Interdisciplinary Mutuality: Migration, the Bible, and Scholarly Reciprocity

Abstract

For almost forty years, scholars of the Bible have drawn on the conglomerate field of migration studies to illuminate historical contexts and to exegete biblical texts. This paper recognizes the rich contributions supplied across the decades by such interdisciplinary scholarship. It offers a rejoinder to this work by exploring how biblical scholars might balance the interdisciplinary scales through reciprocal contributions to migration studies. The response is structured in three movements. First, I present the biblical corpus as a migration-informed and migration-informing artifact that has influenced perceptions of and engagements with migration for more than two millennia. The second part of the paper presents three avenues biblical scholars might pursue in their approaches to migration scholars as interlocutors. Finally, my conclusion offers closing reflections on ways biblical scholars might more appropriately prepare themselves for further interdisciplinary mutuality.

1. Reflecting on Reciprocity and Return

I begin this article with a note of contextualization. This essay is not the paper I presented at the Transgressing Boundaries workshop, but rather, an outgrowth of a conversation about interdisciplinarity that took place between participants on the final day of the workshop. My original presentation was an overview of approaches and models from modern migration studies and an assessment of which might be most effective for scholars of the Bible and ancient Near East. Having written extensively about such things elsewhere (Trinka 2022b, 2024), I have opted instead to compose a brief essay that addresses the topic of interdisciplinarity from the opposite direction, as a biblical scholar seeking to enrich the work of migration scholars with findings from my “home” field. Thus, this article offers an expanded set of reflections on what those of us who study the textual records of the ancient Near East and Bible can offer to scholars immersed in studying migrations past and present.

On the last day of the congress, Ida Hartmann asked what biblical scholars might be able to contribute to migration studies. Until that point in the meeting, discussions on interdisciplinarity had largely taken the direction of asking what methods and theories outside the fields of biblical and religious studies might be heuristically useful for such work, including my paper. It is very much the norm for biblical scholars to beg, borrow, and steal theory for our interpretive ends without giving much thought to repaying the favor. Biblical scholars do not typically ask how our learnings from interdisciplinary work might function as a rejoinder to conversations taking place in other fields. With her question, Hartmann—a classically trained anthropologist—turned the tables and spurred us to reflect on how we might move from what has essentially been a unilateral methodological siphoning of migration studies work toward a conversational approach between fields.

Although primed to think multilaterally about interdisciplinary work, I was admittedly unprepared to provide a thoughtful reply to Hartmann’s incisive and incising question in the moment. I was also cautious not to assume or speak for other scholars in the room. After supplying a milquetoast answer, I deferred to others to offer their own suggestions. Consensus quickly emerged as a shared concern for whether biblical scholars could know another field well enough to offer critical insights. Could biblical scholars ever be familiar enough with a massive conglomerate field like migration studies to provide interventions? Hartmann, in turn, reflected on the challenges she has faced as an anthropologist invited to speak into biblical studies conversations through her work in the “Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism” research group at the University of Copenhagen (see Hartmann in this special issue). The room agreed that if such work were undertaken, it must be with self-awareness and humility, given the likelihood that biblical scholars might miss the mark.

In the days following the conference, Hartmann’s question lingered in my mind. I could not help but feel that as an advocate of interdisciplinarity—and a founding editor of an academic journal that focuses on interdisciplinarity(!)—I should have a more complete and coherent answer to the question of what I, as a biblical scholar, might bring to the methodological doorsteps of my migration studies colleagues. Further conversation with Drs. Hartmann and Fry convinced me that, even at the risk of hubris, Hartmann’s question required a fuller response in written form. Having earlier written about interdisciplinarity as a “departure and return”, and critiquing therein scholarly propensities to borrow unequally from fields beyond our own in ways that confuse traditional comparative methods with interdisciplinarity, I hope to draw out in this essay the “return” element of interdisciplinarity. The aim is to call both biblical scholars and mobilities/migration scholars to methodological reciprocity to form “networks of intellectual hospitality and mutuality that result in cross pollination” (Alderman et al. 2022, p. 5). I mean here more than a simple exchange of methods or findings. I envision collaborative research and writing endeavors that analyze the Bible as a migration-informed and migration-informing artifact across historical and modern migrations. This essay is one step toward achieving the goals of broadening our scholarly networks and deepening our interdisciplinary collaboration.

