IF AN ALIEN SOJOURNS AMONG YOU: ISRAEL AND DIFFERENCE IN THE LIFE OF GOD

by Daniel M. Yencich

A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for OT 7090: Old Testament Theology Dr. Jason A. Bembry

Emmanuel Christian Seminary

Johnson City, TN 12/12/11 IF AN ALIEN SOJOURNS AMONG YOU: ISRAEL AND DIFFERENCE IN THE LIFE OF GOD Not so long ago our church embarked on a two-month survey of the Old Testament narrative. For the most part, the lessons and discussions went well. One was tempted to think that the majority of those present were indeed tracking with the teacher and going home with the conviction that the good news of Gods kingdom was for everyone. One was tempted to think this, that is, until the final minutes of the very last lesson on Ezra-Nehemiah in which the xenophobic heritage of post-racist America stood up in church and had its say. A man whom I respect and consider a brother raised his hand and said that, on the basis of Ezra 10:10-11, marriages, even between believers, should not cross over racial boundaries. When pressed for a cogent line of reasoning that reconciles this interpretation of Ezra to Pentecost, the Gentile mission of Paul or scriptures like Galatians 3:28, he was unable to do so. Yet, without a sign of hesitation or reflection, he retained his original belief: whites and blacks should not marry; for him, same and different cannot mix. Upon this discussion I have continued to reflect. How can one self-professing New Testament Christian hold both a belief in the good news of Christ and such a low view of Christians who marry interracially? Is there an underlying bias against difference? Moreover, how can a reading of one book, the Bible, help to create and sustain such a dissonance in a person? By this I mean that on the topic of otherness or foreignness, the closest biblical cognate to modern-day racism, the Bible does not appear to put forth one monolithic teaching, understood once and for all by everybody within the community of faith. Rather, like the worlds populace, the Bible appears diverse on the subject of outsiders: sometimes the foreigner should be divorced (Ezra 10:10-11), while at other times the alien should be loved as oneself (Lev. 19:34). At times the 2

alien stands alongside the people of Israel and is included in the covenant (Deut. 29:10-12), while sometimes foreigners are to be kept at arms length and no covenant be made with them (Exod. 34:15-16). How are the differences to be reconciled? In this paper I will argue that there is in the biblical story of Israel an original openness to difference and that this openness is rooted in the divine character as revealed in Torah. It follows then that Israel, in the retrojected memories of its earliest stages of peoplehood, was not ethnically pure that it was, from Abraham, consistently comprised of an ethnic mix of different and same. A consistent synthesis of different biblical perspectives will be sought on the basis of Israels original ethnic otherness and a theological case be made that this impurity was both God-sanctioned and in keeping with the divine character. Lastly it will be posited that, in keeping with Israels diversity, there accordingly exists within the theologies of the Old Testament a latent if qualified impulse to welcome, protect and include the alien, the outsider who chooses to come in. Methodology and Assumptions Is there a normative stance within the Old Testament with regard to the outsider and foreign interlocutor? Without a theological method, the answer to this question depends entirely on where a person stands culturally and historically, as evidenced perfectly by my congregants outburst. Yet the absence of theological method is a hermeneutical method itself, for interpretation happens not in a vacuum but rather always within a matrix of inherited assumptions and understandings. Accordingly I will here sketch my own theological methodology and critical assumptions with regard to the matter at hand. The Canonical-Directional Approach of John Howard Yoder The Bible as we have it is the final compilation of a multitude of perspectives, at times

running in tandem on this issue, and at other times running at odds. But from the multitude has come the one: despite the seeming cacophony of divergent voices, the Bible comes to us not as the many apart but as the many together, a unified whole. The unity is not a matter of so-called inerrancy or a quest for objective truth. Rather the unity rests communally and directionally: as one people the church gathers around the Scriptures and reads them forward, taking special care to recognize certain theological trajectories within the texts using the best tools available to them. In adopting this hermeneutic I follow John Howard Yoders canonical-directional approach, which John C. Nugent helpfully lays out in his Ph.D. dissertation, Old Testament Contributions to Ecclesiology: The term "canonical" emphasizes Yoder's biblical realist tendency to work primarily with the final form of the canonical text. This means accepting each text as it stands and taking into account that it stands alongside other canonical texts that impact how it should be read. The term directional emphasizes that Yoder reads the Old Testament in terms of a trajectory that points to and finds its fulfillment in Christ.1 This will mean allowing the Old Testament texts to be what they are, taking it on faith that they point toward a fulfillment in Christ. Using Yoders canonical-directional approach does not mean that the answers are easy to come by. Rather, it will mean digging into the texts as they are and letting the chips fall where they may. In conjunction with Yoders approach, it is my assumption that certain historical-critical analyses of early Israelite history can be of value in establishing a theological trajectory. Though these will not receive priority over the biblical texts themselves, they will be helpful in our engagement. We will deal with the text as it stands before us canonically, but our faith is not solely in the text it is also in the God who works behind the text as well. Put differently, our faith is in the historical YHWH, the one who moved concretely in history, as well as the YHWH

