“My Father Was a Wandering Aramean”: Biblical Conceptions of Migration and Their Relevance to Contemporary Immigration Debates in the United States

The story of ancient Israel’s origin, contained in the collection of texts scholars often call the Hebrew Bible, is founded on the idea that the Israelites migrated to the land of Canaan, a land that they were forced to leave repeatedly and to which they kept returning. This motif is featured in the stories of individual characters in the Hebrew Bible, such as Abraham and Jacob, as well as in stories about the Israelites as a whole, including the narration of Israel’s return to Canaan by way of a miraculous escape from Egypt and a period of wandering in the wilderness, and centuries later their forced migrations to Babylonia and Egypt in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Thus, the biblical text often has been invoked as a fruitful source of information about proper attitudes toward and policies governing migration in the United States.

But putting the Bible into dialogue with contemporary issues is a difficult task under any circumstances inasmuch as it involves an act of cultural translation between two vastly different socio-religious situations. Ancient Israel was not a modern state with borders and glass booths staffed with uniformed, governmental agents charged with checking one’s passport, citizenship, and immigration status. Yet interested parties on various sides of the debate in the United States not infrequently have turned to the biblical text for guidance on issues related to migration, drawing conclusions from the same texts that lead to calls both for greater restrictions on migration (Hoffmeier 2009) and for a more open stance toward immigrants (Carroll R. 2008). In this chapter, we survey the biblical texts that reflect Israel’s self-perception as an immigrant people and the impact this perspective had on the biblical understanding and treatment of certain categories of non-Israelites, focusing on the ger (translated often as “resident alien” or “sojourner”) in particular. In the process of exploring this complex terrain, we will evaluate in what ways the biblical materials and ancient Israel’s conceptual categories can or cannot be mapped upon and usefully applied to the contemporary situation—what much of the media and many US politicians have referred to as a “crisis”—at the southern border.

A comprehensive assessment of terminology related to migration in the Hebrew Bible is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is necessary to provide some basic information about how the movement of individual people or collective groups (e.g., those sharing a common tribal or ethnic identity) between places is presented in the biblical text. Common verbs of movement in Biblical Hebrew include hlk, bw’, yṣ’, and nsʾ, and these can have a wide variety of meanings not specific to moving from one land to another. The verb glh and related nouns carry the connotation of exile or forced migration (e.g., this verb is used several times in 2 Kings 17 to describe the northern Israelites being driven into exile), the verb grš describes the driving out of a particular person or group from a place (e.g., this verb is used in Gen 3:24 to describe God driving Adam out of Eden suggesting that in some sense all subsequent humans are migrants exiled from their original homeland), and the verb gwr, which we discuss in more detail below, is often used to describe the act of residing in a place that is not one’s traditional homeland. Additionally, the Hebrew Bible contains several nouns that identify those who are outside of the Israelite patrilineage system yet reside (either temporarily or permanently) in Israel; ger, nokhri, toshav, and zar are all terms for outsiders that appear at times to be distinct and at others to overlap (Achenbach 2011). In fact, a zar and possibly also a ger refer to a non-Israelite in many instances but can also be used for an Israelite in certain circumstances.

Given the wide variety of terminology used in the Hebrew Bible to describe migration, readers are already at a disadvantage when trying to match biblical words for migrants and migration to modern, English-language terms and ideas. The same difficulty is faced by those who attempt to use frameworks for migration that are derived from modern nation states to explain what are frequently quite different kinds of phenomena in the Hebrew Bible. In his recent book on migration in ancient Israel, Eric Trinka offers a word of caution against using contemporary terminology to assess migration in the Hebrew Bible and goes on to note the limited usefulness of such terminology even when applied to our contemporary situation:

Modern classifications of movement and movers employed by the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Population Division, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are based on post-Westphalian nation-state systems of citizenship. These terms are tailored to address specific situations of movement within the legislative frameworks of global diplomatic protocol and international human rights. Biblical scholars should avoid using them as heuristic categories because, more often than not, doing so skews readings of material culture and textual data. Migration scholars themselves have even raised warnings against limiting descriptions of movement to the terms set forth by modern nation-state bodies. Such terms interpret migration primarily from the purview of the state, not from that of migrants themselves. Likewise, the terms artificially demarcate, and even erase, modes of human movement that states cannot or do not want to account for. (2022: 19)¹