Throughout this essay, I will use the phrase cultures of mobility, a phrase I coined after synthesizing the work of migration scholars Jefferey Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci with that of mobility scholars Tim Cresswell, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. The phrase encapsulates the reality that all societies cultivate and enforce socially patterned norms of space and movement. Mobility is a distinctive aspect of movement defined primarily by power relationships that emerge from and generate implicit and explicit socially coded scripts for who and what can move, and how, when, and where it can move. The meaning(s) ascribed to different modes of movement depends in part on the persons that move and on the social networks in which those persons are enmeshed. Behavior is constrained by more than biological capabilities or physical intentions. Different bodies are expected to have and authorized to experience different spectrums of mobility wherein certain registers of movement are socially sanctioned and others are presented as destabilizing or deviant (Cresswell 2006, 2010; Hannam et al. 2006). The usefulness of the framework of cultures of mobility is found primarily in its ability to help contextualize movement as an aspect of social construction, to see social codings of movement as part of what Berger called “plausibility structures” (Berger 1967).

2. The Bible as Migration-Informed and Migration-Informing Artifact

In some sense, migration scholars are used to the idea that their work will be integrated across a wide range of fields and other non-academic contexts. Scholars from adjacent disciplines, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and activists rely on the theories and data derived from the study of migration for various purposes. Migration studies has, to some extent, been sustained as a field because of the demand for applicable findings. There is already significant collaboration between scholars of religion and migration scholars given the considerable overlap between the fields of religious studies, sociology, geography, and anthropology on the topic of religion. Nevertheless, specialists in those domains who focus on modern religions are typically not trained as biblical scholars. I do not often hear of migration scholars knocking on the doors of biblical scholars to inquire what of their learnings might enrich their work. What, after all, would those engrossed in the study of seemingly esoteric ancient religious texts and cultural artifacts have to contribute to discussions of modern migration? To some extent, the initial work of bridge building between these disciplines requires that biblical scholars take the first step to approach migration scholars with the proposition that our work does have the potential to enrich theirs.

Who are the migration scholars that would benefit from such interdisciplinary intervention? Migration studies has evolved to be a conglomerate field encompassing the work of anthropologists, geographers, demographers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and public health experts; humanities scholars from the disciplines of history, law, and literary studies; and natural scientists from the areas of archaeology and biology. Some fields would benefit more from biblical studies interventions than others. Those oriented toward transtemporal notions of mobility and literary or qualitative approaches to migration may be more open to incorporating what might initially appear to be an irrelevant area of study. But where should biblical scholars begin justifying our ability to make meaningful contributions to migration studies? I suggest biblical scholars start with the centrality of the Bible itself as a migration-informed and -informing cultural artifact.

The Bible is a collection of texts that emerged in multiple contexts of displacement, migration, and travel. What may seem obvious to biblical scholars may not be so for scholars of migration; that is, few things in human history maintain as pervasive a presence in migrational undertakings as the Bible. Perhaps the wheel or the parasite hold pride of place in such a competition, if ever one was arranged, but the Bible would be close behind. It is widely accepted that the biblical corpus, as it is known to us today, was profoundly shaped by the events of invasion, destruction, and relocation under Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian hegemony in the 8th–5th centuries BCE. While few scholars would argue for the wholesale creation of the Bible in the Babylonian and Persian periods, it is not controversial to argue that these periods witnessed significant scriptural formation and reformulation. Recognition of the movement-bound contexts of biblical authorship, redaction, reception, and preservation is among the most important insights biblical scholarship has offered in the last century. Understanding how ancient experiences and cultures of migration informed trajectories of composition and reception is therefore essential to historical and interpretive enterprises, including those that occur within modern migration. In addition to reflecting on the Bible’s migration-informed origins, it is imperative to recognize how modern lexicons of movement have been shaped by biblical vocabulary; terms like exodus, exile, and diaspora are now applied unwittingly in everyday discourse on human mobility without much, if any, thought given to their biblical origins (Dufoix 2019).

