This essay begins by outlining the methodological ideas that will guide the examination. Here I engage with Jan Assmann’s concept of mnemohistory and propose a method that validates both the written text’s substance and the reality of its observed application. Next, I examine the long-standing religious connections between the Black experience and the Exodus narrative as a way for Black people to make meaning of their identity. In this section, I suggest that Black people have come to find striking parallels between themselves and the Israelites, a common past that James Cone has used to present a Black ontological identity. After presenting these interpretations, I evaluate them in light of the challenge that this identity is only defined in terms of oppression, pain, and the rejection of whiteness. I trace these issues into the Exodus narrative itself, and the analogous repercussions of Israel forming a shared identity through the story. In light of these criticisms, I turn to Foucault to ask whether identity construction can ever be divorced from power abuse. By returning to an ethical foundation for my understanding, I argue that there is a moral need to distinguish between good and poor uses of power in identity construction. I find these positive examples in a Queer reading of the text, where I argue that liminality and hybridity enable Moses to carry out his liberating duty. I conclude this essay by praising this technique as a means of including marginalised voices in the narrative while avoiding the difficulty of essentialism.
The Exodus narrative, which recounts Israel’s departure from Egypt, is a watershed episode in Israeli history with profound implications for not only the Jewish faith, but also Christianity, Islam, and Western thought more generally. Given the historical significance of the Exodus, it is not surprising that the story has been the subject of several interpretive efforts to determine its historical reliability, i.e., to engage the narrative in connection to archaeological and epigraphic evidence to assess its historicity.[1] In my view, this preoccupation with historical issues has obscured a fuller view of the text, particularly in relation to practical application. More than most stories, the Exodus narrative refuses to be restricted to the realm of history, instead allowing a multiplicity of voices to interpret its essence in varied expressions of memory, tradition, imagination, and praxis. This rhetorical shape and effect lends itself to a view of the Exodus not just a historical event, but a ‘conflation of history and memory that suits the conditions of different qualities of time.’[2] Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist, supports a similar approach to the Exodus, which he calls mnemohistory. Assmann describes mnemohistory as ‘concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered.’[3] Mnemohistory rejects the possibility of positivistic historical knowledge in favour of comprehending the current conditions of interpretation. This general structure of understanding is concretized in present interpretive groups and their corresponding group identities. After all, cultural memory is enacted in the context of individuals who share similar tales, resulting in a distinct feeling of group identification. As Assmann puts it, ‘cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity.’[4]
Our investigation is therefore largely unconcerned with what actually transpired historically. Rather, we want to explore how this narrative has been interpreted and the ways this has engendered group identities. As Paul Ricoeur puts it, the self can be ‘recovered only by the detour of a decipherment of the documents of its life.’[5] In this view, the Exodus is an identity-forming narrative and its interpretation reveals fundamental knowledge about the various interpretive communities. Since multiple groups have staked a claim to this common memory, a question arises of whose identity is legitimated as participant in the narrative. I define identity in this context as the dynamic interplay between the shared foundational tale and the group’s ability (power) to construct itself through these signs and symbols. Both of these factors must be kept under tension. For starters, we need to consider what the narrative says, or, at the very least, what it says in our best endeavour to reconstruct it in light of our interpretive commitments. While rhetorical enthusiasm may lead us to believe that the narrative itself has no weight in its interpretation, we must not deny that interpretation is always impacted in some way by the object of textual enquiry. Here I will employ an interpretive approach which affirms both the reality of the narrative, to the extent that it can be reconstructed, and the reality of its observable historical application. The second factor to consider is the interplay between interpretation, knowledge, and power. To assert one’s identity is to wield authority over the boundaries of knowledge in such a way that some will be included and others will not. This authority, and how it is received, will have a significant impact on how, if at all, under-represented groups can use the Exodus to reclaim a solid sense of identity.
