Divining the Woman of Endor: African Culture, Postcolonial Hermeneutics, and the Politics of Biblical Translation by J. Kabamba Kiboko (review)

One of the most significant biblical texts dealing with female divination is 1 Samuel 28:3–25, the story about King Saul's visit to a female necromancer in Endor. However, misconceptions about "the woman of Endor" have dominated the text's long reception history: she has often been (mis)labelled as a witch. In this monograph biblical scholar Jeanne Kabamba Kiboko, who is also a clergywoman and Bible translator, discusses these persistent misconceptions and how they were passed on to African culture through the colonial period, with far-reaching consequences for the mission church's attitude towards indigenous divinatory practices.

In the prologue the reader learns more about the author's background: she was born into the Sanga (also known as Basanga) people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her relatives were devout Roman Catholics but also honoured their native way of life and their ancient religious traditions, including divinatory practices, which were condemned by the church. Yet, despite the deep-rooted, negative attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward divination, Kiboko already observed early on the striking similarities between the culture of the Hebrew Bible and the Sanga culture in which she was immersed, especially with regard to the positive use of divination.

In this study the author demonstrates her thorough understanding of divination, witchcraft, and attitudes toward them from ancient times to the present day. She acquaints the reader with divinatory practices in the ancient Near East during the second and first millennia BCE, thus providing a helpful background for our understanding of 1 Samuel 28. She also examines the anti-divinatory sentiments in medieval to modern Christian Europe which the colonial missionizing agents brought with them to Africa. Within the African context, Kiboko mainly focuses on the divinatory practices of her own Basanga people. She explains how the mission church failed to distinguish witchcraft from the positive use of divination in the Basanga way of life, thus condemning all types of divination as demonic practices.

With her postcolonial literary investigation of 1 Samuel 28 Kiboko compellingly demonstrates not only the multicultural spiritual challenges which she had to face, but also the linguistic challenges: the vocabulary of divination used in the translations that were popular in the region, such as the French La Sainte Bible (LSG) and the Kisanga Bible, served well in the colonial context, but it no longer serves the complex situation which the church currently faces in Central Africa (where women, men, and children are still being persecuted as "witches").

For example, according to the worldview of the Basanga people, there are bad spirits, such as the mufu, an angry, haunting ghost. In the Kisanga Bible the Hebrew word Elohim, which refers to Samuel's spirit summoned by the woman of Endor, is rendered as mufu. However, due to the choice of the term mufu, with its negative connotations, this entire episode in 1 Samuel 28 is seen as demonic in the Kisanga Bible. In fact, it is Kiboko's thesis that the vocabulary of divination in this passage (and throughout the Bible) has been widely mistranslated, not only in the LSG and in the Kisanga Bible, but also in the authorized English translations and many other translations and scholarly writings.

Kiboko subsequently exposes several cases of mistranslation through her word study of a number of key terms within the rich vocabulary of divination in the Hebrew Bible. Although not all of these terms are used in 1 Samuel 28, she argues that their examination is essential for understanding the inner biblical conflict surrounding acts of divination. She subsequently examines the history and social context of these terms in ancient times and demonstrates that each...