Thus, caution is needed when attempting to correlate the ancient Hebrew verbs and nouns with their English equivalents in efforts both to understand contemporary migration through the lens of the Bible and to explain various instances of migration in the Bible through modern models of migration. This lack of easy parallels, however, has not prevented readers from turning to the stories and laws of the Hebrew Bible in search of evidence or analogies for how to understand migration today. In order to recognize more clearly how the Bible portrays migrants and to grasp what attitudes and actions the text encourages readers to take toward them, we may be better served by broadening our scope from specific words to larger blocks of text.

In the canonical order of events, the movements of two of Israel’s founding patriarchs, Abraham and Jacob, in the book of Genesis anticipate or perhaps pre-enact the movements of the people as a whole in the book of Exodus.² Abraham—whose name is first given as Abram but changed to Abraham in Gen 17:5—is called by YHWH (Israel’s deity) to leave his father’s house in Haran and go to the land of Canaan, the place in which he will become a great nation (Gen 12:1–3). Genesis 12:5 describes the migration from Haran to Canaan in a quick succession of verbs: “Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, the son of his brother, and all of the possessions that they owned, and the people which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out (yṣ’) to go (hlk) to the land of Canaan, and they came (bw’) to the land of Canaan.” Unlike migrants today, Abraham’s journey from Haran to Canaan is not marked by any official border crossings or interactions with security personnel; following God’s call in Gen 12:1, he simply gathers his household and possessions and journeys to Canaan. However, the fact that Abraham has entered into a land that is inhabited by others is not ignored, for Gen 12:6 reminds the reader, “Now the Canaanites were in the land then.”

No sooner has Abraham entered Canaan than he is forced to leave. The second half of Genesis 12 describes a famine that prompts Abraham and his wife to go down to Egypt to “reside there,” using the verb gwr to designate the experience (Gen 12:10). While scholars have often thought this short story of Abraham’s time in Egypt foreshadows the events of Exodus 1–15, Abraham’s treatment under Pharaoh as a resident alien is much different from the Egyptians’ treatment of the Israelites as slaves in Exodus. While the plaguing of Pharaoh and his house in Gen 12:17 certainly resonates with the plagues of the exodus, the context is entirely different: Pharaoh’s interest in Sarai (her name is changed to Sarah in Gen 17:15), whom he believes to be Abraham’s sister, leads him to “deal well” with Abraham (Gen 12:16), and when the truth comes to light about Sarah and Abraham’s relationship, Pharaoh does not punish Abraham for deceiving him but rather sends him away with the great wealth that he accumulated in Egypt (Gen 12:20; Gen 13:2 confirms that Abraham is now very wealthy). Despite an emphasis on the sexual overtones of Pharaoh’s interest in Sarah in post-biblical Judaism (Tohar 2014), it cannot be said that Pharaoh mistreats his guests in any way; if anything, he is more generous with them than readers who are familiar with Exodus would expect.

Abraham leaves Egypt and settles in Canaan (Gen 13:12), but he remains a visiting resident or sojourner in the land of Canaan, a status that becomes a point of tension when his wife, Sarah, dies in Hebron. In Genesis 23, Abraham approaches the indigenous Hittites to purchase a piece of property from them that will serve as a family burial place. Abraham identifies himself as a “ger-and-toshav” among them and asks for an “achuzat-qeber,” a land possession for burial (Gen 23:4), which he offers to buy from them. The Hittites, however, respond generously, calling Abraham a “prince of God” and offering him his choice of land for a burial plot (Gen 23:6). Abraham chooses the cave of Machpelah, which is at the end of a field owned by a certain Hittite named Ephron, but Ephron too initially rejects Abraham’s offer to buy the cave and insists on giving him both the cave and the field on which it sits (Gen 23:11). Abraham convinces Ephron to let him pay for the field, and they settle on a price of four hundred shekels of silver (Gen 23:13–16). The following verses (vv. 18–20) emphasize that the field and cave belonged to Abraham after this, using two nouns for possession, miqnah and achuzat-qeber, the latter phrase occurring earlier in Gen 23:4.

