The African guild of critical Old Testament studies has a strong tradition of reading ancient texts in dialogue with current African experiences and concerns. Two interpretive perspectives that explicitly relate to Old Testament texts and current interpretive contexts have been labeled “finding Africa in the Old Testament” and “finding the Old Testament in Africa.” The first one analyzes texts that refer to geographical and political entities that today are seen as part of the African continent (especially Egypt and Cush), both from exegetical and hermeneutical perspectives. The second one makes use of a wide variety of African interpretive resources in the analysis of Old Testament texts.

This project aims at identifying and analyzing some crucial interpretive concerns in these fields. This project circles around two Ph.D. projects at VID Specialized University (Norway), by Kjersti Wee and Medhat Nady Youssef, both being jointly supervised by professors Marta Høyland Lavik and Knut Holter.

• Kjersti Wee’s Ph.D. project: “A good wife? How do ordinary Malagasy female readers relate to the text about the woman in Proverbs 31:10-31.”
• Medhat Nady Youssef’s Ph.D. project: “From judgment to blessing: An analysis of the function of the motif Egypt in the rhetoric of Isaiah 19.”