A postcolonial reading of the early life of Sara Baartman and the Samaritan Woman in John 4

Bibliographic Data

ID21492865
AuthorsDewald E Jacobs (0000-0003-0151-8269, Stellenbosch University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume80
Issue1
Publication date2024-03-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0259-9422 • E-ISSN: 2072-8050
PublisherAOSIS (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.4102/hts.v80i2.9095
OpenAlexW4393342291
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited33

When Jesus meets the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s well in John 4, it is a meeting between two colonial subjects in the Roman Empire. In this encounter we find the Samaritan Woman as a triply marginalised body, a woman subject to multiple, intersecting forms of oppression within her patriarchal context. Identified as a Samaritan Woman, Jewish rabbis regarded her as unclean, impure, and being menstruous from birth. It can also be deduced that she is an outcast in her own society because she comes to draw from the well at noon, the hottest part of the day when people did not usually fetch water. This Samaritan Woman is nameless, landless and powerless in an imperial, colonial and patriarchal context. The poem of Diana Ferrus, I’ve come to take you home, in memory of Sarah Baartman, highlights how Baartman was dehumanised and treated as a sexual object by European colonisers. Through a postcolonial reading of John 4, I consider the intersections between the Samaritan Woman and the early life of Sara Baartman in their respective colonial contexts and invite the reader, as the poem invites Baartman, to come home to Africa and resist Western European imperial and colonial patterns and tendencies. Contribution: This article has interdisciplinary implications. This is an interdisciplinary study in the sense that it offers a biblical interpretation of John 4 that is informed by the life of Sara Baartman that has been uncovered through anthropology, history and sociology. It is also integrating the field of postcolonial biblical hermeneutics with the theory of intersectionality

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Contemporary Christian Leadership and Education · History · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

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