Both of these stories could be read as mandating care and generosity toward the migrant, but it is also important to consider that these narratives focus not on generous treatment toward any migrant but on generous treatment toward Abraham, specifically. YHWH’s choice of Abraham as the one through whom the covenantal promise of land and progeny will be fulfilled is unexplained in the biblical text, yet Abraham is YHWH’s elect. Do these stories about Abraham’s warm reception as a migrant indicate a broader ethic of generosity toward migrants? Perhaps, but the case is not as clear-cut as it first seems. As with the deliverance of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt, it is tempting and even worthwhile to consider what broader principles regarding the proper treatment of human beings in general might be derived from such stories, but it is also the case that these narratives are just as much about the particulars.³

Jacob’s story, too, is characterized by the necessity of migration,⁴ but unlike his grandfather, Jacob will die outside of the homeland, in Egypt. As a result of a ruse that allowed him to usurp his father’s blessing from his older brother, Esau (Genesis 27), Jacob is sent from his family’s home in Beersheba to his uncle’s home in Haran (Gen 27:43), back to the place Abraham initially left in Genesis 12. After many years away from his homeland, Jacob returns south to reconcile with his brother and ultimately to bury his father, Isaac, who resided in Canaan for the entirety of his life. At the beginning of the material that focuses on Jacob’s son Joseph in Genesis 37, Jacob is said to dwell in the “land of his father’s sojournings,” “land of sojournings” being the way the Priestly Pentateuchal source (hereafter “P”) refers to the land of Canaan during the time that the patriarchs resided there (Gen 17:8; 28:4; Exod 6:4; etc.). As with the famine in Genesis 12 that caused Abraham to take his family to Egypt, so too does another famine arise during Jacob’s lifetime that causes the patriarch to seek help in Egypt. While Jacob initially only sends his sons to buy grain from Egypt (Gen 42:1–2), he is ultimately convinced by Joseph to relocate the whole family from Canaan to Egypt.

Yet, once again, Egypt is portrayed as a hospitable place for the family in transit: when Pharaoh hears that Joseph’s brothers have come to Egypt, he invites the whole family to move to Egypt and “eat the fat of the land” (Gen 45:18). Upon their arrival, Jacob and his sons are given the opportunity both to work for Pharaoh (Gen 47:6) and to obtain a land holding (achuzah) in Goshen (Gen 47:11). When Jacob finally dies in Egypt, his funeral procession draws out all of the highest officials (Gen 50:7–14). The family’s experiences could be understood as depicting Egypt as a place hospitable for foreigners, even if not completely accepting of foreign residents (Gen 43:32; 46:34). Yet Jacob, like Abraham, has been chosen by YHWH, and Joseph, too, is shown favor by YHWH throughout his time in Egypt (Gen 39:21, 23; 45:8; 50:20). It is difficult to derive from this treatment of YHWH’s elect an overarching “biblical ideal” for the proper response to migrants and migration more generally.⁵

In the stories of Abraham and Jacob, migration is a major theme. Their experiences as migrants are characterized by unhindered movement between locations and apparently easy resettlement in the places where they decide to stay. The diverse narratives of individual migration in the Hebrew Bible that begin with Abraham and include men, women, and children of a variety of backgrounds lead to the perception that the Hebrew Bible is, fundamentally, a story about migration.⁶ Yet, the circumstances of migration in the stories of the patriarchs have very little in common with the geopolitical landscape of the United States today. Additionally, these individual experiences of and responses to migration depicted in Genesis and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible are diverse and somewhat unique, making it difficult to extrapolate from any one narrative a singular attitude toward or conception of migration. This is true as well for the stories about the people of Israel as a whole and their various periods of migration represented in the biblical text, to which we now turn.