John C. Nugent, Old Testament Contributions to Ecclesiology: Engaging and Extending the Insights of John Howard Yoder, (Ph.D. diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009), 40.

revealed to us in the texts. My final assumption, which theologically underwrites everything else, is that the theology of the otherness of God and his people in the Old Testament story is important for the life and continued life of the local church in our own context today. Not only must churches wrestle with the issues of otherness, difference and xenophobia for their own immediate ministerial needs, I am convinced that a church must be (or become) a body of welcome and that this biblical ethic is mandatory for a churchs continued existence. For there will be no going back to an earlier age of separation: the globe continues to shrink as more and more people begin thinking and acting glocally. A whole world of difference is either at or coming to our front doors; to be faithful ministers of the gospel we have been entrusted with, we must learn how to respond faithfully. The Emergence of Us and Them in Ancient Israel At the core of ethnic identity stands the bicameral question, Who am I, and who am I not? To answer either one is to begin answering the other, for they are intertwined: Ethnic consciousness involves both an assertion of a collective self and the negation of collective other/s, creating a world of asymmetrical we-them relations.2 The question of ethnicity is not an ontological feature of human organization, [or] a first cause in and of itself.3 In other words, a defined sense of ethnicity only develops amongst a group over time. The first people to settle in Jonesborough, Tennessees oldest town, did not likely identify strongly with one another across familial lines to form a cohesive community of Jonesborough folk whereas now people living in that town are more likely to relate to one another as a group based on the towns collective history and culture. Group-identity is a process; it comes about as a group lives together over time. And so we could pose the two questions, Who was ancient Israel, and who were they
2

Diana Edelman, Ethnicity and Early Israel, in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Leiden: Brill, Ibid.

1996), 25.
3

not? but the answers seem to vary, for theories of ethnicity in Israels infancy are both abundant and diverse. It all depends on where in Israels story you begin.4 Following the majority of scholars who cite the so-called tribal period in Iron Age I as the earliest that Israels origins may be traced,5 D. Edelman seeks to establish the ethnicity of early Israel in the biblical texts of Joshua and Judges as a tribal confederacy in Canaan. She is quick to note that the composition of these texts is removed from the events they portray by hundreds of years,6 thus any historical information regarding ethnicity will have to be run through a screen of critical suspicion. In her reading, Edelman emphasizes the essentially monarchic character of Joshua and Judges: It is probably no coincidence that the office of judge as imagined by the author of the book of Judges differs from that of kingship only in hereditary succession, or dynasty. Both [Judges and the monarchic society of its provenance] assign to the leader the dual roles of military leadership and judicial leadership, which specifically means holding the people to the terms of the Sinai covenant [Judg 2:17].7 Thus the narratives of Joshua and Judges appear to have certain monarchic shades to them, resulting in an historical inception point of Israels ethnicity that is somewhat less than objectively historical in its telling. This may all be true, but it does not get us any closer to answering the question of Israels ethnic origins, for Edelmans approach only offers us one, late monarchytinged perspective. In addition to Joshua and Judges being documents far-removed historically and shaded monarchically, her approach includes only an assessment of the texts which reflect

Paula M. McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), Ibid., 40.

