Gerrie Floris Snyman

• D Th
• Professor at University of South Africa

Popular readings, for example, sermons appear to exonerate Rebekah and Jacob (Gen. 25: 19-34; Gen 27-29, 33), as if they want to salvage the relation between faith and good character. Scholarly readings are more ready to question Rebekah and Jacob on a continuum between Rebekah and Jacob as deceitful and rescuing the Abrahamic covenant. Who are to...

In the colonial period since 1492, the colonial masters of Europe sent perpetrators within the colonised territories to other colonies where they became slaves – forced migration and diaspora. These slaves started a new life and became, like Cain’s children, the ancestors of a few notable families (e.g. in South Africa) – a typical postcolonial sit...

This essay explores Manasseh's vulnerability in both narratives in terms of the current reader's own vulnerability. In 2 Kings 21:1-18 Manasseh appears to remain invulnerable over-against the inhabitants of Jerusalem's vulnerability. In 2 Chronicles 33:1-20 Manasseh is turned fragile in captivity and physically rendered vulnerable. The essay is div...

The current interpretation of Edom in Mal 1: 2-5 does not allow for any redemption of Edom. This article looks into the possibility of reading these verses differently so as to allow for the rehabilitation of Edom. At issue here is to whom the deity is referring to in Mal 1:4: the Edomites or the audience of Malachi’s prophecy, the priests? In near...

This essay responds to a question Prof. I. J. J. (Sakkie) Spangenberg asked the author at the 2015 meeting of the OTSSA with regard to the use of the OT in current South African discourse. It pertained to the use of an OT text in a context that is historically and culturally removed from the story: why is the figure of Cain used to illustrate perpe...

This article inquires about the appropriation of Cain within a critical South African whiteness. The main argument is that despite Cain’s wrongdoing and punishment, he succeeded in living a fruitful life. The idea of the appropriation of Cain is based upon ideas expressed by Katharina von Kellenbach in her book, The Mark of Cain. The article looks...

The question this essay asks is how does one respond in a credible way (from a position of whiteness) to the decolonial turn when that turn radically interrogates (to the point of shaming) one's being by questioning the morality of the cultural and social structures of whiteness and the zone of being in which one finds oneself. The essay proposes a...

In this essay the author looks at the decolonial critique on Western epistemology as presented within Western biblical hermeneutics in order to appreciate the focus on the geopolitical and the body political nature of knowledge. To this end, the author revisits an aspect of the book of Esther, namely the issue of Haman as perpetrator, not only to u...

A review is presented of Kelley’s (2002) Racializing Jesus. Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship, in terms of the following question: “If the argument about Western culture’s complicity in racism is taken seriously, how does one move forward towards a hermeneutic that is racially sensitive but not racist?” In terms of the...

Based on two grass roots readings of Esther 9 in terms of violence and power, the author discusses the issue of race, identity and power. His entry point is based on the notions of public and hidden transcripts as developed by James Scott’s book Domination and the arts of resistance. Hidden transcripts (1990). The article explains the current South...

The book of Esther employs a wisdom theme to develop the plot and its denouement. The particular illustration of wisdom is that of role reversal. Haman, the second in command, gets kicked out and the leaders of those he sought to lock out filled his position. However, the role reversal becomes more than a mere change in status. As Grace needed to s...

This essay enquires into the problem of mimesis when dealing with the biblical text: imitating the text as well as imitating the tools with which the text is read. Using the Book of Esther as illustration material, it looks into mimesis within the story of Esther itself as well as mimetic actions based on the story. The focus then shifts to a parti...

An ethics of reading the Bible and a hermeneutics of vulnerability On the basis of Van der Walt’s (2008) proposal regarding an approach towards Scripture, the author proposes a hermeneutics of vulnerability that aims to facilitate a Bible reading process “with” people and no longer “for” people. Such a hermeneutic will enable the Bible reader to t...

An ethics of reading the Bible and a hermeneutics of vulnerabilityOn the basis of Van der Walt’s (2008) proposal regarding an approach towards Scripture, the author proposes a hermeneutics of vulnerability that aims to facilitate a Bible reading process “with” people and no longer “for” people. Such a hermeneutic will enable the Bible reader to tak...

Employing a hermeneutics of vulnerability to unmask privileged positions, this article intends to provide a reading from a white perspective of The Africana Bible. Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora. The hypothesis is that the book constitutes an exercise in reading the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/First Testament in ter...

To read, see, talk and believe differently � a response to other readers� reading of �Om die Bybel anders te lees: �n Etiek van Bybellees� As any exegesis is necessarily preceded by certain theological convictions, the author of the book Om die Bybel anders te lees: �n Etiek van Bybellees (2007) responds to criticism on the book flowing from a semi...

This article will illustrate the validity of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's SBL Presidential address of 1987 on the topic of the ethics of interpretation, namely doing justice to the text in its his-torical originating context by inquiring, inter alia into the author's responsibility towards his audience. Firstly, Schüssler Fiorenza's ideas on the...