The theologically inflected history of the people of Israel as told in the Hebrew Bible is book-ended by two major population movements: the journey into the land of Canaan and the forced migration out of it to Babylonia and Egypt. The first of these movements, which begins in the book of Exodus, is a long-fought journey into the land that was promised to Abraham in Genesis 12, and the departure from Egypt is less a simple migration and more an escape from a tyrannical pharaoh and oppressive hard labor. Nothing about the journey to or eventual entrance into the Promised Land is characterized as easy: internal (Exod 15:24; 16:2–3; Num 14:1–4) and external (Exod 17:8–16; Num 21:21–35) fighting plagues the people, the viability of living in the land is doubted (Num 13:25–33), and Moses’s leadership is questioned (Num 12:1–16; 16:1–35). One significant feature of this great migration to Canaan is that the God of Israel is also depicted as journeying in the midst of the people.⁷ The deity manifests as a cloud during the day and fire at night, instructing the Israelites on when to move and when to stay based on the presence or absence of the cloud covering the tabernacle. YHWH was not only able to be present in the center of the encampment but also would move when the people moved (Num 9:15–23). Trinka has suggested that YHWH’s mobility functioned as an attribute of his divine power and likely was seen to be more comprehensive or expansive than other autochthonous West Semitic deities, eventually leading to the rise of Yahwism in the region (2022: 174–75). This concept of a mobile deity is theologically essential to the period known as the Babylonian Exile and resonates with Ezekiel’s vision of YHWH’s mobile chariot and departure from Jerusalem (Ezek 1:4–28; 10:1–11:13), in which YHWH accompanies the Judean exiles to Babylon despite the exile itself being framed as a punishment.⁸

We would be remiss if we elided the fact that Israel’s return to Canaan after their exodus from Egypt and wandering in the wilderness is described as involving a call to annihilate the Canaanites currently residing in this land. Thus, the story of Israel’s mass migration suggests that such migratory patterns can pose serious threats to those currently living in various lands when migrant groups arrive en masse. We use the language of “story” intentionally because few scholars think that a large group of Israelites left Egypt and invaded and conquered Canaan for several reasons (Moore and Kelle 2011: 96–144). To begin, the biblical text is itself inconsistent. On the one hand, Joshua 1–10 depicts something akin to a genocide as summarized by Josh 10:40: “So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded.” Yet, the opening chapters of the book of Judges suggest much of Canaan and its native population was not conquered quickly. In fact, other passages even within Joshua, such as 13:1, contradict the portrait of Israel’s total annihilation of the native Canaanite population: “Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the LORD said to him, ‘You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed.’” In Josh 23:6–13, one finds a long warning for Israel not to intermarry with the inhabitants of the land or to be tempted to worship Canaanite gods thereby forsaking YHWH, providing further evidence that the conquest narratives are being used to motivate religious loyalty among Judeans living in a later period. After all, if the Canaanites were all annihilated, why be concerned about intermarrying with them or being tempted by their religious practices? Furthermore, the archaeological evidence does not support the portrait drawn in Joshua 1–10. Many of the earliest Israelite settlements seem to have pottery identical to those of the Canaanite populations, leading scholars to hypothesize that much of ancient Israel’s population descended from Canaanites (Dever 1995, 2003), a point even acknowledged at times in the Bible (Gen 38:2; Ezek 16:3).

The fact that this story of Israel’s entrance into the land is more a theological recounting of Israel’s arrival in Canaan than an accurate historical report, however, does not mean the tensions, conflicts, and violence it describes between a mass migratory population and another population group currently inhabiting a given land are inaccurate or illusory. At the same time, it also was not written to serve as a model for the actions and attitudes that other migratory groups should take toward those already living in the place to which they are moving. As with other stories in the Hebrew Bible, the description of Israel’s entrance into the land of Canaan is not easily separated from ideological and theological tenets that govern Israel’s unique relationship with YHWH, who grants the land of Canaan to Israel through a covenant (Gen 15:18–21).

Turning to a later era in Israel’s history, it should not be surprising that the Hebrew Bible, as a collection of diverse literature, is not of one mind about the extended period of migration that began with Assyrian expansion into the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE.⁹ The prophetic collections of Jeremiah and Ezekiel provide a case study of differing perspectives on the Judahite experiences of displacement that resulted from the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587/6 BCE.¹⁰  C. A. Strine has used a comparison of the attitudes toward Babylonia in the two books to demonstrate the diversity of experiences depicted in the literature that reflects on this period and to argue for a more sophisticated system for distinguishing between the different kinds of migration represented therein (2018b). While Jeremiah, on the one hand, takes a positive attitude toward resettlement in Babylonia, viewing it as a necessary precursor to deliverance from exile (Jer 29:1–14), Ezekiel sees Judah’s interactions with Babylonia as one of the key reasons for the destruction of Jerusalem (perhaps best exemplified in Ezekiel 23). Jeremiah’s positive attitude toward the Babylonian diaspora, however, should not be understood as endorsing migration out of Jerusalem more generally, as both before and after some Judahites opt to flee to Egypt, the prophet is depicted as harshly critiquing their decision to leave Judah (Jeremiah 42–44). Ultimately, the different experiences of and attitudes toward migration reflected in Jeremiah and Ezekiel contributed significantly to ongoing conflicts—and attempts to resolve these conflicts—during the resettlement period (Crouch 2021, 2023).

In the prophetic literature, both individuals (especially the prophets themselves) and collective Israel are depicted as involved in migratory behavior. The combination of individual and collective narratives of movement creates an impression, as Tchavdar Hadjiev writes, that:

the Hebrew Bible in its final canonical form presents biblical Israel essentially as a migrant people. Their ancestors journey from Mesopotamia, to Canaan, to Egypt. They depart from Egypt to sojourn in the wilderness and finally enter Canaan, the “Promised Land” that is to become their home, a place to belong. Yet, the people’s arrival there is neither the climax, nor the end of the story, just a mid-point in a long, winding journey that constantly swings between belonging and alienation, native and foreign, home and away. Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt describe a triangle marked by the constant flow of exiles and exoduses, deportations and returns.

(2018a: 437)

It is quite likely the extensive attention the Bible gives to various narratives of individual and collective migration undergirds one of the most well-known principles of the Hebrew Bible’s legal material: care for one particular type of migrant, the ger.

One important factor complicating our discussion of the Hebrew Bible’s laws concerning migrants is that there is no single term for “migrant” in the Hebrew Bible, much less a term that might approximate the condition often described as “undocumented” or “illegal”¹¹ in the United States—namely, the status one obtains when they have overstayed their visa time limit or crossed a national border in areas not controlled by any governmental authorities. That said, the Hebrew term ger merits special attention for many reasons but most especially because Abraham and Jacob are both connected to the term through their experiences in Canaan and Egypt. Also noteworthy is that later Israelites come to describe their status while in Egypt as gerim (the plural form of ger) (Lev 19:34), which, as discussed in more depth below, is linked to the command for Israelites to love gerim as they love fellow citizens. Several translations have been suggested for ger: resident alien, resident outsider (Olyan 2000), and, perhaps most commonly, sojourner (Spencer 1992).

In the Hebrew Bible, a ger is usually (but not always) a foreigner who lives permanently in the midst of another community and who, as such, is afforded certain rights (De Vaux 1997: 74). Generally, the ger has no familial or tribal affiliation with the place in which they are staying, but this defining feature is complicated by the description of the Levites as “sojourning” among the Israelites as non-land-owners (Deut 18:6). The Hebrew Bible treats gerim as a class separate from foreigners who might be passing through or enslaved foreign individuals whose patron is an Israelite. Moreover, the presence of the masculine and feminine forms of the word in the Mesha Stele (a Moabite monumental inscription dating from the ninth century BCE) alongside “men” and “female slaves” attests to the fact that gerim were considered a class separate from citizens and enslaved individuals in other parts of the ancient Near East (Spencer 1992: 6:103). Although gerim were free individuals, they generally did not hold landed property (for an exception, see the future-oriented vision in Ezek 47:22–23), and often were grouped among other socially and economically dependent groups, including orphans and widows (Deut 14:29; 16:11, 14; 24:17, 19, 20, 21; 26:12, 13; 27:19; Jer 7:6; 22:3) (De Vaux 1997: 75). Gerim are described as being subject to the Israelite justice system (Lev 20:2; 24:16, 22; Deut 1:16), and, on several occasions, the equal application of the law to Israelites and gerim is emphasized (Lev 24:22; Num 15:15–16, 29; Deut 1:16).

