Emerson B. Powery and Rodney S. Sadler Jr. | Westminster John Knox Press | 2016

Reviewed by Rabbi Dr. Stu Halpern

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Emerson Powery and Rodney Sadler Jr.'s The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved analyzes how Black slaves wrestled with, reinterpreted, and were inspired by the Bible's teachings. As Powery, a professor of biblical studies at Messiah College, and Sadler Jr., an associate professor of Bible at Union Presbyterian Seminary, demonstrate, biblical interpretation was crucial to the Black struggle. As they write, "In the nineteenth century interpreting the Bible was both an act of identity formation and a feat of the imagination." On the one hand, the Bible was the locus of faith and values for their masters. And on the other hand, it was used to justify enslavement. Thus, the Black interpretive enterprise dwelled on figures and themes that operated within the same hermeneutic playing field as those who sought to oppress them while using the shared texts to fight back, in thought if not always in deed. "These interpretive activities," the authors write, "were multilayered engagements with self, community, tradition, and world." Citing the scholar Allen Callahan, Powery and Sadler Jr. note how "biblical answers" were used to justify harsh enslavement that the slaves called into question, inspiring in them "a critical sensibility, a penchant for interrogating themselves and others." As such, some former slaves argued that, though some believed that the "curse of Ham" was meant to immortalize Blackness as beneath whiteness, Gehazi, cursed in the book of Kings with the "whiteness of a leper," demonstrated that it was whiteness, not Blackness, that was the accursed skin color. Many slaves saw the sufferings of Jesus in the New Testament as embodying their own struggles and pain and the Exodus story as mirroring their own attempts at liberation. In one of the more fascinating sections of the book, the authors note how what they term a "hermeneutic of survival" was developed through the observance of the Sabbath. Some slave owners would give their slaves off during the Christian Sabbath. While many owners tried to steer their workers towards gambling and drinking during their respite, many slaves took the opportunity to form community with each other and study the Bible. Some spent the time learning to read, others in religious worship, and some used the time to hatch escape plots. It was "Sabbath ideology," the authors suggest, "which facilitated the development of the early Black church and corporate autonomy" and "may just be the birth of African American independence." Writing of his experiences leading a "Sabbath school," Frederick Douglass recalled how the day allowed him and his fellow slaves to behave like "intellectual, moral, and accountable beings." It was "the delight of my soul," Douglass wrote, to spend the Sabbath "doing something that looked like bettering the condition of my race." As Powery and Sandler Jr. convincingly argue, the Bible served a crucial role as America moved towards abolition, as more and more enslaved Blacks saw it as a source of "survival, communal shaping, and uplift." To read more Straus Center book reviews, click here. You can learn more about the Straus Center and sign up for our newsletter here. Be sure to also like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and connect with us on LinkedIn.