To mark the publication of Dr. Nyasha Junior’s latest work, Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (OUP, 2019), Ancient Jew Review invited Dr. Junior and Dr. Andrew Jacobs to engage in conversation about the research and implications of this research. AJR is pleased to debut its new #conversations series with the transcript of their exchange.
ANDREW JACOBS: Hello, Professor Junior! Thanks for joining me for this discussion. First, I want to say how much I enjoyed the book; I learned a lot and I think it will find a really broad audience (if it hasn’t already). But here’s my first, and perhaps most important question:
How do you pronounce “Hagar”? With a long “a” (Hay-gar) or a short “a” (Hag-gar)?
NYASHA JUNIOR: Hello, Professor Jacobs! Thank you for agreeing to have this conversation. I’m from the South and pronounce it as Hag-gar.
AJ: Growing up I think I pronounced it Hag-gar (my family’s also from the South) but somewhere along the way I somehow picked up the long “a.”
Now that we’ve settled that: You began your book in the classroom when you were teaching at Howard University School of Divinity when your students registered surprise to see a picture of Hagar as a white woman since they knew she was black.
Why do you think Hagar’s blackness was important to these students?
NJ: I think that they learned about her as a Black character and wanted to keep that image, especially since most biblical characters are treated as “White.”
AJ: You’ve taught in different classrooms with different aims and goals (divinity students, undergraduates) and given talks to all kinds of audiences while working on this book: did you find similar resistance or surprise at the idea of a white Hagar? What kind of reactions have you had when people found out what you were working on?
NJ: No one has been surprised by the idea of a White Hagar. I have had some resistance to the idea of Hagar’s sexual relationship with Abram/Abraham as non-consensual.
AJ: People wanted to believe that Hagar was a willing participant in Sarai/Sarah and Abram/Abraham’s use of her? How did people register that resistance?
NJ: Usually, it was during the Q&A after a talk. I remember that one person was upset because she didn’t think that a husband could rape his wife. Since Hagar was Abraham’s wife, she argued that their sexual encounter could not have been rape.
AJ: You begin the book with two questions, more or less: How did Hagar become black and what purpose has Hagar’s blackness served.
Were you expecting any particular answers to these questions? Were you surprised at what you found?
NJ: I wasn’t expecting any particular answers when I started. I was surprised to find that there is more than one Hagar tradition, particularly within Black American culture.
AJ: That’s one of the aspects of the book I really appreciated—that it’s not a linear story, but there are various threads from the biblical narrative, from the history of enslavement in the U.S., and the “Aunt Hagar” traditions in Black U.S. folk culture (taken up in literary culture, too). At some points you talk about “clues,” almost like it’s a mystery you were solving.
At the same time we knew where we would arrive: at a Hagar folks could—and wanted to—imagine as Black. You conclude she’s “relatively recent”; she comes out of African-American, feminist, and womanist thinkers, and took hold pretty quickly.
It made me think a bit about how the book’s narrative is partly about the change in biblical studies, or about who can talk about the Bible in an “official” way. Do you think that’s a fair reading: is Hagar-as-Black a symbol for shifts in what the Bible can mean to broader audiences?
NJ: I’m glad that it made sense to you. I found it very difficult to write a non-linear story. My research led me to lots of different types of sources. It really did feel like trying to solve a mystery. I had to skip around somewhat while still trying to construct a narrative that my readers could follow.
I think that it is important to shift away from treating biblical interpretation as something that only biblical scholars and other academicians do. This book would not have been possible if I limited myself only to “official” or “authorized” interpreters. In order to find out more about Black Hagar, I had to look at how different types of people engaged biblical Hagar’s story.
AJ: Indeed. Do you think that is happening? In the story you tell, Black Hagar does ultimately emerge from an academic setting. Do you see biblical interpretation that makes new, persuasive meaning—especially around issues of race and sexuality—coming from non-scholarly or academic circles?
NJ: I don’t know that such interpretations are seeking to be persuasive. In my experience, outside of academia, biblical interpretation is frequently used to support or prop up current understandings. I definitely think that there is still a long way to go on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. In private conversations, folks are still asking me very basic questions about what the Bible “says” on these issues.
