NABPR Announces Postdoctoral Fellow Keith Pinckney Jr.

My academic journey began at Old Dominion University. Though I didn’t major in Religion or Biblical Studies, it certainly was where my heart was. During this time, I developed a hunger and passion to understand the biblical text in its original contexts. Informally, I read everything I could get my hands on and had access to related to the bible and theology. I subsequently attended Reformed Theological Seminary for an MA in Biblical Studies. Here, I had the opportunity to learn ancient languages, study theology, and gain a grounding in biblical studies. I eventually specialized in HB/OT. This wasn’t something I chose, but something that chose me. Fascinated by Hebrew and Aramaic, the cultural milieu from which the text and Ancient Israel arose, and the formation of the OT, I knew this was where I wanted to make a career. As I went deeper into OT studies, I was struck by the dearth—apart from a select, and eminent few—of African American voices in the field. It also became increasingly clear to me that many—in both ecclesial and non-ecclesial settings—had inherited poor, uninformed, and at times racist readings of the OT. Since then, I’ve aimed to harness my intellectual energies to write, teach, and speak in ways that address these issues. For my PhD, I attended the University of St. Andrews in the UK. My time at St. Andrews has been extremely formative, as I have been trained in the best of critical biblical scholarship, expanded my Semitic language repertoire, and had numerous opportunities for professional development.

In the coming years, I have three primary goals. First, I hope to refine and diversify my pedagogical skills. I will have the opportunity to teach a range of undergraduate courses, broadening my horizons as both a scholar and an educator. I am passionate about working with students and teaching them to read sacred texts carefully, critically, and ethically. Second, I want to network and build more relationships in the academy, both within and outside my discipline. I am a firm believer that innovative ideas are often preceded by interdisciplinary research. Lastly, I will continue my own research and publish my dissertation.

My dissertation is titled “The Problem of Returning to Egypt: Disintegrating Israelite Ethnic Identity,” supervised by Michael Lyons. The thesis argues that many texts that display a negative attitude toward returning to Egypt in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets constitute a recurrent literary motif. This persistent negative attitude is meant to indicate that returning to Egypt is problematic because it represents a reversal, an undoing of the seminal event, the origin myth: the exodus from Egypt. This literary motif is meant to assert that returning to Egypt will lead to the diminishment and disintegration of biblical Israel’s distinctive ethnic identity as a people. These texts also don’t operate in isolation from one another, as many are intertextually linked by scribes through a variety of text-referencing techniques such as allusions, analogies, and inversions. This study contributes to research on the nature and function of “myth” in the corpus, the configuration of ethnic identity in antiquity, the age-old question of the relationship between the law and the prophets, the role of Egypt in the literature, and lastly, inversions/reversals as an understudied technique used by ancient Israelite scribes.

Being part of the Baptist tradition, to me, is about acknowledging and continuing in a rich intellectual and scholarly heritage. It means that I am working within a long and storied tradition, one that has been a site of social justice, activism, and care for the marginalized. I am excited about partnering with NABPR and being part of a community of scholars of religion. I look forward to collaboration, producing cutting-edge research, and partnering to educate students about what it means to understand, interpret, and practice religion in ways that lead to empathy for our neighbors and to greater tolerance for those with differing cultures and beliefs in our modern pluralistic society.