33.
5

Ibid., 28. Some have dated Joshua and Judges to ca. 700 BCE (See Antony Campbell, Of Kings and Prophets: A Ninth Century Document (1 Samuel 1-2 Kings 10) [Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1986], 17; Others have dated them to ca. 600 BCE (See W.F. Albright, The Biblical Period (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University, 1950), pp. 45-46; Others still have dated these documents to an even later date of pre-515 BCE (See Martin Noth, The Deutoronomistic History (tr. J. Doull et al.; JSOTSup, 15; Sheffield: JSOT, 1981).
7

Diana Edelman, Ethnicity and Early Israel, in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 28.

traditions of Israel as a landed nation.8 Does Israel only achieve group identity in the biblical narrative with its entrance into Canaan and formation of a tribal confederacy? It appears that Edelman believes so. With regard to Edelmans analysis, I believe that the possession of land and formation of government (tribal or otherwise) is one of the possible markers for what makes a people group count as a nation or ethnicity, but I do not believe it is the only option available. Edelman dates the writing of both Joshua and Judges to the monarchic period and then questions their historical value based on their monarchic coloring of the period which they represent but if Joshua and Judges reflect back imagery of the monarchy because they were written late, why should other, similarly late books which formulate traditions of earlier eras not count? If we eschew Edelmans tacit bias towards the holding of land and formation of government as prerequisites for peoplehood, we are left with the entire Torah which immediately precedes Edelmans starting point in Joshua and Judges. This does not mean that we treat Torah as historically more reliable than Joshua or Judges, or even more removed from the monarchy or other late periods. Rather, we will begin at the beginning of the history of Israel as the Bible tells it because it can be assumed that the text represents an admixture of ancient, reliable, historical components and late, untrustworthy, anachronistic elements9 that, within the idealized, romanticized account of the past in Torah there are kernels of history. We can regard the biblical account itself as a conceptual model of Israels genesis. It is as if the
8

Diana Edelman, Ethnicity and Early Israel, in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 27-34. Abraham Malamat, The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method, in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 310. Jon D. Levenson puts it differently but affirms the central value of investigating Torah as proto-history when he poses the question, Can it not be the case that the literary form of the Torah conveys a truth which is not historical in nature? Is not fiction a valid mode of knowledge, a mode of which God himself have made use? See Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: And Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 8.
9

Israelites themselves formulated an articulate portrayal of their distant past, much as modern scholarship does. [] This projection within the biblical text has certain clear advantages over modern speculation: being much closer to the actual events by thousands of years and being a product of the locale itself, it inherently draws upon a much greater intimacy with the land, its topography, demography, military situation, ecology, and the like.10 In short, we can allow the traditions of the Pentateuch to count even while retaining a critical distance from the text. The traditions of Creation, the calling of Abraham, and the Exodus need not be uncritically assumed to be strictly historical accounts, but neither must they be critically assumed to be entirely false. For in avoiding both extremes, fundamentalism on the one side and an unhealthy critical suspicion on the other, we can formulate a hypothesis of who Israel believed itself to be, even at its beginnings. Beginning with Genesis, it will soon become clear that even Israels most stylized memories of their own proto-history will display a certain rootedness in and openness to difference and diversity. Creation: A World of Difference As mentioned above, Genesis 1 is not here prioritized as an earlier or more historicallytrustworthy text, but rather as an admittedly later text that nonetheless has something important, even true, to say about Israels beginnings. Von Rad places the creation narrative (Gen 1:1-2:4a) firmly in the writings and theology of the Priestly source (P). Accordingly,

it contains the essence of Priestly knowledge in a most concentrated form. It was not written once upon a time; but, rather, is a doctrine that has been carefully enriched over centuries by very slow growth. Nothing is here by chance; everything must be considered carefully and precisely.11
Abraham Malamat, The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method, in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 310. See Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 47. See also, J.A. Emerton, The Date of the Yahwhist in In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel (ed. John Day; New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 107-129. Emerson also gives J a pre-exilic date.
11 10

And so, like Edelmans above assessment of Joshua and Judges, Genesis is shaped by a later perspective, the P source dating even later to ca. 538-540 BCE12 and whatever shadings of Priestly theology that are there are both intended and important.

Throughout Gods act of creation in Genesis 1, a few things are evident. First, creation is depicted as Gods victory over the forces of primordial chaos; over both creation and chaos, God reigns supreme.13 From subjugated chaos, God brings order: the systems of relationships God implements within creation operate smoothly and in union, despite the continued existence of chaos.14 Harmoniously coexistent in creation are the heavens and the earth, the light and the darkness, the land and the seas, male and female; what God orders from the foundation exists in a balance, together. Second, and by extension of the first, this means that creation is an intended diversity of interrelated and harmonious relationships. God creates vegetation, sea creatures, birds, creeping things and wild animals of the earth and within each biological family is a taxonomy of difference (Gen 1:11-25). Third, the divine character is shown to value the inherent beauty of diversity and variety in the very act of creating. The multitude of created plants, sea creatures, birds and land animals suggests that creation is itself polyphonic, and this blessedly so, for when God looks over all that he has made, he says that it is all very good (Gen. 1:31).