We may now turn our attention to a concrete example of the Exodus in observable interpretation and mnemohistorical reconstruction. Here, we can examine the long-standing connections between the Black experience and the Exodus narrative as a way for Black people to make meaning of their identity. The connections between Black religious thought and the Exodus are abound in the history of African American Christianity. The Exodus has served as a foundational text through which Black people have identified with the Israelites as two peoples who both suffered from brutality, injustice, and enslavement while hoping for future liberation. In this reading, Black people have equated Pharaoh and Egypt with white oppressors, and identified themselves with the Hebrew people freed by God. As Cone argues, ‘almost all Blacks in America—past and present— have identified Egypt with America, Pharaoh and the Egyptians with white slaveholders and subsequent racists, and Blacks with the Israelite slaves.’[6] This identification with the Exodus is a mechanism for Black people to articulate their sense of historical identity through an intentional reconstruction of the past, in which Black people are recruited into the heritage of liberation. This identification is founded on the awareness that their historical circumstances are in many ways similar to those of the Israelites. If the Israelite condition was opposed to God’s will, then it stands to reason that God would act in comparable ways to alleviate Black suffering. During the time of slavery, the Exodus story also provided opportunity to consider the possibility of future emancipation and the formation of a separate collective identity. This future identity would be based on both their personal memories of slavery and the new recollections uncovered in the Exodus narratives.
This exegetical approach to the Exodus has been closely associated with Black liberation theology. James Cone, considered by many the father of Black liberation theology, extends this interpretation of the Exodus as it relates to the oppressed ontological identity. Cone specifically identifies what aspects of identity and experience cause God to show preferential concern, rejecting a universal interpretation of God’s revelation in the Exodus. For Cone, there is something distinctive about God’s choice to align himself with the oppressed and suffering. This election reveals that God is not a universal champion, but rather, the saviour of oppressed people. As Cone puts it, ‘by choosing Israel, the oppressed people among the nations, God reveals that his concern is not for the strong but for the weak, not for the enslaver but for the slave, not for the whites but for Blacks.’[7] Cone considers revelation to be a continual event throughout human history. Just as God chose to reveal himself in the context of oppressed communities in the Exodus and incarnation, God’s self-revelation to the human race continues through Black communities. Because receiving this revelation entails participating in the liberation of a marginalised community, freedom is inextricably linked to recognising and identifying this oppressed identity. This understanding can be found in the dialectical interplay between freedom and oppression, which we previously derived from the Exodus story and now find in Black identity. As Cone puts it, ‘because Blackness is at once the symbol of oppression and of the certainty of liberation, freedom means an affirmation of Blackness.’[8] Cone’s Black liberation effort is thus held together by the recovery of Black identity in a way that affirms experiences of suffering, survival, and marginalisation. This identification is both psychological and practical in nature, necessitating engagement with an oppressed community as well as ontological alignment with the oppressed.
