Professor David Tuesday Adamo's Biblical Scholarship on Women: Reflections from an African-South African Mosadi

Abstract

One of the prolific writers in the discipline of African Biblical Hermeneutics is the Nigerian Old Testament (OT) scholar, Professor Tuesday David Adamo. In his tireless efforts to unlock the OT reality for African contexts, persuaded by his commitment to decolonise the subject of Biblical Studies, Adamo has made successful efforts to reflect on the African presence in the Old Testament. The present study seeks to engage Adamo's concept of African Biblical hermeneutics in order to investigate whether the author sufficiently discussed the theme of gender in his discourses. This research attempts to respond to the following two main questions in view of Adamo's discourses: (1) In Adamo's concerted effort of confirming the presence of Africa and Africans in the Hebrew Bible, does the woman question feature? (2) If so, how does Adamo navigate the question? Keywords: Adamo; African Biblical Hermeneutics; African Woman; Bosadi; Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; Wife.

The Afrocentric-Womanist Paradigm

“…It is important to highlight that Masenya (1997Masenya ( , 2005 has also developed a methodology from an Afrocentric womanist perspective for reading the Bible. Masenya's Bosadi approach is derived from the Northern Sotho word bosadi meaning womanhood.…”

Ancient Egyptians in Black and White: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ and the Hamitic Hypothesis

“…However, the many African American, African, Afro-diasporic, and non-Black scholars who have carried on this task in the twenty-first century tend to accept an African presence in the Bible and to generate scholarship beyond Copher's method of uncovering the Black presence. Newer methods include analyzing how Africans are depicted in religious texts (Byron 2002); paying attention to issues of gender, class, and sexuality in biblical texts as well as the contexts of writers and readers (Bailey 2009(Bailey , 2010Byron and Lovelace 2016;Gafney 2017); interrogating the liberatory potential of biblical texts for marginalized people (Bennett 2003;Masenya 2005;Weems 2003); and studying the psychological, social, cultural, and political meanings of scripture for Africana peoples (Bowens 2020;Love 2013;Junior 2020;Junior and Schipper 2020;Marbury 2015;Powery and Sadler 2016;Schipper 2017;Wimbush 2000). Thus, Copher's more narrow focus on deconstructing the Hamitic Hypothesis by demonstrating the Black presence in the Bible is no longer a central aim of Africana biblical interpretation.…”