This forms the baseline assumption, then: that God, lord supreme of the cosmos, is here a god unbounded, free to do as he pleases. It is in this freedom that he chooses to found creation on the basis of a mutually-inclusive diversity. What exists therefore exists in the plural, the multitude, and the relationships between all created things are harmonious and unbroken. From creation, God
12

Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 25.

1 13

Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 6.
1 14

Ibid., 14ff.

is identified as one who revels in difference and insists that it is blessing and not bane. From the One comes the many, and in the many is the world: different, other and diverse, just as God intended it.

The Otherness of Abraham

Genesis treats humankind as a family, drawing its origins back to one primal couple and unfolded again through the three sons of Noah.15 The default setting of humanity, as Genesis tells it, is uniformity in diversity: though spread out geographically, humankind is interrelated and essentially united. Through genealogy, the tradents of Genesis make surprising connections between Israel and the wider world of nations:

Israel is connected even with Amalek the memory of whom God wishes to extinguish, and with whom God is at eternal war (Exod. 17:14ff.; Deut 25:17ff.) not only by the strongest antagonism, but also by a close blood relationship: he is the grandson of Esau. This means that the worst enemies are not the ones who are markedly strange or different, as every racism perceives it; they belong to the closest relations.16 It may seem strange to us that tradents within Israel would wish to connect themselves so concretely to enemies. One would think that they would want to differentiate as starkly as possible themselves from their political enemies, as is the modern reflex. Yet Genesis confounds us and shares not our practice of demonizing our enemies to the point of dehumanization. In Genesis, opponents, even the greatest of enemies, are brothers and disputation is an essentially familial affair.

The impulse to draw connection where negative distinction is expected is set in even bolder
Frank Crsemann, Human Solidarity and Ethnic Identity, in Ethnicity and the Bible (ed. Mark G. Brett; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 66.
1 16 15

Crusemann (Ibid), 71.

10

relief in another foundational story to Israels self-understanding, the calling of Abram (Gen. 12). Nugent points out that Abrams story picks up where Babel left off: in Babylon.17 It is from his country (Haran in the area of Babylon) that God calls Abram to go, and it is to this Babylonian man that God gives the promise nationhood and blessing (Gen. 12:1-3). This account, regarded typically as Yahwhist (J the oldest biblical account18) is striking in that it displays a foundational connection between Israel and the nation who would later lay waste to Jerusalem in 587 BCE. Because J is an early source that far predates the Babylonian Exile, this connection should not be taken as intentional, nor should it overemphasized. Yet the irony cannot quite be avoided: the promise that serves as the bedrock of the Abrahamic covenant, from which Israel derives a foundational identity, is rooted in a people of whom Israel would later despise. The irony is keenly felt in the words of Psalm 137, Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! when, in the wider scope of biblical history, it is the people of Israel who are in an oblique way themselves little ones of Babylon, even as they are children of the promise to Abraham.

This reminds us that history and otherness operate salvifically in the economy of the One who stands outside of history, for it is out of Babylon that Abram is called and it is from Abram that arises a nation which will bless all nations (Gen. 12:1-3). The call of Abram is thus doublysubversive of tendencies to overqualify us and them distinctions: not only is Abrams background suspiciously connected to the region of Babylon (from which arises both Babel and, much later, the Babylonian Captivity), the telos of the promise is universal in scope. The promise affects and includes all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:3).
John C. Nugent, Old Testament Contributions to Ecclesiology: Engaging and Extending the Insights of John Howard Yoder, (Ph.D. diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009), 84.
18 17

Albert de Pury, Yahwhist (J) Source, ABD 6:1012-20.

11

We can thus ill afford to miss these blue notes within Genesis which begin a basis for understanding Israels character as other from the outset. It is the self-same God of diverse creation whose promise of blessing stems from, and includes, the diverse families of the earth. Both creation and the people of Israel, from their respective moments of conception,19 appear to be intentionally diversiform and universal in scope: creation is meant to be fruitful and fill the earth with its beautiful difference and Israel is meant to bless the world, in its beautiful difference, through its unique existence.