On first examination, engaging with the Exodus narrative in a liberationist framework looks to have enormous potential for reclaiming an identity that has previously been degraded, forgotten, and erased. This new rediscovery of identity is facilitated by the dynamics re-interpreting the Exodus in light of ongoing revelation and Black experience. The basic theological meaning of Black identity, according to Cone, is found in the collective experience of the oppressed, an experience that has always been in continuity with the divine preference demonstrated in the Exodus. Nonetheless, this reclaiming of identity has been met with criticism, particularly the argument that Cone fails to deal with the many facets of the Black experience. Because Cone conflates identity with ontology, Blackness is only defined in terms of oppression, pain, and the rejection of whiteness. Because Black life is fundamentally determined by Black pain, there is limited opportunity to acknowledge the ongoing effects of oppressive structures and the ways that privilege can work even within Blackness itself. This creates a racial essentialism in which Blackness is treated ‘as if it objectively exists independent of historically contingent factors and subjective intentions.’[9] Here the power structures that are active in shaping and framing individual identities lend themselves to an imbalance of power. Because Black identity is predicated ontologically on symbolic Blackness, this disadvantages Black persons who do not feel their personhood in these precise terms. In Cone’s case, the criticism is that his essentialism is gendered, and womanist theologians have frequently attacked the male superstructure at work in his theology.[10] Thus, the promise of Black liberation remains ontologically bracketed to a limited reconstruction of identity, and tracing this identity into the Exodus risks codifying Blackness as a pure oppressive experience, which will always remain ‘alienated from Black interests in not only surviving against suffering but also thriving, flourishing, and obtaining cultural fulfilment.’[11]
Indeed, earlier in this essay, I called our attention to the tension that would need to be maintained between the text and the process of interpretation. In this section, I will bring our attention to the ways in which the narrative itself expresses identity in monolithic and problematic ways, suggesting that the problem of an exclusive preference is codified in the core structure of the text. We can look to postcolonialism for this reading, which combats the liberationist propensity toward optimism in Exodus by underlining the ways in which a conscious preference for one group generates a new and dangerous ethnocentric identity. This resistance is achieved by focusing on the attacked and enslaved Canaanites in the succeeding conquest. While Exodus recounts the moment in history when the Israelites were liberated from slavery, it also asserts that they were dispatched to conquer and pillage Canaan, even committing genocide.[12] The book of Joshua’s clear message is one of joy for Israel’s military victories, and that these deeds were sanctioned and praised by God.[13] Edward Said’s commentary on Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution is the first, albeit brief, postcolonial attempt at a Canaanite reading of the text. Here Said demonstrates how the text’s one-dimensional appraisal of Israeli identity leads to the later erasure of the Canaanites, both literally and metaphorically. In the promised land, moral status was assigned on the basis of a narrow understanding of identity and ‘if like the Canaanites you don’t happen to qualify for membership, you are excluded from moral concern.’[14] These readings of the text, mostly dismissed by most Western liberation theologies, praise a model of invasion, tyranny, and extermination that, predictably, European Zionists have exploited to justify their own territorial ambition. This example highlights how partiality for specific groups and forms of injustice can perpetuate oppression and provide divine approval for all manner of ethically dubious behaviours.
At this juncture, we might wonder why it is so difficult to make positive statements about the identity of the oppressed. Until now, we have attempted to utilise the Exodus narrative to speak of self-constituting subjects that are found or reclaimed in the text in a way that is both politically meaningful and illuminating of the importance of recognising their consciousness as hidden voices. But perhaps the answer lies in acknowledging that no aspect of identification, such as race, gender, or oppression, is ever completely objective as a category of understanding or a foundation for action. Michel Foucault argues that there can be no clear sense of self that is apart from the constellation of symbols and power linked to the development of identity. For Foucault when we speak of the positive subject we are not talking about a fixed understanding, but rather, a function of power that emerges from an existing discursive potential. Since the language, epoch, and historical conditions of knowledge production are not fixed, this means that subjects can never be recognised as fixed historical beings. The conditions of discursive formation are liminal and ever changing systems and ‘language itself is characterized by an atemporal basic structure characteristic of all discursive formations.’