Migration scholars might also consider the lasting impact biblical texts have had as resources of faith for individuals and communities of migrants across almost three millennia. Beyond being a resource for migrants, the Bible has also shaped international paradigms of human rights and immigration law through its influence on both religious communities and secular states (Lin 2024; Neutel 2022). One must also reckon with the use of biblical texts as justificatory tools in the migrational horrors of global slave trades, colonial conquests, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Few, if any, texts in human history can rival the migration-immersed origins or migration-informing existence of the Bible. Even the Qur’an, which itself emerged in a world of transregional mobility—and has widely influenced contemporary migration experiences and policy—incorporates and expands upon earlier biblical migrational foundations. The world is steeped in biblically informed and related concepts, ideas, and ideologies. This fact means the work of biblical scholars can and should inform many facets of the modern study of migration. Migration scholars would benefit from knowing that the cultures of mobility that inform the experiences of many of those whom they study are shaped both directly and indirectly by the biblical texts.

3. Next Steps: The Journey Towards Migration Studies

While one may recognize the importance of the Bible as a dominant cultural artifact for undertaking migration scholarship, one cannot simply hand migration scholars a Bible with a request that they apply it to their work. This would be irresponsible. In the same way biblical scholars should be more responsible when using social-scientific methods in their research. (Trinka 2024). Most biblical scholars would scoff, rightfully so, at the idea of non-specialists uncritically incorporating biblical accounts of movement or perspectives of migration into their work without proper interpretive contextualization. Readers of this essay have all likely read some form of social scientific scholarship that has attempted an analysis of religious or biblical texts and themes. Sometimes, such work is insightful. More often than not, it lacks nuance because non-specialists are typically unaware of important historical or linguistic contexts.

I propose three avenues by which scholars of the Bible can approach scholars of migration with collaborative intentions. These proposals are not meant to be exhaustive, but exploratory. The intent of this article is to begin this interdisciplinary exchange, not to complete it; to provide possibilities for future conversation, not to offer the last word. The first avenue is to fill in evidential gaps for relevant historical periods and texts by enumerating and illuminating patterns and cultures of mobility and migration. The second is for scholars of the Bible and ancient past to compare their own theoretical, methodological, and evidential repertoires to identify where methodological correctives might be appropriately offered to migration scholars. The third is to participate in collaborative research efforts to better catalogue and analyze the Bible’s place and function(s) in contexts of modern migration.

3.1. Ancient and Biblical Cultures of Mobility

The first avenue is to fill evidential gaps in the past by mapping patterns and cultures of mobility and migration. In attending to migrational content and contexts within the Bible, one easily finds biblical authors and characters therein dealing with the full spectrum of migrational activity—from self-initiated movement to situations of captivity and human trafficking. Themes of exodus, exile, and return loom large and are frequently the most addressed by scholars. Still, other registers of mobility abound, including military conquest, transregional animal husbandry, travel, trade, pilgrimage, and missionary migration. Among these, a range of modes of mobility are represented, including walking, running, dancing, swimming, sailing, and traveling by animal or in animal-drawn vehicles. Movement is also not limited to human actors—accounts rich with animal mobilities abound. Moreover, biblical authors frequently elaborate on the mobilities of superhuman entities, often couching profound theological arguments about divine presence and power in descriptions of divine mobility. These various understandings of divine mobility can have direct correlations to how modern migrants understand divine mobility, presence, and absence in their own journeys (Trinka 2021, 2022a, 2022b). The biblical corpus also demonstrates its authors’ and editors’ awareness of different aspects of the life cycle–migration nexus, including marriage migration and aging and dying away from home. One finds biblical authors dealing across genres with the realities of household decision making, the necessity of non-movers as facilitators of migration, family separation, and reunification.

Migrational accounts frequently address issues of significant loss, such as lack of access to social networks and resources, fear of exploitation, sexual violence, loss of children in migrational contexts of war and relocation, and immense acculturative pressures. Even the exodus narrative, which presents migration primarily as liberation from enslavement, is overshadowed by difficulty and death en route. Many aspects of inter-biblical conversations on hospitality mirror modern discussions of asymmetrical sympathies and the notion of deservingness, as communities and states determine which movers are worthy of protection or reception. Likewise, biblical discussions of identity maintenance correspond in surprising ways to modern discourse on relatedness, and how receiving populations often sympathize or empathize with particular displaced populations more than others. Socio-cultural discussions abound regarding hospitality toward foreigners and acculturative choices in contexts of migration, including language, religious creativity and orthodoxy, dress, dietary practices, intermarriage, and other aspects of identity negotiation. In some cases, migration is understood as a process that reifies communal identity and even religiously purifies a group. In others, it is migration that jeopardizes one’s membership in a particular community.

