Abstract
I came into the task of reading Exodus and Deuteronomy expecting primarily exegetical work that attempted to read texts from Exodus and Deuteronomy against the grain, that is, from a variety of non-Western perspectives. There is, however, comparatively little of either exegesis or competently performed postmodern readings to be found. Instead, one encounters quite a lot of reception history (especially medieval rabbinic interpretation history), a lot of social commentary, some historical anthropology, and even some sermonizing, all mentioning ‘Exodus’ or ‘Deuteronomy’ at some point. With few exceptions, what exegesis one finds is wilfully dishonest, shallowly researched, and even, at times, poorly written. I have enjoyed the work of the editors, Athalya Brenner and Gale Yee. It is in light of this that I was so shocked by the low quality of some of the articles. I should note that some of the essays are quite good. The articles by Gendi, Larsson, Wong, and Jacob stand out – the latter three not only as examples of competent exegesis but of relevant applications of the postmodern approach. These are the kinds and qualities of articles I was hoping to encounter.
Other essays, however, not only fail to attempt a competent reading of the titular texts, they even fail to be legitimate postmodern readings. To name just a few examples: Adamo’s ‘African reading’ is only African in the sense of supporting a kind of African nationalism: a tendency to try and view all of human history as somehow Africa-centric, specifically to make the historical claim that the mixed multitude of the Exodus story were in large part Africans from the south of the continent. Kelly’s essay is an ironic example of power politics – dressed in the sheep’s clothing of postmodernism – that invokes the term ‘false prophet’ from Deuteronomy to argue for the silencing of a minority position in the ecological scientific conversation. Regardless of whether or not he is scientifically correct, this is hardly rowing against the tide or reading from the perspective of the marginalized. The obligatory self-disclosures, so central to this volume, are very often irrelevant. In some cases, autobiographical self-disclosure is almost all the essay contains (Lipton’s essay is the most egregious example of this). While Gendi’s essay, mentioned above, is quite a good work of literary exegesis focused on the character of Pharaoh in Exodus 1-15, I fail to see how it is ‘an Egyptian perspective’, other than by virtue of Gendi’s Egyptian ethnicity. This essay’s subtitle, like the pretensions of many of the essays, simply panders to the postmodern meta-narrative of itself. What postmodern readings purport to do, and what would be valuable if they actually accomplished it, is to be self-aware in their subjectivity and intentionally push interpretive boundaries, to see if the key to a text is hidden behind some privileging or repression that many of us, as modern Western readers, did not know we were perpetrating upon the text. This is not, unfortunately, something generally achieved by the essays in Exodus and Deuteronomy.