“To read the Bible sensitivelyand in its richness” – in conversation with Amie van Wyk In response to Prof. J.H. van Wyk’s review of Gerrie Snyman’s book “Om die Bybel anders te lees: ’n etiek van Bybellees” (2007) the author proposes thatthe issue is contextuality, neccesitated the moment the human aspect rears its head in the process of reading t...

Within a hierarchy of senses where sight dominates, race constitutes a regime of visibility with whiteness as the master signifier in the Western world. The essay explores the impossibility to think beyond race in a world that is still deeply racist. Racism is not undone once people have seen through it. In illustrating the performativity of race i...

This paper argues that the critique offered by African hermeneutics of what they perceive to be Western hermeneutics, can be interpreted as an interpellation of whiteness. The paper endeavours to explore aspects of this interpellation. Based on Pres. Thabo Mbeki"s letter on the eve of Human Rights Day, it proceeds by illuminating several other inte...

Feeding on the current social anxiety in the country that is defined by racial lines, the paper suggests the possibility of a theology for the 'retributed', i.e. those who undergo justice in terms of affirmative action or land repossession. Employing Ndebele's thoughts on the folktale The lion and the rabbit and the issue of justice in Lars von Tri...

This article follows aspects of the current debate on racism as embodied in the AIDS-HIV controversy. It discusses President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS letter to world leaders in terms of the religious reality it invokes and his reaction to opposition at home regarding his stance on the link between AIDS and HIV. His handling of opposition is analysed in t...

Homosexuality and time-orientedness: an ethic of reading the Bible? The article deals with the discourse on homosexuality within the Reformed Churches in South Africa. At stake is the exegete’s subjectivity, or presupposed arbitrariness in the hermeneutical process. The author takes issue with the view that the Biblical text on homosexuality is a...

This article provides a critical discussion of some aspects in The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories, and Trends (West & Dube 2000). The book gives its intended Western reader the opportunity to see (an etic view) how others perceive the Western cultural context. The discussion focuses on the following aspects: (a) The role and possibilit...

The RCSA is in desperate need of a new way of approaching the Bible. The hermeneutical principles that gave birth to a theological legitimation of apartheid are still active in the theological legitimation of a patriarchal order in the RCSA (Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika). It is as if the RCSA suffers from a theological schizophrenia which bar...

The paper concentrates on the Western presence in Africa in the midst of accusations of racism. Using a postcolonial framework posited by two books written/edited by R. S Sugirtharajah (1998. Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism. Contesting the Interpretations, and The Postcolonial Bible) the paper follows recent events and public debate...

The essay deals with the inability of churches and individuals to take the indispensable next step of radically recasting their reading practices of the Bible in a post-apartheid society. Failure to remodel the premises and practices of Bible interpretation results in a sense of betrayal. Although the theological justification for apartheid might b...

This article intends to link Africanisation, lay readings and critical scholarship. Its point of departure is the dialectic of colonial inferiority complexes and the realisation of a Babelesque confusion as a defining element of South Africanness. Within this socio-political context the focus falls on Semeia 73 ('Reading with': an exploration of th...

This article discusses the production of a genealogical text in Chronicles (1 Chron. 2:3-4:23) which probably served as a key to membership within a collective community in the province of Yehud in the Persian period of the Second Temple era. The article starts with a discussion of how genealogies work in Southern Africa: firstly, within a particul...

Bible reading and recalcitrance - reader reaction on God and EstherThis article pleads for an open pluralism regarding people's thinking about God. In an answer to the question of how one comes to grips with such a pluralism an aesthetic approach may be instrumental in bringing the biblical text closer to the present-day reader. Such an approach ac...

The present tension within the Gereformeerde Kerke of South Africa (GKSA) is probably a result of a conflict between different plausibility structures. By referring to Berger’s definition of plausibility structures, the article illustrates their function in the churches. Because of the global village in which modern humankind finds itself the GKSA...

In commemoration of the death a hundred years ago of Dirk Postma, the founding father of the Gereformeerde Kerke in South Africa, this article focuses on the theological creativity of the past twenty years at the Theological School in Potchefstroom. Theological creativity in the GKSA should be viewed in the light of a fear of humanism, horizontalis...

Instead of regarding a biblical text as an archaeological field filled with revelations of God which only need to be exposed, this article focuses on the relationship between the text and its readers. The aim is to discuss the way in which readers can be helped to interpret the text in a certain way. To read is an enjoyable experience which leaves...

The miracles in Joltn 6: 1—21, explained in terms of an analysis of the narrator's perspective The author of the Gospel of John reconstructed creatively, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, certain events in the life of Jesus Christ. His description of these events does not amount to an accumulation of facts or to a literal description. Instead,...

When Beyers Naude, an anti-apartheid stalwart, asked in an open letter to ministers in the Dutch Reformed Church how it was possible to preach peace from the Gospel on Sundays without touching the heart of people, he touched a very sensitive hermeneutic nerve. The Bible played a central role to establish the policy of apartheid as a social model. T...