Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
There would be no Moses, no crossing of the Red Sea, no story of breaking the chains of slavery if it weren’t for the women in the Exodus narrative. Women on both sides of the Nile exhibited a subversive strength resisting Pharaoh and leading an entire people to freedom. Defiant explores how the Exodus women summoned their courage, harnessed their intelligence, and gathered their resources to enact justice in many small ways and overturned an empire. Women find themselves in similar circumstances today. The Women’s March stirred the conscience of a nation and prompted women to organize with and for their neighbors, it is worth reflecting on the resistance literature of Exodus and what it has to offer women.
Defiant is about the deep work women do to create conditions for liberation in their church, community, and country. The women of Exodus defied Pharaoh, raised Moses, and plundered Egypt. We are invited to consider what the midwives, mothers of Moses, Miriam, Zipporah and her sisters demonstrate under the oppressive regime of Pharaoh and what it might unlock for us as we imagine our mandate under modern systems of injustice.
Kelley Nikondeha presents a fresh paradigm for women, highlighting a biblical mandate to join the liberation work in our world. Women’s work involves more than tending to our own family and home. According to Exodus, it moves us beyond the domestic territory and into relationship with women across the river, confronting injustice and working to liberate our neighborhoods so all mothers and children are free. Nikondeha calls women to continue to be active agents in heralding liberation as we organize and march together for one another’s freedom.
- Examines the influence of the women in the Exodus narrative
- Highlights the biblical mandate to join the liberation work in our world
- Reflects on the resistance literature of Exodus and what it has to offer women
- Twelve Men, Twelve Women
- Shiphrah and Puah
- Jochebed
- Bithiah
- Miriam
- Mothers All
- The Seven Sisters of Midian
- Zipporah
- The Nile Network
- Descendants of Miriam
The best storytellers know how to locate the characters that are hidden in plain sight and bring them to center stage. Kelley Nikondeha is such a person. She locates the ‘hidden figures’ in the book of Exodus—the defiant women—and gives space for their narratives. She masterfully weaves the witness of Exodus women with women of our present era. In the weaving of these stories, Kelley invites us to see what we have failed to see and to listen to the ones whose voices are often overlooked. Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom is a generative book. It ignites the prophetic imagination and calls us to participate in God’s mission of healing and liberating broken creation.
—Cheryl Bridges Johns, Pentecostal Theological Seminary
“I dare you to read Defiant and not be moved to daring. For any woman who has fallen asleep in her own life, Kelley Nikondeha’s fierce words, fleshy stories, and fecund imagination will wake her up to the Pharaoh-defying power that is her story, our sisters’ story, both ancient and now.
—Erin S. Lane author of Lessons in Belonging from a Church-Going Commitment Phobe
- Title: Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom
- Author: Kelley Nikondeha
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Publication Date: 2020
- Pages: 214
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Topic: Exodus
Kelley Nikondeha is the co-director and chief storyteller for Communities of Hope, a community development enterprise in Burundi. She is the co-founder of Amahoro Africa, a conversation between theologians and practitioners within the African context. She is the author of Adopted: The Sacrament of Belonging in a Fractured World and Defiant: What the Women of Exodus Teach Us about Freedom. For more, visit www.kelleynikondeha.com.