The academic discipline of biblical studies has historically been pretty Eurocentric.This powerful critical method is most often called African American criticism, though the name is like totally not perfect. That is, you don’t have to be an African American to utilize this critical method.This critical method focuses on how authors of the Bible portrayed Africa and Africans. And let me be the first to tell you, it’s mostly quite positive. While the biblical authors didn’t know about ALL of Africa, they do write about Cush, Ethiopia, Cyrene, Sheba, and of course Egypt. For the biblical authors, these nations were the southern boundaries of the world that they knew. And, these African nations were famous for many things, one of them being wealth. Isn’t that right, Hagar?
African nations are generally portrayed as rich in the Bible. Thus, Isaiah talks about the material goods belonging to African nations such as Ethiopia and Sheba, as well as “the wealth of Egypt” (45:14).

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Class Comments, Week 08: Letters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.