AJ: The subtitle of the book is Blackness and Bible. I was lucky enough to be able to invite you to Scripps in 2017 where you spoke about #BibleSoWhite. It was eye-opening to a lot of the audience to think beyond the default whiteness of the Bible in the U.S.
Do you see a future in the U.S. where that default biblical Whiteness is dislodged? Have you come to the other side of this project thinking any differently about “Blackness and Bible”?
NJ: That was such a fun talk! The audience ranged from undergrads to senior citizens, but I felt that there was something for everyone. Default Whiteness in all its forms will keep its grip on the USA for quite some time. I don’t think that many people are willing to even acknowledge it and certainly are not ready to dislodge it. I ended up stressing the Blackness part and letting go a little more on the Bible part. That is, I gained a better understanding of Black cultural production that wasn’t centered on biblical texts.
AJ: Yes, you suggest in the epilogue that Black Hagar might be a distraction from appreciating Black U.S. culture: “African-Americans need not focus on seeing themselves in one anthology of texts.”
Can you say a bit more about this caution? Is it a bit dangerous perhaps to pin cultural hopes on the Bible?
NJ: Yes, I think the desire to see oneself reflected in biblical texts makes sense given its importance in American life and culture. Yet, there are rich Black cultural traditions that are neglected due to the focus on biblical texts. It’s not the only game in town. Toni Morrison recently died. Her contributions to American literature are undeniable. In my mind, Sula and Nel should be as recognizable as Mary and Martha.
AJ: I was going to ask if you see Hagar, or other biblical characters, differently on the other side of this book. But it sounds like maybe you’re looking at them less, or not at all… at least not in the way your students did when they were surprised at a White Hagar.
Do you see this project changing how you teach about the Bible?
NJ: I’m more interested in what I call “the Bible in the wild.” Not in standard biblical commentaries or monographs but how real people engage biblical texts in the real world.
In teaching I include more texts that are not about the Bible and read them alongside of biblical texts. For example, I assign Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” with Proverbs 1-9. In class we talk about the variety of “wisdom” traditions and share things passed down to us from our communities.
AJ: That sounds terrific. It makes me wonder if you would have a different response to your Howard students who initially spoke out about Hagar, if you would steer them in different directions or tell them not to put all their eggs in the Bible basket.
Thinking beyond Hagar, you have co-authored a book on Black Samson that’s coming out this summer. Can you say a little more about this project, if it relates (or doesn’t) to the questions that you raise in Reimagining Hagar?
NJ: Now that I have finished the Hagar book I have a lot more information that I could share with Howard students. I think that some readers will be surprised where the book takes them.
Yes, Jeremy Schipper and I are co-authoring Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon. Like Reimagining Hagar, it focuses on one character and is a type of reception history. But Black Samson deals with how activists, artists, and others used the figure of Samson to talk about race in America.
AJ: I’ve been spending more time than I ever thought thinking about the Bible in U.S. culture lately, and both of these projects just remind me how the Bible—in whole and in parts—is in this unending dialogue with culture and ideologies. Perpetuating but—maybe?—disrupting U.S. ideas about race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion.
Do you have a sense of what’s next after Black Samson, or will you give your grateful audiences time to digest all of this bounty?
NJ: Yes, perpetuating and disrupting. It’s non-linear and difficult to disentangle. The use of biblical texts by non-academicians is almost like studying the Bible “in the wild.” Folks are not citing texts and sources the way you might want. They are using allusions and paraphrases. They are remixing and mixing-up texts in exciting ways.
My current project is on 19th-century evangelist Jarena Lee. It’s less traditional biblical studies and more reception history and American religious history.
AJ: Sounds fantastic. I think at some point all of us who start out studying “antiquity” (in whatever form) find we have to face “modernity” (in whatever form) head on.
Thank you so much for your time today! And congratulations on another great book.
NJ: Thank you.
Nyasha Junior is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She writes, teaches, speaks, and frequently tweets on religion, race, gender, and their intersections. She is the author of An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Westminster John Knox Press, 2015) and Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the co-author of Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Visit her website nyashajunior.com and follow her on Twitter @NyashaJunior.
Andrew S. Jacobs is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of several books and most recently co-editor, with Georgia Frank and Susan R. Holman, of The Garb of Being: Embodiment and the Pursuit of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity (Fordham Press, 2019). You can find him on Twitter at @drewjakeprof and at http://andrewjacobs.org/.