None of this is to say that the texts always accurately represent historical realities on the ground or that biblical texts should be mined for historical migrational content. It is to say, however, that certain biblical authors are obsessed (for lack of a better term) with questions regarding the influence of migration on the constitution of the community and its everyday life. When one extends their study beyond the received text of the Masoretic tradition to include the broader compositional history of the Septuagint (LXX), Samaritan Pentateuch, the discoveries of the Judean Desert, their underlying Vorlagen, and other pseudepigraphal and apocryphal texts, they find textual variations that sometimes reflect migrational contexts and that redactional choices are sometimes intended to address different migrational or diasporic experiences. Biblical scholars are well equipped to explore the place of diverging textual corpora in relation to early Jewish–Christian relations in different diasporic and mobile worlds.

While the world of the Bible is a world in motion, biblical authors are on the whole ambivalent about migration. Taken on the whole, no unanimous perspective on migration or migrants emerges in the Bible, but rather, the expansiveness of migrational content demonstrates diverse cultures of mobility that often stand in contrast. Here is where a paradox arises in the bible–migration nexus: On one hand, we must deal with the fact that many cultures of mobility around the globe could be considered as being biblically influenced. Scholars must recognize and work to analyze the many ways the Bible is intertwined and implicated in those “ideological codings of mobility” (Cresswell 2006, p. 9). At the same time, scholars must be cautious about suggesting any direct overlay of biblical cultures of mobility in present contexts (Kaminsky and Hurst 2025). There are, for example, many who seek to read biblical tropes of hospitality and care for the stranger as a mandate to facilitate the passage and resettlement of migrants. Conversely, some seek to bolster negative public opinions of migrants and migration by operationalizing biblical texts in support of restrictive migration regimes. The reality is that the Bible contains a spectrum of opinions on migrants and migration. Attempting to conform biblical texts to modern cultures of mobility ignores the fact that directly translating past patterns of migration or cultures of mobility into present contexts can be a dubious enterprise. Rather than treating the biblical corpus as a static set of migration tropes, we should approach it as a site of contestant meaning-making around movement—one that reflects a wide spectrum of motives, constraints, and conceptual frameworks that can challenge and complicate dominant narratives in modern migration discourse.

3.2. Theoretical and Methodological Correctives

Apart from relaying the realities of the Bible’s importance as a migration-informed and migration-informing artifact, biblical scholars can make a broader contribution to helping modern migration scholars avoid the multifaceted problem of presentism. Migration has always been a part of the human experience. All migration scholars would agree. Nevertheless, global histories of migration frequently start with comparatively nebulous claims about human movement in prehistoric eras, glossing over ancient historical contexts before focusing on early modern and modern migration histories.

While migration has been of interest to scholars of modern and ancient periods alike, those working in chronologically disparate areas of specialization have rarely interacted (Tsuda and Baker 2015). The reasons for the lack of dialogue across historical subfields are manifold. Barriers to cross-temporal work include the particularities of language training and the finite abilities of researchers to interpret extensive bodies of evidence across such broad timescales. Another factor is that there are typically more firsthand data that cross a wider swath of social and economic categories for historically recent and present periods of migration than those in the ancient past. Beyond this, modern migration scholars are often simply unaware of historic migrational contexts that predate the last five hundred years. A similar critique can be leveled against scholars of the contemporary Middle East who might generally know that the region has a long history of manifold mobilities, but are unaware of ancient cultures of mobility or patterns of movement upon which modern mobilities are constructed. Biblical scholars and scholars of the ancient Near East can fill in important evidential middle ground often unconsidered by modern migration scholars.

