Nikondeha - Defiant

Defiant is a profoundly hopeful and deeply inspirational exploration of the extraordinary women in Exodus as well as the brave, imaginative, justice-seeking, coalition-building, truth-speaking women and girls of today. Nikondeha has given us a great gift to help us through these troubled times.

DEBBIE BLUE
author of Consider the Women:
A Provocative Guide to Three Matriarchs of the Bible

Grounded in liberation theology, Nikondeha delivers an empowering message of hope, utilizing the twelve women of Exodus and her lived experience in Burundi. Pushing past the patriarchal reading of Scripture, Nikondeha shatters female stereotypes by offering her readers a solid perspective on the labor of women and the role they played as matriarchs in their communities.

CAROLINA HINOJOSA-CISNEROS
poet, writer, speaker

Subversive. Collaborative. Glorious. Kelley Nikondeha offers a theological lens for the liberation work women have been part of since ancient times. Now wherever theres an oppressive pharaoh with dehumanizing decrees, lets look for the Nile Network of women collaborating for freedom and justice. Better yetlets be them.

IDELETTE McVICKER
founder of SheLoves Magazine

The story of the exodus is rich but only half-told. Kelley Nikondeha tells the rest of the story through the experiences of the women. Read this and let the exodus come alive in a new way! You will be enriched and the story will develop a power you never expected.

DOTTIE ESCOBEDO-FRANK
Catalina United Methodist Church

Defiant is exactly how I felt after reading Kelley Nikondehas book about the subversive women of Exodus. This eye-opening work disrupts the all-too-common habit of skimming over biblical female narratives to get to the real action involving men. Finally, the female side of this story gets its due, not as a matter of fairness, but because we need these courageous female role models to embolden women and girls today. Defiant combines solid scholarship, creative imagination, current events, a global perspective, and Kelleys own remarkable multicultural story to salvage examples of strong women whose holy defiance, I pray, spreads to Gods daughters in todays world, where oppression, abuse, and injustice seem hopelessly entrenched. Let the reader beware: defiance is contagious!

CAROLYN CUSTIS JAMES
author of Finding God in the Margins and
Half the Church: Recapturing Gods Global Vision for Women

I dare you to read Defiant and not be moved to daring. For any woman who has fallen asleep in her own life, Kelley Nikondehas 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

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 Exodusthe defiant womenand 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 Gods mission of healing and liberating broken creation.

CHERYL BRIDGES JOHNS
Pentecostal Theological Seminary

DEFIANT

What the Women of Exodus
Teach Us about Freedom

Kelley Nikondeha

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2020 Kelley Nikondeha

All rights reserved

Published 2020

262524232221201234567

ISBN 978-0-8028-6429-1

eISBN 978-1-4674-5861-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nikondeha, Kelley, 1969 author.

Title: Defiant : what the women of Exodus teach us about freedom / Kelley Nikondeha.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Summary: Looking back to the women of Exodus as well as to women around the world today, this book presents a paradigm for women that highlights the biblical mandate to join the liberation work in our world Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044037 | ISBN 9780802864291 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. ExodusCriticism, interpretation, etc. | Women in the Bible. | LibertyReligious aspectsChristianity.

Classification: LCC BS1245.52 .N55 2020 | DDC 222/.12092082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044037

Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical citations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For all the women who want to know
what faithfulness looks like in perilous times.

And for D. L. Mayfield, Elie Pritz,
Kaitlin Curtice, and Lisa Sharon Harperdefiant women
who show me what faithfulness looks like here and now.

Contents

I have never forgotten the first time I heard Kelley talk about the women of Exodus. She hadnt imagined it being a book just yet; she was still knee-deep in her own learning (because this is how Kelley has fun: commentaries, deep-dive research, and repeated listening to Walter Brueggemann sermons). We were at a friends house, four of us eating peaches and making plans together. We were workshopping our callings, figuring out how to do the work we felt God had called us to do, helping one another discern and dream. If there is one thing that dangerous women like to do, it is making dangerous plans together.

When it was her turn to share about the work she wanted to lean into next, Kelley stood up from the red couch where she had been reclining next to Tina and steadied herself by laying one hand on the piano as she began to share. Our dialogue ceased as the words you are about to read poured forth from her soul. We stopped moving, stopped talking, stopped breathing (or so it seemed). Kelley was lit up with a light of revelation. I had the weirdest instinct to take off my shoes as if she were creating holy ground with her words. By the time she was finished sharing about the women of Exodus, I nearly got up and ran a lap around the neighborhood. I remember looking at the other two in the room and saying, Did we just hear the best sermon of our entire lives right here in this living room? Freestyled beside the piano?

Kelley introduced me to a narrative of liberative, connected women that utterly captured my imagination, and Ive never gotten over it. I have been deeply transformed by Kelleys witness to these women. Walking alongside of her as she first delved into the concept, through her meticulous deep research, to the thoughtful prophetic result has been like having a front seat to a masterclass in theological writing that can actually transform lives. Her theological imagination, honesty, depth, wisdom, and embodied power is a song of freedom for all of us. She is such a good guide for you on the path of liberation. She served as a midwife to this message, she mothered it, and now shes ready to pass it along to us as the next link in what she calls The Nile Network of solidarity. Get ready.

For too long the notion of biblical womanhood has felt weak and ineffectual, a cookie-cutter vision of a 1950s sitcom that didnt even exist in real life, and yet it crippled and silenced generations of women in the church. In Defiant, Kelley lays out a feast for us of the truth about biblical womanhood: the resistance, the strength, the civil disobedience, the collaboration, the truth-telling, the drumming, the wit, the holy liberated power of women who know their God. She connects everything she learned from the women of Exodus to the women of our past and our time whose subversive strength continues to spell the downfall of evil and injustice. In these pages, you will learn to recognize women at work. This book is more than permission; its a clear call to rise up to the Exodus mandate for all of us. In these pages we begin to see that the blueprints of our liberation have been here all along.