Exodus: Salvation Comes from Beyond the Wilderness

Having passed through creation to the very beginning of the formation of the people of Israel, we now come to the moment in the biblical story in which Israel is itself self-aware. At the beginning of Exodus, we are confronted with a people who have now adopted the name sons of Israel (bin yirl) as their primary identity marker (Exod. 1:7). An answer to the above question (Who is Israel?) thus appears here: Israel understands itself to be who it is only in connection to the story thus far. The people are the sons of Israel/Jacob, the descendant of Abraham the one called from Babylon to whom the promise of the Covenant was given. It is striking that this first instance of self-understanding comes in conjunction with the story and with the narrative context Israel begins to infer and to affirm her identity by telling a story.20 Thus the answer to the second question (Who is Israel not?) is also apparent: they find themselves in
On the call of Abraham, Nugent writes, Conception is an apt metaphor for this initial phase of Israel's existence because...canonically, speaking, God's people did not truly exist as a distinctly identifiable people until the Exodus from Egypt. Yet, undoubtedly, the book of Genesis narrates the calling and pilgrimage of Abraham and his family as foundational to Israel's self-understanding. See John C. Nugent, Old Testament Contributions to Ecclesiology: Engaging and Extending the Insights of John Howard Yoder, (Ph.D. diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009), 83-84.
20 19

Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: And Entry into the Jewish Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 39.

12

Egypt, but Egypt Israel is not. It is also striking that Israels self-realization comes only as a conquered people, a sojourner people suffering and not at home.

Within Egypt, Israel as a people-group multiply and grow under the oppression of an unnamed Pharaoh (Exod. 1:12). Hearing the groaning of the people, God takes notice of them and comes upon Moses at Horeb, the mountain of God beyond the wilderness (Exod. 3:1). Levenson puts the geography of Gods self-revelation in sharp focus, claiming that the desert wilderness functions

as a symbol of freedom, which stands in opposition to the massive and burdensome regime of Egypt, where state and cult are presented as colluding the perpetuation of slavery and degradation. The mountain of God is a beacon to the slaves of Egypt, a symbol of a new kind of master and a radically different relationship of people to state. Sinai[/Horeb] is not the final goal of the Exodus, but lying between Egypt and Canaan, it does represent YHWHs unchallengeable mastery over both.21 And so, not only is Israel a foreigner people in an unfamiliar and oppressive land but the God who hears their cry is himself an outsider god who comes from the wilderness and rescues his people from the powerful hegemony of the Egyptian state.

Gods deliverance of the Israelites from the clutches of Pharaoh (Exod. 3:7-14:31) can thus be seen as doubly-subversive of Egypt: not only is it a resounding judgment against Egypts oppression of Israel, it is also an unqualified challenge to the state and its definition of peoplehood and power. When Pharaoh seeks to consolidate power and exercise it over the children of Israel for the benefit of himself and his people, he subordinates the people of Israel under the people of Egypt. Enslaved and oppressed, Israel is separate and unequal, defined as the foreigners below by the Pharaoh and state above. It is in direct opposition to this schema that God stands and miraculously delivers his people, the children of the promise. In Gods economy, the power and
21

Ibid., 23.

13

the worth of people is not defined by the state instead it is defined by the anarchic, other deity who descends upon Egypt to deliver his people. It is this God who saves them and this God who defines them as the ones whose salvation comes from beyond the wilderness (Exod. 3:1).

From Egypt, Israel is led into the wilderness to Sinai, the mountain of God, upon which the Mosaic covenant is ratified. The laws of this covenant bear the mark of the story that precedes them; not just any laws, they are the laws of the God who is himself other the one who creates and sustains an ordered, diversiform creation, who calls Abram from Babylon to elsewhere, and the one who hears the cries of his foreigner people and saves them from their plight. These laws will be shaped by and reflective of the deity who oversaw these things and a posture of openness to and sustenance of the outsider within Israel is thus evidenced within them.