There is also the challenge of a pervasive, albeit wrongly placed, assumption that causes and experiences of movement are qualitatively different enough between modern and ancient contexts to render comparative analysis impossible. Sweeping narratives of sedentarization, urbanization, and the creation of writing form the basis of a model in which humans truly became homo sapiens after they learned to settle down. Scholars of the ancient past, and even those in the ancient world, frequently promote this totalizing narrative (cf., Porter 2012; Hoo 2023, 2024). Modern migration discourse also sometimes falls into the trap of assuming that sedentary society is real society, with mobile actors representing a spectrum of acceptable and deviant forms of movement that are measurable against the rubric of sedentary life. Mobilities scholars have already offered this critique of migration studies, but the critique would be strengthened with more examples from the ancient world that demonstrate the essentially mobile nature of society (Trinka 2022b, 2024; Urry 2007). The Bible itself preserves remnants of disputes over the meanings of migration, and many times demonstrates its authors’ predilection for sedentary life. Wrapped up in biblical portrayals of mobility and migration are hints of the authors’ and editors’ own cultures of mobility, and those of the times, places, and persons they seek to represent. Also embedded in biblical texts are varying perspectives on the relationship between the Divine and mobility/migration (Trinka 2022a, 2022b). Again, such theologizing amid movement and in response to movement continues today as members of faith communities interpret their own experiences and those of others through the rubrics of biblical portrayals of migration.

In line with expanding the historical purview of migration scholars and challenging reigning paradigms of sedentarism, scholars of the Bible and ancient past can push back against methodological nationalism. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller coined methodological nationalism, the assumption of the nation-state as natural, to demonstrate its pervasive and problematic presence across the social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Cf. Demir 2025). Like other scholars working within the methodological and terminological frameworks established by nation-states, migration scholars have often been heavily influenced by what Anne-Marie Fortier calls the “citizenship turn”, whereby migration is studied predominantly through the rubrics of state-created categories (Fortier 2000). All too often, biblical scholars have followed suit in committing methodological nationalism by interpreting texts within the confines of these state-based definitional categories. However, those engaged in the historical enterprise can offer comparative insights on past and present hegemonic structures aimed at controlling and monitoring mobility, and in doing so, deepen modern migration scholars’ articulation that not only is migration older than nation-state categories, but also that such categories are not typically claimed by migrants themselves.

In some sense, this essay presupposes that biblical scholars have contributions at the ready to initiate substantive dialogue with migration scholars. The Transgressing Boundaries workshop is proof that some are indeed prepared for such interdisciplinary exchange. There are, however, two concerns that biblical scholars who work on mobility and migration might address amongst themselves while reaching out to migration scholars.

The first concern to be addressed internally amongst biblical scholars is the necessity of understanding migration as a socially constructed category of movement. Biblical scholars would benefit from studying mobility studies scholarship along with migration studies research, so as to situate their analysis within a more comprehensive taxonomy of movement, mobility, motility, and migration (Trinka 2022b). Presently, biblical scholarship focuses on migration mainly through the lenses of trauma, crisis, and a lack of migrant agency. Yet, migration in the Bible and in a broader historical perspective is not only, or even primarily, experienced as crisis (Baker and Tsuda 2015; Flamm and Kaufmann 2006; Sirkeci et al. 2016). There is much that can be said on biblical themes of exile, captivity, and diaspora that relate to involuntary movement, but painting every biblical image of movement as a form of flight or every biblical character as a refugee does not do justice to the plurality of mobile actors represented across the corpus. Nor do such readings honor the complex presentations of overlapping cultures of mobility and decision-making matrices represented across the biblical corpus.

My own approach centers on explorations of explicit and implicit perceptions of movement and movers (Trinka 2022b). My work is based on the assertion that the nature of migration as a socially constructed and socially negotiated enterprise has not drastically changed from the ancient past to the present. While technologies for movement and communication have significantly changed, the fact that migration is most often undertaken as a strategy to mitigate insecurity has not changed. Similarly, the centrality of social networks and attendant decision-making frameworks have remained consistent for millennia. Many of the most traveled migration routes in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world remain the primary routes for modern migrants. Attention to changes in the scope and scale of movement is necessary, but differences in these areas of migration research should not keep us from appealing to both modern and ancient evidence for human movement to understand broader related phenomena. Beyond critiquing tendencies towards sedentarism and presentism, scholars of the Bible and ancient Near East can offer thick descriptions of cultures of mobility found throughout textual and material cultural records. By this, I mean not simply presenting modern scholars with more obvious evidence of ancient movements, but of the more nuanced work of interpreting and articulating the plausibility structures that governed ancient experiences and enactments of movement.

