The Bible: a book of migrations

Abstract

The conditions of migration, trafficking and trafficking of people today are very different from those of the time of the Bible, but the underlying problems are still very similar. Therefore, an overview of the subject in the Bible is very important to understand and raise the issues from a social, political, cultural and Christian point of view at present, 2016. It is not simply a matter of knowing what has been, but to raise problems from their roots, to illuminate the way in this way and to find new cultural, social and human responses. The Bible does not solve the current problems, because the social situation has changed, but it helps to raise them with radicalism. This is a theme that has been raised since the Old Testament, where God himself, at the beginning of the Decalogue, defines himself as the liberator of the oppressed: “I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt” (Ex 20), 2; Dt 5, 6; cf. 1 King 12, 28; Jer 2, 6). In that line is placed a very old historical creed, where each Israelite affirms “my father (Jacob, Israel) was an Aramaic wanderer ...” (Dt 26, 5-10). All Westerners, rooted in Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) origins, we consider ourselves “children of an Aramaic wanderer”, descendants of multiple migrations... This issue, together with that of trafficking (buying and selling of people, especially women and children) defines in some way the biblical story, as it culminates in Mt 25, 31-46, where the Messiah of God says “I was a foreigner and you welcomed me ... or you did not”. The Bible is a realistic book where the memory of the hardest story is interspersed with laws and paths of liberation (of utopia), which are still open, so that we have to interpret them in a personal and
social way. It is not a matter of staying in the letter, repeating what the Bible once said, but of updating it, from today’s cultural, social, political, and national principles.