[15] The stable subject cannot, therefore, be a source of meaning or action since they are always in a condition of creation and reproduction. As a result, determining who is speaking is a pointless issue because the subject of knowledge is always a secondary effect or by-product of a continuing discursive production. This formation is drenched in the pursuit of power as its motivation, and attempts to use identity in service of emancipation will always be entangled with this abusive potential. Thus, Foucault refuses to indicate which uses of identity are more noble than others, leading us into a difficult position. As John Ransom puts it, ‘the moment Foucault refuses to acknowledge the existence of a different order of knowledge, one that allows us to determine beforehand what is good or bad about a particular exercise of power, one that allows us to judge its validity, at that moment, a rather exasperated dispute begins.’[16]
If the rediscovering of silenced identities occurs in the midst of problematic power discourses, it is difficult to see why we should do so rather than simply giving up the struggle. Why bother changing anything if we must always substitute one kind of identity and oppression for another? Still, I do not think the situation is as grave as it appears, and I believe there is room for progress in these difficult and unavoidable decisions. When we approach the world, we do as multiple, fragmented, and constructed selves who, despite this, operate meaningfully through these distinct and discernible identities. Liminality is not the inverse of knowledge, because in our daily lives, these subjective experiences become objective in the sense that we recognise them as the only meaningful experience we have. In practise, this involves interpreting all reality openly in terms of its unique and mixed perspective, rather than any overarching universality. According to this viewpoint, the human is fundamentally meaningful as an expression of hybridity through an amalgamation of class, race, gender, etc. Here we can dispel the notion of retreating from identity as any sort of remedy to the problem of essentialism. We make meaning of the world through these constructions, and refusing to participate in this definitional game would result in far worse indecision. Refusing to acknowledge boundaries results in a dangerous sort of non-subjectivity in which no manifestation of identity is confirmed or challenged. As this essay has argued, the culturally unique ways in which identities are imposed have a significant potential for harming others. It is not enough to simply stop engaging with identity, because inaction and indecision in the face of injustice is invariably an implicit commitment to support it. These decisions are invariably ethical, and they speak to the ethical components of our own identity. As McAuliffe puts it, ‘unless resistance to suffering and oppression is at the center and core of our ethics, unless it is its raison d’être, then ethics, our ethical lives, ourselves as ethical beings cannot be taken seriously.’[17] The challenge will be to speak of identity in a way that challenges these exclusive paradigms while being explicit enough to demarcate where God is at work.
I’d like to make the case here that perhaps the greatest path forward in raising otherwise silenced voices is to embrace liminality, ambiguity, and mystery not as a problem but as a necessary component of our identity. Further, I would like to present that we can retrieve these ‘queer’ ideas from within the Exodus narrative. Queer theology emerges from the understanding that early chapters of liberation movements spoke of people via essentialist conceptions of sexuality and gender, as well as the assumption of an independent, unified, and self-knowing subject. Against this view, Queer theology advocates for a kaleidoscope identity drawn from a dialectical mixture of all sorts of non-normative, odd, strange, or eccentric modes of identity. Gerard Loughlin defines Queer Theology as follows: ‘Queer seeks to outwit identity. It serves those who find themselves and others to be other than the characters prescribed by an identity. It marks not by defining, but by taking up a distance from what is perceived as the normative.’[18] Destabilizing and deconstructing prevailing forms of hegemony results in the queering of doctrines and narratives, as well as a vision of the self as freed from any rigid identity impositions. Because queerness provides a route for other and rejected identities to infiltrate mainstream discourse, such an initiative undermines hegemonic control and hence its authority over defining meaning. This understanding challenges the dangers of essentialism because it ‘encourages us to adopt a more ironic stance toward the standards we endorse, striving to detect arbitrary elements within necessary limits and to discern the shadow of injustice haunting existing norms of rationality.’[19] As a result, this queerness invites us to call out the sites of identity in reflexive and self-critical ways that do not rely on punitive identification systems.
