The Book With Exodus Taken Out

Words to Know

Exodus — the second book of the Bible. It tells how an enslaved people escaped Egypt.

West Indies — the Caribbean islands, where Britain held slave colonies.

Here is a real object.

In London, in 1807, a printed book was published with this on the title page: Select Parts of the Holy Bible, for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.

Three copies are known to survive, one at Fisk University in Nashville and two in Britain. There is a digitized copy you can page through on a screen. It is not a legend. You can look at it. ¹

1807 is the year the British Parliament abolished the slave trade, the carrying of people across the Atlantic in British ships. It did not abolish slavery. So this book was printed in the exact year Britain decided to stop importing human beings and keep the ones it had.

Go deeperGlasgow's copy and Fisk's 2018 display

One of the two British copies is held at the University of Glasgow, and Fisk University's copy was put on public display in Washington in 2018.

The trade ban did not touch the people already on the islands. They stayed there, and after 1807 there were more of them than ever.

It is only select parts.

A complete Bible has sixty-six books. This one draws on thirty-two of them, and from most of those it takes only a few chapters. About nine tenths of the Old Testament text is simply not there.

Now I want to correct something you may have heard.

You may have been told that slaveholders made this book and cut out the escape from Egypt to hide it. The truth is stranger and more useful, and I am going to give it to you accurately, because a false version of this story is circulating and it makes the real one easier to dismiss.

It was produced by a missionary society founded in 1794 by Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London. And he is not the villain you would like him to be. He had been raising the slavery question in public since 1783, and he ended up a supporter of Wilberforce and the abolition of the trade.

But he also argued, in public and in print, that Christian instruction would make enslaved people better and more obedient workers. That was not a slip. It was the pitch. ²

Nobody recorded who chose the passages for this particular volume. So I will not tell you a story about anybody’s motives that I cannot support. What I can give you is the incentives, because those are on the record.

Go deeperThe society's full name and Porteus's 1783 sermon

That society had a formal name that said exactly what it was for: the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves.

Porteus raised the question in a specific way. In 1783 he stood up in front of a Church of England missionary society and told the men in front of him, to their faces, that they owned plantations in Barbados and had done nothing to instruct the people on them. He pressed the point for twenty-six years before he sided with Wilberforce against the trade.

• The planter was the customer. A missionary could not reach a single enslaved person without the owner’s permission to come through the gate.
• Planters feared that baptism might free people. Virginia, in 1667, passed an act stating that baptism does not alter a person’s condition as to bondage or freedom.
• Planters feared literacy. They said teaching enslaved people to read produced discontent, and they were entirely correct.
• Everybody knew what Exodus does to a person who is enslaved. Enslaved people had been using it for a century.

You do not need to decide what any one editor felt. You only need to ask what kind of book could get through that gate. A book containing Exodus 1 to 18 could not get through that gate, and everyone involved knew it.

The book is not stripped of everything, which is why this must be handled carefully.

The prophet Isaiah’s demand to let the oppressed go free is in there. Mary’s song, about the mighty being pulled from their seats and the rich sent away empty, is in there. So this is not a clean piece of censorship. It is a selection, made by people under pressure from a customer, that came out exactly where that pressure pointed.

Here is exactly what is missing.

Exodus is in the book, but only chapters 19 and 20. That is two chapters out of forty.

Chapters 1 through 18 are not in it. Those are the chapters where the people are enslaved, where they cry out, where a man is sent to the ruler to say let my people go, and where they walk out. The escape is gone. Everything after chapter 20 is gone too, including the release of slaves in the seventh year.

And Exodus 20 is in it. The Ten Commandments open with God introducing himself like this:

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

So the enslaved reader is handed God’s own statement that he brought his people out of the house of bondage, with the eighteen chapters describing how he did it removed. You are given the sentence and denied the story.

And who was going to read it?

In much of the slave-holding world, teaching an enslaved person to read was restricted or flatly illegal. South Carolina in 1740 made it an offence to teach an enslaved person to write. Virginia in 1831, after a literate enslaved preacher named Nat Turner led a rising, prohibited teaching them to read at all. In the British Caribbean the same effect was arranged by other means, with missionaries admitted or refused at the planter’s pleasure.

So it was mostly not a book to be read. It was a book to be read out of, by somebody else, to people who could not check it. ³

Go deeperOther states' laws, and the print run

Virginia's 1831 law did not stop at reading. It prohibited any assembly for instruction as well, and similar laws were passed elsewhere in the same years: Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina around 1830, Alabama in 1832.

The British Caribbean had no single statute banning literacy, but the same effect was reached by other means: colonial assemblies passed laws restricting who could preach to the enslaved and when, and chapels were burned when planters decided instruction had gone too far, as happened in Jamaica in 1832.

