‘Blessed Be Egypt My People’: Diaspora, Reading Strategies and the Politics of Translation (Isaiah 19:25)

With slavery and colonialism now in our distant past, mass population movements provide a new frontier for multiracial human interaction across the globe. Diaspora, as framed in the translational project resulting in the Septuagint dating several centuries before the Common Era, provides glimpses into an enduring epistemology that not only problematises immigration but offers a window into viewing the biblical world. Thus, when properly nuanced, diaspora, offers an essential key in reading biblical texts. This paper seeks to explore how the incidence of ‘transnationalism’ has provided impetus to alter conventional hermeneutics and read the Bible differently. To this end, special attention will be paid to Isaiah 19:25 and the translational politics that has decisively altered its rendering. Additionally, I take note of how, in this discourse, and in Isaiah 19:25 as a primer, the privilege of power has turned the Bible into a regrettable accessory in the subjugation of those on the margins.