Let My People Live

Kenneth N. NgwaisProfessor of Hebrew Bible at Drew Theological School and the Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum. He is the coeditor of Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age: A Transdisciplinary Theological Conversation.

"Kenneth Ngwa's Let My People Live is a refreshing academic exercise in reading for liberation. It not only takes African, postcolonial, and liberation biblical hermeneutics to a whole new level of execution, it also effortlessly occupies a whole new place in the biblical scholarship, generating new ways of writing, reading, analyzing, seeing, and interpretating. Ngwa thus invites us to a new exodus—a journey to a whole battalion of new ways of reading the narrative of Exodus, a story that has vexed the oppressed, displaced, dispossessed, and liberation questors in claiming the God who sees, knows, hears, and acts of the behalf of the oppressed, while at the same time authorizing the erasure of native people. The God we love to hate. Ngwa's Let My People Live encourages readers to take up the gershomite-ogbanji postcolonial identity and hermeneutics, in quest of 'the quality of life forged across time and space outside constructions of erasure, marginalization, and singularity.'"— Musa W. Dube, Professor of New Testament, Emory University"The author ably foregrounds Africana hermeneutics as being about life. Forces of erasure, alienation, and singularization are resisted in favor of liberation for the communal flourishing of the Africana. An invaluable resource for Hebrew Bible scholars and students alike."— Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan'a Mphahlele), Professor of Old Testament Studies, University of South Africa"Dr. Ngwa adeptly weaves together the histories and current realities of peoples of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic with the story of the Exodus. Using a nuanced Africana hermeneutic, he develops key insights from the familiar biblical book that can foster the wellbeing of our communities and the natural environment today. This is such a timely book!"— Cheryl B. Anderson, Professor of Old Testament, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary"Let My People Live offers an imaginative and interdisciplinary textual study that replaces the idea of leaving with living by exploring Africana categories to discuss erasure, alienation, and singularity, a triple consciousness that rejects imperialism as it was manifested by the slave ship, the slave castle, and the postcolony. The text demonstrates that Exodus is always a story of strife that is grounded in hope by offering a postcolonial reading of the exodus motifs, exploring afro-ecology to counter colonial necrology. The hermeneutics at work here is a wonderful testament to the idea that the Africana world can transform the scotched wasteland depicted in the exodus narrative into a livable space."— Elias Kifon Bongmba, Chavanne Chair in Christian Theology and Professor of Religion, Rice University"Kenneth Ngwa provides African biblical studies and theology with a way of returning to the book of Exodus and the motif of 'exodus' anew, more than twenty-five years after African theologies proposed a turn away from the book of Exodus and from the motif of exodus as 'liberation' to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the motif of 'reconstruction.' Ngwa poetically and prophetically summons us to an African(a) return to the book of Exodus. He shifts the hermeneutical frame so that we discern exodus' capacity to resist and transform the dominant systems of our entangled African(a) time, systems of 'erasure, alienation and singularization.' Ngwa understands his 'exodus work' as offering resources for defying these three systems, foregrounding 'survival, return, and community' as forms of resistance, respectively. Exodus, with Ngwa as our guide, yields useful resources for creating 'viable, concrete, and lasting alternative ideologies and structures to these three destructive systems, in order to support communal flourishing.'"— Gerald O. West, Professor Emeritus, School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa