The Bible as a Text of Migration
Dr. Jacqueline Hidalgo unpacks the good book’s representations, forms, and travel histories
In recent years we have witnessed myriad uses of the Bible in the United States to justify either violent repression of migrants (witness, for instance, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ use of Romans 13) or a more welcoming policy toward migrants (witness, for instance, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s use of Exodus, Leviticus, and Matthew). We have also seen numerous migrants themselves identify with biblical texts and figures (witness, for instance, Marco Saavedra of the Dream 9 paraphrasing 1 John 4:18).
Yet these perspectives all assume the Bible can tell us something about migration without considering how the Bible itself has been shaped by migration in complicated ways.
When I say that the Bible is a text of migration, I draw from biblical scholar Jean-Pierre Ruiz’s Readings from the Edges: The Bible & People on the Move. The Bible connects with “people on the move” in at least three ways: through its representations, its form of writing, and its histories of traveling.
Representing
The Bible registers the stories of and cultural traditions around different migrants in human history. The tale of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 and 4 is, among other things, the tale of humans forced to migrate from their first home, humans who must then labor to make home elsewhere. Tales of migration continue throughout Genesis and mark the title of Exodus, which chronicles the ancient Hebrew liberation from slavery and traversing out of Egypt toward Canaan. Other stories of migration abound through writings such as Ruth or prophetic texts such as Isaiah.
The New Testament too contains many stories of migration, and notions of migration and diaspora work as powerful metaphors. For instance, in the Gospel of John, as Gilberto Ruiz suggests, we may understand Jesus as a migrant from heaven crossing over to earth. Roberto Mata’s work points us to faithful communities in Revelation as involved in a metaphorical migration, where, in a revision of Exodus, they await God’s deliverance from present exile into the new Jerusalem.
Writing
The Bible is also a text of migration because migrating communities produced the texts that form our Bible. Many of the books that form the Jewish Bible, especially crucial texts like Genesis, were first redacted into a familiar written form when Jewish communities lived in exile under Babylonian domination in the sixth century b.c.e. Ancient peoples created texts like Revelation as a way of negotiating life in diaspora.
These texts became a repository for working out communal identity and belonging in the face of a long-term exile from one’s homeland. Moreover, the formation of these texts into something we identify as a canon is undertaken by ancient Jews living in exile and other ancient peoples migrating around the ancient Mediterranean, Eastern Africa, and Western Asia.
“[T]he practices surrounding biblical texts...served to situate the Bible as a homing device...especially for marginalized and migratory peoples.”
—Jacqueline Hidalgo, Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration, 2018
Traveling
Once these texts were canonized, they also became carried, translated, retranslated, and employed by many migrating peoples. In modernity, colonizing Europeans brought their bibles to all the parts of the world they visited, and they sought to share their bibles, often at the point of a sword.
One of the great legends of the early conquest of the Americas is that of Friar Vicente Valverde taking the Bible before the Inca Atahualpa, who smacked it out of Valverde’s hands (some contemporary scholars argue that Valverde carried a missal rather than a Bible, though a missal will include parts of the Christian bible). In my research among Cuban Americans at Calvary Chapel in Claremont during the early 2000s, I found that many of those first-generation migrants took great solace in the Bible because they saw it as promising them a true home in the kingdom of God that would be bigger and better than the governments ruling this world.
I describe the Bible as a text of migration neither because I think the Bible justifies generosity toward or sympathy for migrants nor validates migration any more or any less than other human activities. Self-justification through sacred texts, in fact, has been the tool of enslavers and colonizers as much as it has been a source of sustenance for oppressed populations around the world. We who are migrants need no sacred text to justify our humanity, and we who are citizens of the United States (or any other xenophobic nation) should need no sacred text to convince us of the humanity of migrants.
Humans are complicated and messy animals, and the Bible is a witness to our messiness. Recorded there are the varying and contradictory ways humans have negotiated and represented experiences of migration. No one migration story in the Bible—or in the worlds of the peoples who crafted, canonized, and carried biblical texts—is exactly the same as the other. Precisely because migrants have always had diverse stories, we cannot expect the Bible to give us any one, straightforward message about migration.