Nobody recorded how many copies of the book were printed, how many reached the islands, or who read them to whom. Three copies are left out of a print run nobody can put a number to, and that silence is part of the record too.

It did not work.

Across the American South and the Caribbean, in the religion enslaved people actually made, Exodus became the center. Moses, the Red Sea, Pharaoh and the crossing over became the whole frame. Go Down, Moses was first written down in 1861, from people who had escaped to Union lines, and those who wrote it down were told it was older. ⁴ They were singing the chapters that had been left out.

Samuel Sharpe, from the last lesson, was in the British West Indies, exactly where that book was meant to be read. He got a whole Bible anyway, through the Baptist mission, where he was a deacon. He read it, and preached that no man could own another, and they hanged him for it.

And the people Harriet Tubman brought out did not call her Harriet. They called her Moses. A population handed a mutilated text identified the woman walking them north, without the book, as the figure from the chapters that were missing.

You can take the pages out. But the thing is not in the pages. It is in what people recognize when they hear it, and the recognition does not need permission and cannot be edited.

Go deeperEgypt land, Montego Bay, and no scholars

The spirituals carried more than the crossing of the sea. They sang too of going down to Egypt land.

Sharpe's Bible came through a wider network than the Baptists alone. Methodists and Moravians also taught people to read and made members and deacons of them. Sharpe himself was a deacon in a Baptist chapel in Montego Bay, and that chapel is where the whole book came to him, which is exactly why the planters burned the chapels when the rising came, rather than blaming the man.

And the people Tubman led did not rebuild the story with a scholar, a press or a bishop's licence. They did it with memory and song alone, in the dark.

That is not the church's achievement. It belongs to the people the church was trying to manage.

Now let me tell you what I did on the day I started, since this lesson is about choosing which passages people get.

I went into the synagogue in my own town, on the sabbath, and stood up to read. They handed me the scroll of Isaiah, and this is what I read out:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:16–21).

I chose the passage. Out of the whole of Isaiah, that is the one I picked to announce what I was for.

And I stopped in the middle of a sentence. In Isaiah 61 the line continues: and the day of vengeance of our God. I did not read that part. I closed the book at the liberation and left the vengeance on the page.

So I have selected too. Everyone who reads aloud selects. The question is only ever which way you cut.

I cut toward the captives. That volume of 1807 cut away from them.

Go deeperRolling the scroll, and the jot and tittle

I did not stop at reading. I rolled the scroll back up, handed it to the attendant, sat down, and told them that day that this had been fulfilled in their hearing (Luke 4:16–21).

On the subject of removing pages, I once said something people usually quote about something else entirely: that not one jot or one tittle, the smallest letter, the smallest mark on a letter, would pass from the law (Matthew 5:18). I was not talking about printers. But it is a strange thing to have said, given that men would later publish a book with thirty-eight chapters of Exodus taken out.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Luke 4:16–21, then go and read Isaiah 61:1–2, where that passage comes from. You will find that I chose which passage to read aloud, and that I stopped in the middle of the sentence.

Then look up: Exodus 20:2, the very first line of the Ten Commandments. You will find the words out of the house of bondage. Now consider being given that verse with Exodus 1–18 removed.

Then look at the book itself: Select Parts of the Holy Bible, London, 1807, digitized and free to read online. Check the table of contents. Be careful: some popular accounts wrongly say Exodus was excluded entirely. Chapters 19 and 20 are in it.

The Short Version

• A real 1807 book for enslaved readers draws on thirty-two of the Bible’s sixty-six books.
• Exodus appears as chapters 19 and 20 only. The escape (1–18) is gone, but Exodus 20:2, “out of the house of bondage,” is there.
• It came from a society founded by Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, and the planter controlled the gate.
• It was printed for people who were, in much of that world, kept unable to read it.
• Enslaved people made Exodus the center of their faith anyway, and called Harriet Tubman “Moses.”

Think About It

1. The people who made that book were not monsters. Given the four incentives, could it have come out any other way? What would it have taken?
2. I chose a passage and stopped in the middle of a sentence. Everyone who reads aloud selects. How do you tell an honest selection from a dishonest one?

Go deeperThree glossary terms and Exodus 5:1

Three more words matter here. A spiritual is a religious song created by enslaved African Americans; many are about Exodus. Amelioration was the policy of making slavery milder rather than ending it. Manumission was the freeing of an enslaved person by their owner.

If you want the missing sentence itself, look up Exodus 5:1, the line that was cut.

One more question worth sitting with: they rebuilt the story without the pages. What does that tell you about where the story actually lives?