While I have already justified the use of the Bible, (an ancient book, written in a different geographical context), in trying to address modern struggles, it is important here to be more specific about how this should be undertaken. The historical roots of the method presuppose that it does not tolerate ‘an anything goes’ kind of biblical interpretation in the contemporary struggles. It does not tolerate an approach whereby the Bible is deprived of its historical social context. However, the search for biblical hermeneutical weapons of struggle must not begin and end with the historical context of the biblical text. The process must take into consideration, or rather proceed to a critical interrogation of the history, culture, and ideologies of the readers/appropriators of the biblical texts. This allows the scholar to identify areas of commonality or differences with the historical context of the biblical texts so identified for the pur- pose of crafting hermeneutics of liberation. Consequently, biblical her- meneutics dedicated to liberation of a selected group of people, using the same tool of struggle as was used to interrogate the readers’ history, culture, and ideology, must of necessity go further to address the ques- tion of the material conditions that constitute the sites of the struggle that produced the biblical texts. This is so important because, even the material conditions that produced the culture, history and ideologies of the readers of the Bible need to be seen as sites of struggle. Operating with the hypothesis that the Bible is the product and the record of his- torical, cultural, gender, racial, and social-class struggles, the exegete is then allowed to interrogate the material and ideological conditions that
produced the texts.47
Norman K. Gottwald, one of the most celebrated Old Testament scholars and a staunch advocate for the appropriation of the historical cultural- material methodology’s paradigm of struggle in analysing biblical texts, which he convincingly deploys when analysing the origins of early Israel, the development of the monarchy in Israel, and the aftermaths, set the necessary parameters for appropriating the Bible in today’s struggles, thus,
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there is but one way in which those ancient religious symbols can be em- ployed today in anything like their full range and power, and that is in a situation of social struggle where people are attempting a breakthrough toward a freer and fuller life based on equality and communal self- possession. Even then it is risky business to ‘summon up’ powerful sym- bolism out of a distant past unless the symbol users are very self-conscious of their choices and applications, and fully aware of how their social strug- gle is both like and unlike the social struggle of the architects of the sym- bols.48….From an historical cultural-material and social-evolutionary per- spective, if we are to continue to derive symbolic resources from the bibli- cal traditions, our way of relating to early Israel-as to all previous com- plexes will have to be scientifically informed. A social understanding of early Yahwism might encourage us to see what form of oppression are in- hibiting and frustrating the full development of human life today, what has to be done to change those conditions in specific terms, and what praxis and ideology are needed if we are to develop in the needed direc- tion.49
As will be evident, most of Gottwald’s views are highly placed in this study. For, it is upon these foundational insights that this study has chosen biblical texts whose material conditions and subject of discussion are strikingly similar to the situation of Zimbabwe. In other words, the study is an adoption and application of Gottwald’s hypothesis particu- larly the paradigm of struggle between dominant and dominated socio- economic and political classes on the Zimbabwean scene using the ra- cial, class and gender struggles between the (dominant) employers and the (dominated) domestic servants as the lenses through which we can observe the larger picture of the struggle in the society.
Given not only geographical separation but huge time-span that sepa- rates Zimbabwe from the texts of the Bible, it should be admitted that Exo 21:2-6, Deut 15:12-18, Lev 25:39-54, will not make a lot of sense as liberating texts when read only from the context of the reader especially
now in the 21st century A.D. But when the texts are situated in the
broader ancient Near Eastern context first, and their eighth century con- text, one finds that there are areas of continuity with the exploitation of the poor that is still going on in different parts of the world. In their context, these texts suggest a struggle between the rich and the poor;
48
N. K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250-
1050 B.C.E. New York: Orbis Books, 1979, p. 701.
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peasants and the ruling elite who exploitatively amassed and monopo- lised control of the means of production, the land, such that the only available option was for the peasants to be enslaved after losing the
land.50 The same situation is underlying slavery in the Roman-
Palestinian environment, the context of Jesus and Paul.
The context of Luke 4:18; 1 Cor 7:20-24, Phil and Gal 3:28 clearly suggest that they come out of the socio-historical situations in which there was a struggle between those who exacted tribute, through control of a state machinery as well as through control of latifundia (large estates) ac- quired by the dispossession of the poor, and those who tilled their own land but were reduced to bare subsistence by heavy taxes and rents, as well as dispossessed employed labourers, slaves, the unemployed, petty criminals, bandits, and other lumpen-proletariat, quite typical of the ancient Near Eastern and eighth century contexts. This is strikingly simi- lar to the struggle that produced domestic workers in Zimbabwe. It was in this context that Jesus announced the ‘good news’ of liberation to slaves among others. Both the content and the pattern of this proclama- tion (Luke 4:18-19) are rooted in the Jubilee and Sabbatical-year tradi- tions of Hebrew Scriptures (Exo 21:2-6; 23:10-11; Deut 15:1-18). In these traditions, liberty is presented in economic, social, and political terms: freedom for slaves, release for captive people, cancellation of debts, re-
distribution of land and care for the poor among others;51 the very prac-
tical steps that Zimbabwe needs to adopt so as to solve the exploitation of domestic workers.