Reading Genesis 1 with the enslaved

Reading Audaciously

Ludwig Noya
Published 10 December 2024

At this year’s meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature, Ludwig Noya presented a critique of the way Genesis 1 has traditionally been understood to promote a universally accessible democratic identity as ‘made in the image of God.’ To do this, he put the text into conversation with the experiences of the enslaved, as represented in this famous abolitionist movement image (originally published on the cover of the 1866 annual report of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society).

Noya writes:

I couldn’t help but put the passages on priesthood enslavement and Genesis One twenty-seven side by side with the Declaration of Independence and the experiences of the enslaved person in North America. As the enslaved persons cry out, am I not a man and a brother, and am I not a woman and a sister? toward the notion that all men are created equal; enslaved foreigners, persons with disabilities, and women in the Pentateuch could also cry out, am I not a human toward the so-called democratic notion of the image of God?

Perhaps what we thought was a concept of democratization of kingship was none other than a creation of what Norman Gottwald called a theocratic oligarchy. Instead of the democratization of kingship, a dispersion of power from the monarchy to the masses of the population, what we encountered instead was a concentration of power in the hands of the few, which Exodus nineteen verse six described as a “priestly kingdom.”

Noya’s presentation drew from his dissertation, “Rest as a Site of Struggle: Reconsidering Sabbath Transgression Narratives in the Hebrew Bible,” which will soon be published as a monograph.