Written in Our Image

THEY WERE NEVER ABSENT FROM THE STORY.

For generations, the Bible has been read in radically different ways.

In one context, it was used to justify systems of racial hierarchy and human bondage. In another, it became a source of endurance, resistance, and hope for those living under those same systems.

Both histories are real.
Both are documented.
But neither can be understood without returning to the text itself—within the world in which it was written.

Written in Our Image is a historical and textual investigation into the presence of Africa and African-associated peoples within the biblical narrative, and the later interpretations that reshaped that reality.

This book does not argue ideology.
It follows evidence.

Drawing on:

• Historical and archaeological research
• Linguistic and textual analysis
• Documented records from the Atlantic slave era

This study distinguishes between:

• The biblical text itself
• The interpretations built around it
• The historical conditions in which those interpretations were used

From the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 to the political world of Egypt and Cush…
From the rise of pro-slavery theology to the creation of the 1807 “Slave Bible”…
From plantation readings of Scripture to the theological resistance of enslaved communities…

This work traces how the Bible was:
interpreted, weaponized, and reclaimed.

It does not claim that the biblical world was uniformly African.
It does not claim that all later interpreters acted in bad faith.

Instead, it advances a narrower and historically grounded argument:

That Africa and African-associated regions were part of the foundational geographic world of the Bible—and that later racialized interpretations emerged within specific historical contexts, not from the text itself.

Written with methodological precision and restraint, this volume is designed for readers who want clarity over assumption, evidence over rhetoric, and history over inherited narrative.

This book is for readers who are ready to ask:

What does the text actually say?
What was added later?
And what happens when those two are finally separated?