both of divine intervention and of human political agency. For the African-born Wheatley, who was taken to Boston as a child, reared in slavery, and converted to Christianity, the Old Testament offered hope of release from the chains of bondage. Deeming slaveholders "our modern Egyptians," Wheatley confidently anticipated the workings of Providence. "In every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call Love of Freedom," she wrote in 1774. "It is impatient of oppression, and pants for Deliverance. . . . The same principle lives in us. God grant deliverance in his own Way and Time."1 More than 200 years later, the Jamaican Marley and the Wailers sang the "Exodus" theme to a reggae beat: "Exodus! Movement of Jah people / Send us another brother Moses gonna cross the Red Sea."2 Whatever the form, the Exodus story has been central to African American visions of freedom and collective identity.	1
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., puts Exodus! at the center of African American understandings of "Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America." The biblical account of the Israelites' journey from slavery to freedom expressed a "metaphorical framework for understanding the middle passage, enslavement, and quests for emancipation" (p. 3). It had practical political consequences as well. In Glaude's view, the Exodus story could work in contradictory ways, stirring black resistance to slavery at one turn and inspiring nonviolence in another. Indeed, the Old Testament tale could offer a model for ethical conduct in this world: "You shall not oppress a stranger. You know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9). For black abolitionists, the exegesis of Exodus furnished a means collectively to reject violence toward others as a response to enslavement.	2
Although Glaude does not present a deeply researched social history of the Exodus theme, he nonetheless provides a provocative model for understanding blacks' collective ideas of justice in early nineteenth-century America. Numerous scholars have documented that enslaved and free black people identified with the Israelites and imagined themselves as chosen people. Glaude adds to this scholarship a philosophical and ethical analysis of how the story became central to the secular politics of African America. His is the first sustained account of the political meanings of exodus in African Americans' search for a common language of history, experience, and nation. In broad strokes, Glaude frames this wide-ranging discursive strategy in the decades of free black community and church formation. Retold during numerous public rituals such as freedom celebrations, the story "blunted" the "brutality of the peculiar institution" and became more than an expression of blacks' suffering. These repeated retellings "solidified that sense of communality needed for conjoint action" and became "an account of black liberation" (pp. 4–5).	. . .