The Story of the Exodus and the Images of the Promised Land and Heaven in the Poetry of African American Spirituals

Since the beginning of slavery blacks discovered in the Bible stories which provided not narratives and language to delineate the difficulty of being a slave, but also hope for better future in the afterlife. The Exodus was perceived as the Bible’s main argument God denounced slavery and would come in a catastrophic event to judge those mistreated blacks. This article is devoted to the exploration of the biblical figure of as a recurring trope in selected lyrics of slave spirituals and spirituals recorded by . Scholars seem to agree that the Exodus is the migration narrative, but in this I seek to demonstrate that it may also represent the theme of going on a spiritual to the other side in the hereafter or the end of time city the New Jerusalem.