The Study of Involuntary Migration as a Hermeneutical Guide for Reading the Jacob Narrative

Abstract

AbstractThe patriarch Jacob is an involuntary migrant. Jacob lives as an asylum seeker from Esau’s threat of violence and then as a refugee under Laban’s protection. Eventually, Jacob returns ‘home’ to Canaan, but he finds there a society totally different than the one he remembers or imagines. Jacob resembles involuntary migrants from other cultures in all of these ways. The experiences of other involuntary migrants can and should, therefore, guide interpretation of this narrative. This article, therefore, exegetes the texts concerning Jacob in Genesis 25-33 by utilising findings from the social-scientific study of involuntary migration, James C. Scott’s work on subaltern resistance, and studies on the role of trickster narratives in the Hebrew Bible. By generating new interpretive solutions to perennially problematic passages and showing the prominence of the experience of involuntary migration in Genesis, this article outlines an important new hermeneutical approach relevant not only for this text but also for a large number of texts in the Hebrew Bible concerned with involuntary migration.