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If an Alien Sojourns Amongst You: The Plight of the Outsider in Israelite Law In the Old Testament law traditions, there are two basic categories into which those within the geographical boundaries of Israel who are not ethnically-Israelite can find themselves: foreigner (nokr) and resident alien (gr). Both indicate outsiders who have, in some sense, come in but the two groups are treated as separate entities under the law, with different mores and standards reserved for each. M. Guttmann asserts a hierarchy within Israel that places the Israelite citizen at the top, the resident alien below the citizen, and the foreign interlocutor at the bottom of society.22 The nokr The nokr is defined by his being unfamilial to the family or clan, and the root (nkr) is widespread in the Semitic languages, being used to denote those who are different, foreign, or hostile in Akkadian, and foreign in both Ugaritic and Ethiopic. In each case, the stress is on the difference, the essential and unassimilated otherness of the foreigner; he is usually treated as one with whom there is little commonality. In one instance the foreigner is told outright to be gone: You came only yesterday, and shall I today make you wander about with us, while I go wherever I can? Go back, and take your kinsfolk with you; and may the Lord show steadfast love and faithfulness to you. (2 Sam. 15:20 Emphasis mine) It is important to note here that while the foreigner is indeed recognized as an outsider and an unknown quantity, he is not regarded with outright hostility. Though asked to part ways with the in-group, the member of the out-group is still hoped to be within the blessing of God. If the nokr chooses to stay within the land, he or she is exempt from both the requirements and blessings of the law. While the nokr can be sold the dead animal that is unlawful for the
Michael Guttmann, "The Term Foreigner Historically Considered" in Hebrew Union College Annual Vol. III (1926): 4.
22

15

member of the covenant community to eat (Deut.14:21), he will not be granted a remission of debt during the Sabbatical year (Deut. 15:9). He retains his outsider identity and can come only so far into the insider-group. Guttmann helpfully defines the nokr in a political and social sense: "What is characteristic of the nokr therefore is the fact that he maintains the connection with his native country or with the country which he has left. In this he differs from the gr who in reality had also come from afar, but has severed the connection with his former country.23 The gr The gr (resident alien), on the other hand, functions within Israel as an outsider who has chosen to stay within the land and has come under the protective auspices of the host peoplegroup. The term itself, as indicated by its Arabic cognate jr, was a protected stranger.24 These were non-Israelites who had joined in the Exodus flight from Egypt (Exod. 12:38, 48; Num. 11:14) or had been subsumed into Israel proper after the Canaanite conquest (Josh. 9:3ff). If the so-called peasant revolt theory25 of Israels genesis in Canaan is correct it, too, would explain the original ethnic impurity of Israel from this earliest age. In Ugaritic, it can mean both one who dwells on the walls of Ugarit or one who dwells in the temple, possibly as a fugitive.26 1 Kgs. 17:24-27 records an instance of grm who were taught the law of the god of the land they found themselves in, implying that these foreigners were to become clients or patrons of Yahweh, and thus protected from harm.27 Throughout
Michael Guttmann, "The Term Foreigner Historically Considered" in Hebrew Union College Annual Vol. III (1926): 1. Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 398. E.g., See George E. Mendenhall, The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine in The Biblical Archaeologist Vol. XXV, no. 3 (1962): 66-87.
2 26 25 24 23

D. Kellermann, gr, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament 2:440.

2 27

Bernard A. Asen, From Acceptance to Inclusion: The Stranger in Old Testament Tradition in Christianity and the Stranger (ed. Francis W. Nichols; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 18.

16

Deuteronomy the alien is treated in the law alongside orphans and widows as those who need to be shown favor and protection (Cf. Deut. 10:17-19; 24:17, 20, 21; 26:13). These laws may in fact point to an actual abuse or neglect of the alien (as well as the orphan and widow), since it is unlikely that Israel would legislate against that which was not happening. That these grm would find themselves in such a situation of coexistent neglect and dependence suggests to Asen that a preference for translating gr as immigrant is instructive when one considers the social factors which contributed to someone needing protection and seeking inclusion into a new community.28 Other texts appear to extend beyond mere protection of the alien, however, going so far as to actually include the grm in the covenant: As for the assembly, there shall be for both you and the resident alien a single statute, a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you and the alien shall be alike before the Lord (Num. 15:15). You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen: for I am the Lord your God (Lev. 24:22). Yoder posits that passages such as these reflect a permeable unity within the nation of Israel that left open the option for the assimilation and full inclusion of the alien.29 Contra Yoder, though, Milgrom believes that these two texts (and other passages - e.g. Exod. 12:48-49; Lev. 7:7; Num 9:14; 15:29-30) should not be overemphasized or misconstrued: It applies only to the case given in the context; it is not to be taken as a generalization.30 According to Milgrom, the priestly legislation of the holiness code applies to the gr but not because he is a full-fledged member of

2 28

Bernard A. Asen, From Acceptance to Inclusion: The Stranger in Old Testament Tradition in Christianity and the Stranger (ed. Francis W. Nichols; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 22.
2 29

John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1984), 10.