Proper treatment of the ger in the legal material is often motivated by the fact that the Israelites themselves are described as having been gerim in Egypt, underscoring Israel’s continuously displaced status in relation to the land that they are inhabiting. The Israelites, having first been gerim in Egypt, remain gerim in their own land according to H (the Holiness school, a late priestly group whom many scholars believe penned Leviticus 17–26). In Lev 25:23, YHWH requires that the land not be sold in perpetuity “for the land is mine; you are but residents (gerim) and tenants (toshbim) with me.”¹² Thus, the Israelites who will enter and live in the Promised Land will live there with the same sojourner status that Israel’s ancestors in Genesis had when they lived in Canaan.

It is concern for the ger that is addressed in the following passage from Leviticus that is often quoted by contemporary Jews and Christians on the left side of political spectrum advocating for less restrictive immigration policies: “When a ger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the ger. The ger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the ger as yourself, for you were gerim in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God” (Lev 19:33–34). This passage and other similar verses commanding Israel not to oppress resident aliens—and in some instances issuing a call to love the ger—refer only to resident aliens living for extended periods in the land of Israel among the people of Israel. Thus, these passages are addressing a context far different than the mass migration situation occurring today in the United States, a point we will return to in our conclusions.

Interestingly enough, one finds internal tensions within the Torah about how integrated or not integrated into Israel’s society even such gerim were. According to P, gerim consist of those non-Israelites who dwelled in the land of Israel with the people of Israel. The theology of the Holiness Code actually requires that these resident aliens obey certain cultic regulations. Leviticus 17:15 proclaims that both native Israelites and gerim should not consume meat from animals that died naturally or were torn by other beasts, or, should they eat such meat, they become impure and are expected to engage in a purification ritual. Failure to ritually purify oneself constituted a sin (Lev 17:16). In contrast, Deut 14:21 allows these very same resident aliens to eat meat from animals that died naturally and does not require these resident aliens to observe any ritual purity rules. From a diachronic perspective, this internal disagreement about the treatment of the ger has led many scholars to posit a gradual shift over time from the Covenant Code (Exodus 20–23) to the Deuteronomic Code (Deuteronomy 12–26) to the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26) in which the ger has a slightly different—and improved—legal status in each.¹³

From a synchronic view, this legal tension in the Torah calls into question contemporary simplistic approaches to the idea of tolerance as well as our tendency to assume that inclusion is always more tolerant and exclusion is always a marker of intolerance. Whether the religious approach of Leviticus or Deuteronomy is called tolerant or intolerant depends greatly on whether one is speaking of non-Israelites who are eager to follow Israelite ritual laws or of those forced to abide by such practices even if they would have preferred not to observe them. When certain orthodox Israeli Jews lobby to shut down the public transportation system or try to block cars passing through their neighborhoods on the Sabbath, they are reflecting aspects of H’s belief system, which requires anyone in the Holy Land to observe basic holiness regulations. Undergirding this mentality is the notion that all residents in the Holy Land—Jews, whether observant or not, as well as non-Jews—are all bound by certain laws concerning the holiness of the land. Yet many today would view such a stance as intolerant in that it seeks to impose the ritual standards of one particular group of Jews upon other Jews and Gentiles living in Israel who do not feel bound by traditional Sabbath prohibitions.

In contrast, Deuteronomy excludes resident aliens living in the land of Israel from having to observe purity-based regulations. Thus, Deuteronomy’s ruling that one may sell an animal that died of natural causes to foreigners or one may even give such meat to resident aliens (Deut 14:21) is clearly less inclusive than the parallel text in Leviticus. But one could argue that its stance on this issue is more tolerant because it does not force those non-Israelites living in the land of Israel to abide by Israel’s purity rules. Furthermore, unlike H, Deuteronomy explicitly admits that at least some other peoples have their own relationships with God that at times even includes God’s gifting them their own lands (Deut 2:18–25), and certain passages even suggest the legitimacy of other religious systems (Deut 4:19; 29:25 [Eng. 29:26]) (Miller 1997, 1999). Another P text goes further, even allowing those resident aliens who are willing to be circumcised, along with all the males in their households, to celebrate the Passover ritual, a ritual that marks God’s redemption of his beloved people Israel from their sojourn in Egypt (Exod 12:48–49). Here, resident aliens are permitted to participate in Israel’s cultic life, possibly providing the earliest form of what would later develop into a conversion ritual within Judaism.¹⁴ Yet even while included in some regulations and given the ability to participate in one of Israel’s central rites, and in spite of the language in H that there will be one law for Israelite native residents and resident aliens (Lev 24:22), foreign resident aliens remained distinct and did not fully share in the rights of native Israelites. Thus, Lev 25:45–46 permits one to acquire resident aliens or their children as permanent slaves, something one cannot do with fellow Israelites inasmuch as they belong to God (literally, they are God’s slaves, Lev 25:42).