We can trace this queer understanding of identity into the character of Moses as a necessary component of his capacity to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses, probably more than most, has a queer and hybrid nature to his identity, straddling numerous divides ambiguously. Moses is born a Jew, raised as an Egyptian, and married to a Midianite, yet he is not just one of these labels. Rebecca Alpert has made similar comparisons between these identities and the lived experiences of transsexual and genderqueer people. According to this interpretation, Exodus 2:11–15 represent the tensions between different aspects of Moses’ identity, where he reached a point when ‘he couldn’t tolerate the oppression of his people, and could hide no longer.’[20] The issue of Mosaic identity once again becomes relevant in these verses as it appears Moses rejects his liminality in favour of a static Hebrew identity. Nonetheless, Moses’ callous murder of the Egyptian assailant highlights the risks of essentialist identification, as the result of Moses’ act is death. The point to this hybridity, in this reading, is precisely that God works through this queerness and multifaceted identity, not in spite of it. As Caralie Focht puts it, ‘Yhwh could be the one to save Israel from Pharaoh the abusive butch and ultimately end up with Israel, but Yhwh decides to step aside. She mentors Moses and teaches her how to be a butch so Moses can be the one to rescue Israel and get the girl.’[21] Moses’ multifaceted position allows him to have an audience with the Pharaoh, and his Israelite identification will undoubtedly aid him in galvanising God’s people and accomplishing the upcoming exodus. These instances all relate to the same basic premise: Moses’ identity is in flux, existing in a hybrid and queer environment. His devotion to God and ability to lead God’s people are dependent on his readiness to see his identity as a result of these networks of difference and utilise them as such. Although ethnic and cultural differences are not eradicated, a significant amount of flexibility is established to operate within these gaps. As Dube puts it, this kind of identity is a form of resistance, ‘for it dispenses with dualistic and hierarchical constructions of cultures, which are used to claim the superiority of colonizing cultures, and shows that cultures grow and are dependent on borrowing from each other.’[22]
Thus, it is in this queer, liminal, and hybrid understanding of identity that I see the most potential for the Exodus narrative to bring to light otherwise forgotten voices and identities. When looking to find identity in Exodus, we should celebrate the non-normative, mixed, and confused aspects of the characters which allow them to challenge the power of empire and the binaries which want to present them as a singular conception of the other. This does not entail a rejection of all normative standards of identity available to us. It may well be that a person is Black, but what we are rejecting here is that all that they are is Black, or that Blackness itself can operate outside of the mixed and multiple expressions in which it occurs. The key methodological insight here is that boundaries should be deployed as widely as possible in order to combat the issue of exclusivism. Furthermore, following the example of Moses, we can come to celebrate the inconsistencies of identity as liminal spaces where God can act. In this way, those who have been silenced, erased, and forgotten can look to the Exodus narrative and the epistemic space we have created to find themselves in the midst of God’s liberating action. This is done in recognition of the fundamental contradiction that, while we say God is for them, we must always be mindful of the ever-changing nature of identity, as well as the fact that no single essentialism adequately or entirely describes the nature of God’s action in revelation. Still, we name these sites of action in order to join the struggle against evil and reclaim the identities of those who have been silenced, so that they may, in turn, lift the voices of others.
[1] So for Example Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeologys New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (London: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
[2] Ronald Hendel, ‘The Exodus in Biblical Memory,’ Remembering Abraham, (2005): 622.
[3] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard, 1997), 3.
[4] Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,’ New German Critique, no. 65 (1995): 130.
[5] Paul Ricoeur, ‘Existence and Hermeneutics,’ in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 29.
[6] James Cone, ‘Black Theology as Liberation Theology’, in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 186.
[7] James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 120.
[8] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020), 108.
[9] Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 16.
[10] See for example the critiques of Delores Williams in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013)
[11] Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, 93.
[12] Joshua 1-12.
[13] Joshua 21:43.
[14] Edward W. Said, ‘Michael Walzers Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,’ Grand Street 5, no. 2 (1986): 93.
[15] Gary Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18.
[16] John S. Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 23.
[17] Patricia McAuliffe, Fundamental Ethics: A Liberationist Approach (Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, 1993), x.
[18] Gerard Loughlin, ‘Introduction,’ in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 9.
[19] William E. Connolly, ‘Discipline, Politics, and Ambiguity,’ Political Theory 11, no. 3 (1983): 337.
[20] Rebecca Alpert, ‘Exodus’, in ‘The Queer Bible Commentary’, ed. Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West and Thomas Bohache, (London: SCM Press, 2015), 128.
[21] Caralie Focht, ‘Butch-femme Dynamics in Exodus 2–6 and 14: A Lesbian-focused Character Study,’ Theology & Sexuality 25, no. 3 (2019): 198.
[22] Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (United States: Chalice Press, 2012), 51.