3 30

Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 399.

17

the covenant. Rather, the holiness regulations extend to him because, as a permanent resident in the land, he is just as responsible as the full citizen to curtail impurity within the land that God has set aside to be holy.31 The Deuteronomist disagrees, however, and appears to extend the covenantal boundaries to fully include the grm: You stand assembled today, all of you, before the Lord your Godthe leaders of your tribes, your elders, and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your women, and the aliens who are in your camp, both those who cut your wood and those who your water to enter into the covenant of the Lord your God, sworn by an oath, which the Lord your God is making with you today (Deut. 29:10-12).

draw

We may side with both Yoder and Milgrom, allowing the point of each one to stand. I posit, following Asen, that there exists a trajectory within the law traditions from acceptance and protection to full inclusion that the word gr itself appears to change over time to include within its definition the proselyte or the one who converts.32

3 31

Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 399.
3 32

Bernard A. Asen, From Acceptance to Inclusion: The Stranger in Old Testament Tradition in Christianity and the Stranger (ed. Francis W. Nichols; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 22.

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Israel the grm A final movement to be observed within the Old Testament corpus that concerns the relationship of outsiders to Israel is the self-identification of Israel as grm. In Leviticus 25:23, it is stipulated that, per the law of redemption, the land which belongs to God must not be sold permanently, for the people of Israel are but sojourners and aliens with God. There is within the historical-narratival understanding of Israel a self-identification as a people perpetually on sojourn. F. Spina helpfully points out that Israels patriarchs are repeatedly referred to in hindsight as grm or as those who sojourned (Gen 12:10; 19:9; 20:1b; 21:23, 34; 26:3; 32:5; 35:27; 47:4).33 Leviticus 19:34 stipulates that Israel is to love the alien as the citizen, for Israel had once been aliens in the land of Egypt. It is thus written into the memory of Israel, even coming from different perspectives within that collective, that to be Gods people is to be a member of a community of sojourners. Such a self-understanding necessarily presupposes a posture of acceptance, later evolving into inclusion, which is itself underwritten by a particular understanding of who God is. It is of course true that the latent impulse to protect, identify with and include the alien is one that undergoes serious, negative changes as the original confederacy evolves into an autonomous monarchy. As power is consolidated in a throne, the boundary-markers of us and them are re-ratified and cast more boldly. Where once a diverse people was unified by a commitment to the covenant of a common sojourner deity,34 the kingship appears to reverse the polarity, casting a vision of a people less characterized by their posture of sojourn and more
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Frank Anthony Spina Israelites as grm, Sojourners, in Social and Historical Context in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 322.
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Frank Anthony Spina Israelites as grm, Sojourners, in Social and Historical Context in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 332.

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committed to a human king. The sea-change in Israelite self-understanding from a moving, sojourner people to a land, king, and ethnicity-bound kingdom has far-reaching implications that extend even into today. Yet it was not YHWHs plan to allow Israel to leave its sojourner ethic in the past. In 587 BCE when Babylon begins deporting the people of Israel, I believe that we see a divine reversal of history back to Gods original plan. There is, even within Israel, a growing shift in understanding in which the originally negative concept of exile was gradually transformed into a positive concept of Diaspora.35 Compare the tone between the books of Esther and Daniel on the one hand with books like Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra-Nehemiah. In the former, there appears no real sense of longing to return from exile, even after the decree of Cyrus in 538 BCE, while the latter books attest an intense desire to return to the land and rebuild Jerusalem. In both Esther and Daniel we

see not only a lack of longing for home but an apparent faithful flourishing of the main characters within the foreign kingdom. In these books there is a real openness not only to outsiders but to being outsiders and this, I believe, marks a partial return to Israels sojourner ethic. In EzraNehemiah, of course, the longing for home is deeply-felt and the rejection of the sojourner ethic apparent. Yet we cannot treat Ezra-Nehemiah too harshly. Even as my congregant was apt to point out that Ezra demands the divorce of foreign wives amongst his Israelite brethren (Ezra 10:10-12), it is not out of xenophobia or ethnocenrism, broadly defined. The wives are to be rejected not because they are of a different ethnicity or skin-color; rather, they are rejected because they are nkr and not grm foreigners who retain their connection to their homeland and do not opt-in to the covenant of YHWH. Conclusion: On the Continual Building of Walls
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James M. Scott, "Exile and the Self-Understanding of Diaspora Jews in the Greco-Roman Period" in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 174.