The existence of these internal textual and socio-religious tensions highlights that ancient Israelites wrestled with questions about how open or closed their society should be to long-term foreign residents and that at times one can see resonances with some of the contemporary debates surrounding immigration and questions of assimilation in the United States. If the United States were to take in a large number immigrants from one country or one ethnicity, how much effort should be placed on acculturating said group to wider US, English-speaking mores, and how much should various groups be encouraged to preserve their distinct ethnic and national identities? While it remains difficult to draw equivalences between the terminology and frameworks for migration in the biblical text and migration today, the broad issues and questions about the place of migrants in the land to which they move are as relevant now as they were in ancient Israel.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, movement from one land to another is often depicted as an opportunity, a misfortune, or a punishment, but sometimes the very same migration event can be represented quite differently in other texts. For example, in Numbers 13–14, the prolonged period of limbo between Egypt and Canaan referred to as the wilderness wandering is portrayed as a punishment for the people’s rebellion against YHWH and a rejection of the decision to leave Egypt. In contrast, Deuteronomy 8 describes that same period of wandering as a test and training ground to teach Israel to obey and be reliant on God. Individual migration can also be caused by both positive and negative factors. In Genesis 4, for example, Cain is made a “wanderer” (v. 12) as punishment for the murder of his brother, Abel, but the various migrations of the patriarchs to Egypt in the face of famine are opportunities for their survival. These differing views reflect a broader trend among biblical texts dealing with the movements of individual Israelites and the Israelites as a whole in which the vulnerability of being untethered from one’s homeland (either as a result of one’s actions or as a result of misfortune) at times are reinterpreted in a positive light.

The story of Ruth is perhaps a parade example of this on an individual level. As with so many narratives of family migration, the book of Ruth begins with a famine that causes Naomi and Elimelech, the parents of Ruth’s soon-to-be husband, to relocate the family to Moab, where Elimelech promptly dies. Ruth marries one of Naomi’s sons in her home country of Moab, but after the death of her husband and her brother-in-law, Naomi’s other son, Naomi, now childless and without a husband, opts to return to her homeland. Ruth and her sister-in-law, Orpah, are given the opportunity to return to their own families or to travel with their mother-in-law to Bethlehem. Ruth decides to go with Naomi to Bethlehem, where she sustains herself and her mother-in-law by benefitting from laws allowing her to glean grain behind the harvesters, implying that she is a ger (Lev 19:9–10; 23:22; Deut 24:19–22), although she will identify herself later as a nokhriya, a foreigner (Ruth 2:10). In Bethlehem, Naomi orchestrates Ruth’s meeting with Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s who will eventually marry Ruth and provide the security for the family that only a male relative can. The misfortune of famine that causes Naomi’s family to travel to Moab results in the joining of Ruth to their family, and the second misfortune of the death of Naomi’s husband and two sons leads Ruth to follow the now impoverished and vulnerable Naomi back home to Bethlehem, leading to the family’s economic survival. Finally, Naomi’s return from exile set off by her terrible life circumstances ultimately results in the birth of the future King David (Ruth 4:18–22).¹⁵ One can see in this short but poignant tale how forced migratory experiences can be interpreted as punishments—Naomi claims that God is the root cause of her suffering in Ruth 1:13 and 1:20–21—and opportunities, with God being the one who caused Ruth to conceive a son (Ruth 4:13) and provided Boaz as a next-of-kin redeemer for Naomi and Ruth.

