In this concise and readable volume, Powery and Sadler highlight biblical interpretation in published antebellum slave narratives—they prefer the term freedom narratives—but also include speeches by black and white abolitionists and sermons by well-known northern black ministers. They argue that black critical engagement with the Bible began in the antebellum period, and not, as some assume, in the Black Theology movement of the late 1960s. The national slavery crisis, which featured abolitionists and proslavery thinkers slinging biblical texts at each other, demanded of black writers a critical hermeneutic. This volume is a collection of essays, not a systematic study of freedom narratives or of early African American religious thought. The essays often illustrate well what earlier scholars have concluded, but they also offer new insights and readings of lesser-known narratives.

The critical hermeneutic the book outlines looks similar to how James Cones describes his antecedents in a black religious tradition of liberation. What the authors call a “freedom hermeneutic” was sometimes literal, sometimes not; sometimes concerned with the original context, sometimes not; sometimes dismissive of Pauline authority, sometimes not. Yet this hermeneutic always sought out the reading that led to the greatest liberation. Former slaves found in scripture a God that stood with the oppressed and would judge those that opposed their birthright of freedom. Not all freedom narratives concerned themselves with biblical interpretation; but those that did, as the Genesis of Liberation explains, began with a negative encounter with scripture. The slaves’ first experience involved Paul's admonitions to obey their earthly masters or Luke 12:47's warning that disobedient slaves “shall be beaten with many stripes.” To reclaim the Bible from its oppressive use, freedom narratives consciously recontextualized the passages in an antebellum American setting. For example, Powery and Sadler point to Henry Bibb's and Samuel Ward's retellings of Matthew 25, set at a slave auction: “Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me.” Black authors also employed a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (159) that rejected proslavery interpretations of Luke 12:47, distinguishing between the Jesus on their side and the Jesus of Luke 12. Powery and Sadler see in this hermeneutic an early transformation of “the Bible from a weapon of supremacist status quo” into “a tool that they could use for their own work of liberation” (xiii). In describing this transformation, they largely confirm what scholars like Allen Callahan and Albert Raboteau found when consulting a larger variety of black sources.

The co-authors, however, offer us a more detailed biblical textual analysis than other scholars do. Former slaves altered the wording of the passages they quoted. Powery and Sadler call these creative modifications “functional quotations” (13), a helpful term. They offer side-by-side comparisons of the original passage and the wording in the narratives. Their analysis finds that the freedom narratives employed a wide range of scriptural passages; Isaiah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and Acts feature just as prominently as Exodus. The co-authors even analyze the choice of biblical references on the narratives’ title pages and epigraphs. They pay attention to translation differences, showing us how much of former slaves’ interpretations hinged on particular word choices made in the King James Version.

In their third chapter, a revision of an essay published elsewhere, Powery and Sadler remind us how much slave narratives were concerned with Sabbath-keeping. Former slaves used the Sabbath to carve out space for physical rest and spiritual independence. If the Sabbath offered God's people rest, freedom to worship, education, and means of escape, then the Bible was a book of liberation after all. Former slaves also used their inability to observe the Sabbath properly to create sympathy among white audiences and to indict slaveholders for violating biblical law. Here we see a theme recurring throughout this book, that slaves critically read scripture so as to point out the inconsistencies of proslavery exegetes. Slavery, in its American form, violated the letter of the law. This appeal to the authority of biblical law was not uniform. As Powery and Sadler argue, black abolitionists “did not view it as hermeneutically inconsistent to uphold an authoritative Bible on one topic (i.e., Sabbath observance) while rejecting its authority on separate practices (i.e., slavery)” (81).

Perhaps the most fascinating examples of antebellum black authors’ creative critical work come from little-known freedom narrative writer William Anderson. In their fourth chapter, Powery and Sadler give extended treatment to Anderson's theory of the origin of whiteness. While most antebellum interpreters assumed that humanity was originally white and looked for the curse of black skin in the stories of Cain and Ham, Anderson flipped the script. He argued that humanity was originally black and found the “disease” of white skin in Elisha's leprosy curse on Gehazi in 2 Kings 5. Anderson also flipped the script on Paul, as did other black authors like Solomon Bayley and Richard Allen. Anderson focused on Romans 7:24 (“O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from this body of death?”), and saw “the apostle in a long line of biblical sufferers” (139) who could identify with American slaves’ cry for deliverance.

Despite a few unexpected errors—twice the book refers to early modern English as “Old English”—the book's new insights and close textual work make it well worth our while. And because these essays provide the background general readers need, teachers and students in a variety of fields will want to read them.