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Up to this point I have argued that within the collective memory of Israel there exists a latent openness to difference and the other that emerges from the stories of creation, the call of Abraham, the Exodus and the very character of God. These memories, and thus Israels posture of sojourner, run deep but they can be mitigated against and forgotten, but only for a time. Despite the kingship and the stark drawing of lines, God re-opens the boundaries by casting his people outward in Exile, a diaspora that never truly ends. Yet despite the unfinished character of diaspora that extends even into the New Testament, there is a real impulse within the people of Israel, perhaps even all of humanity, to return to old habits of building walls to keep people out. But, for every acted-on impulse to keep people out of the covenant, there is within the biblical narrative a divine answer, be it in Exodus, Exile or Jesus, to correct the ethic of Gods people to be more open to difference, more inclusive of the other. This theme features prominently in the gospel of Mark, but nowhere more boldly than in 7:24-30 when Jesus himself appears to fall prey to the wall-building impulse. When the Syrophoenician woman calls upon Jesus to heal her daughter, his first reaction is to deny her; yet when she refuses to be ignored, he commends her for her faith and heals her daughter. Though this passage may press uncomfortably upon certain Christologies (unless Jesus was using her as an object lesson), Jesus is still to be seen as a model Israelite one who faithfully resists the temptation to segregate and, in so doing, proclaims the worth of all people and the inherently good news of Gods Kingdom for all of humanity. Those who follow Jesus are thus those within Gods people who have come full-circle and have broken down the last-standing walls between insiders and outsiders in the Kingdom of God. As Christians, we may find our openness to the outsider in Jesus but we would do well to recognize that Gods people have been poor, wayfaring strangers for much longer than two

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thousand years. We are a peculiar people rooted in the creative, sustaining capacity of God to be hospitable, radically welcoming of the stranger and the outsider, so that the Kingdom community might be inclusive of all who would choose to come in.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, W.F. The Biblical Period. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University, 1950. Asen, Bernard A. From Acceptance to Inclusion: The Stranger in Old Testament Tradition. Pages 16-35 in Christianity and the Stranger. Edited by Francis W. Nichols. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. Campbell, Anthony. Of Kings and Prophets: A Ninth Century Document (1 Samuel 1-2 Kings 10). Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1986. Crsemann, Frank. Human Solidarity and Ethnic Identity. Pages 57-76 in Ethnicity and the Bible. Edited by Mark G. Brett. Leiden: Brill, 1996. de Pury, Albert. Yahwhist (J) Source. Pages 1012-20 in vol. 6 of The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Edelman, Edelman. Ethnicity and Early Israel. Pages 25-55 in Ethnicity and the Bible. Edited by Mark G. Brett. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Emerton, J.A. The Date of the Yahwhist. Pages 107-129 In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel. Edited by John Day. New York: T&T Clark, 2004. Guttmann, Michael. "The Term Foreigner Historically Considered." Hebrew Union College Annual Vol. III (1926): 1-20. Kellermann, D. gr. Pages 439-449 in vol. 2 of Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Levenson, Jon D. Sinai and Zion: And Entry into the Jewish Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1985. Malamat, Abraham. The Proto-History of Israel: A Study in Method. Pages 303-313 in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday. Edited by Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983. McNutt, Paula M. Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999. Mendenhall, George E. The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine. The Biblical Archaeologist vol. XXV (1962): 66-87.

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Milgrom, Jacob. The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990. Noth, Martin. The Deutoronomistic History. Translated by J. Doull et al. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 15. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1981. Nugent, John C. Old Testament Contributions to Ecclesiology: Engaging and Extending the Insights of John Howard Yoder. Ph.D. diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2009. Scott, James M. "Exile and the Self-Understanding of Diaspora Jews in the Greco-Roman Period." Pages 174-218 in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions. Edited by James M. Scott. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Spina, Frank Anthony. Israelites as grm, Sojourners, in Social and Historical Context. Pages 321-335 in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday. Edited by Carol L. Meyers and M. OConnor. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983. Von Rad, Gerhard. Genesis: A Commentary. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972. Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1984.

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