Another often overlooked feature of the biblical experience of migration is that, after the Babylonian destruction of Judah and the forced migration of many Judeans to Babylon and Egypt, a number of diasporic communities arose and persisted for hundreds of years even after the Persian authorities permitted the Judean community to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. While these diaspora communities identified with their homeland and at times sent donations and occasionally made pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple (Trotter 2019), they had made new lives in thriving communities outside their homeland where they apparently wished to remain. In short, what began as a forced migration under duress in time became a willful decision not to return to the homeland with which they continued to identify.¹⁶ Thus, a book like Tobit, which many believe was written in a diasporic setting during the Second Temple period, shows little urgency to return to Judea even though it imagines such a return happening in the eschaton (Tob 14:5–7) (Ego 2005). Similarly, the tale of Esther, while exploring the danger posed to a diaspora community of Judeans living abroad in the Persian Empire, ultimately imagines that community wielding power to save themselves from near destruction even as they remain potentially vulnerable to the whims of those who hate them simply because they are foreign and their religious practice is distinctive (Humphreys 1973).

This particular pattern of the ancient Jewish longstanding and thriving diaspora communities has analogues with a host of diasporic enclaves in the contemporary world and particularly in the United States. To name but a few examples, there is a large Cuban expatriate community in Miami, the largest Polish enclave outside of Poland in Chicago, and many Somalians and Hmong in Minneapolis. A contemporary analogue to the ancient Judean exile and growth of a longstanding set of diasporic communities might be found in the various Tibetan enclaves living in exile, especially as an ethno-religious identity tied to a sacred homeland is central to these Tibetans as it was for the ancient Judean diasporic communities. If the circumstances arise in which Tibet is freed from Chinese state control, one wonders how many Tibetans would move back to Tibet as opposed to continuing to live away from their homeland in the thriving diasporic communities where they have built new lives. Of course, these diasporic Tibetans might well support their homeland community or make pilgrimage to sacred sites in it, just as many Jews from around the world travel to Jerusalem to celebrate major Jewish holidays or Muslims from across the globe make pilgrimage to Mecca.

In a more negative vein, one might view the internment of Japanese Americans in guarded camps during World War II or the current talk of forcibly arresting and deporting millions of migrants who have either overstayed their visas or crossed the US border without authorization as somewhat analogous to the way that the Pharaoh and other Egyptians came to fear and then oppress the Israelites who were longer-term resident aliens in Egypt in the exodus story. Pharaoh’s harsh response to this perceived threat costs him and the rest of Egypt dearly, especially when compared to an earlier pharaoh’s acceptance of—and great prosperity as the result of—the elevation of the foreign-born Joseph to vizier and, in time, the migration of Jacob, his sons, and their families to Egypt. Thus, the concern that a migrant population will become more numerous than the local one and the varying responses to this concern is a common thread that links these biblical stories of migration in the ancient world to those of migration movements today. Yet, as we have highlighted throughout this chapter and note again in our conclusions, it is one thing to observe the resonances between various biblical stories of migration and mass migrations occurring today and quite another to use the biblical text to formulate policies that address both the ethical imperative to treat migrants with compassion, on the one hand, and the realities of modern nation-states, their borders, and the legal processes for moving across them, on the other.

The nuances we have highlighted in the biblical text demonstrate that the ancient context of the biblical writers was far different from the contemporary US immigration situation today. Thus, one needs to resist the temptation to cite scriptural prooftexts as if they clearly authorize how modern Western nation-states like the United States or various European countries should treat immigrants or to simplistically suggest that, because Abraham and Jacob were migrants, God is in favor of open borders and unrestricted immigration. However, this does not mean that Jews and Christians, whether on the political right or left, whether favoring more or less restrictive immigration policies, cannot draw ethical inspiration from the biblical text. But, if one wishes to cite scripture in support of a contemporary social issue in responsible ways that may possibly sway those Christians and Jews who think differently about a given policy like immigration, one will need to construct more sophisticated arguments drawing not only from wider scriptural ethical principles but from the wider Jewish and/or Christian theological and ethical traditions. In any case, those who invoke scripture would be well served by openly acknowledging in which ways various biblical ideas and commandments might or might not map on to and be applied to our radically different contemporary situation.