The second internal concern to be addressed amongst biblical scholars is to contextualize biblical cultures of mobility as an aspect of intertextual theological discourse across biblical corpora. While the notion of doing biblical theology has long been disputed as an enterprise among members of the guild, the observation that the biblical corpus contains myriad theologies is generally accepted. Even if not engaged in the task of theological exegesis for a particular faith community, biblical scholars constantly comment on the claims biblical authors put forth regarding the Divine, the Covenant Community, the nature of salvation, conceptions of ethics and morality, and all nature of things concerning the human experience. There is no unified theology of migration found across the biblical corpus. However, descriptions of movement are often theologically freighted (Trinka 2022b). Why, then, have we paid so little attention to the phenomenon of movement and conceptions of mobility found throughout the Bible? There are admittedly bookshelves full of texts on perceptions of foreigners and ethnicity in the ancient past, but few if any offer substantial evaluations of cultures of mobility that are informed by mobility or migration studies scholarship.

How might our exegetical work be enriched if, instead of immediately reaching for modern labels of migrant types or classifications of movement to level on the text, we ask first what cultures of mobility are operative for the authors or editors of the passage(s) under consideration, and how those cultures of mobility are parsable across time, geographies, and social situations? Only after this should we move from there to engaging the text in and through modern contexts of movement.

3.3. Biblical Texts in/and Contexts of Migration

Exploring how religious narratives function in the lives of migrants is an important research avenue. Narrative is an exceptionally powerful element of the human experience, as stories and storytelling wield profound influence over our daily lives (Gottshall 2012). Migrants often draw on religious narratives when making decisions, negotiating cultural differences and challenges, bolstering emotional resilience, and constructing coherent meaning out of incoherent and sometimes traumatic experiences (Buietelle and Zock 2013; Goździak and Shandy 2002; Knott 2016; Trinka 2019). Yet, narratives do still more than these things. Religious idioms, in the forms of both language and praxis, are not merely descriptive, but are elements by which personal and communal worlds are constructed (Orsi 1997). These observations hold true for modern movers as well as those in the ancient past.

Across time, religious practices and texts have played important roles in the migration undertaking. In the cases of the Bible, ancient Near East, and ancient Mediterranean, scholars have access to large bodies of material and cultural and textual evidence that can be (re)interpreted with an eye towards mobility and migration (Trinka 2022b). In beginning this work, scholars might first mine the sources for patterns of religious practices related to ideas or uses of oral and written religious narratives in contexts of movement. With specific cases in hand, they can then turn to the comparative enterprise of reading ancient patterns of practice in concert with the findings related to textuality, orality, and material religion in modern contexts of migration.

Migration scholars have long demonstrated interest in qualitative methodologies, with recent robust methodological treatments seeking to reflectively integrate ethnographic, anecdotal, and generally non-statistical data in ways that build on qualitative methods across the social sciences (Iosofides 2020). Biblical scholars are well-positioned to join such conversations about how modern migrants overlay the experiences of biblical persons or tropes of migration on their own migration experiences.

Still, the interpretive landscape of biblical texts is overwhelming. Not only are Judaism and Christianity astoundingly internally pluralistic with regard to modes of reading and application, but other faith traditions and secular institutions also borrow from biblical traditions in ways that are not necessarily traceable. No text is self-interpreting, despite what faithful readers of the Bible might desire. All reading proceeds in the matrix of past and present interpretive communities. Reading oneself into a text is a common feature of literary engagement. This phenomenon was first studied in relation to religious texts by Hjalmar Sundén, who coined the term “role theory” (Sundén 1966). Narrative psychologists have since added to Sundén’s foundational work (Belzen 1995, 1996; Lindgren 2014; Trinka 2021). Situating another’s reading of a text/narrative within the matrix of interpretive variables and disentangling the various threads of applicative action is complicated and often confounding work. For it to be done well, I think, it requires collaboration between biblical scholars and scholars from across the field of migration studies. Biblical scholars have already begun to explore how migrants see biblical texts functioning in their own experiences. This work would be enriched by expanding the discussion to more intentionally include role theory to learn how migrants might see themselves in the narratives of the texts.

Biblical scholars should, however, be mindful when reading alongside migrants for the potential of generating adverse outcomes related to the use of migrants as research subjects. The work of co-readings should have a purpose beyond being a means to establish one’s ethnographic chops or for biblical scholars to try their hand at fieldwork. Even if undertaken with great anthropological caution and proper intention, such work can come across as scholars using migrants merely as an end to produce new research. Properly performed, such research would be an interdisciplinary enterprise between anthropologists, sociologists, and biblical scholars. While anthropologists can relay in ethnographic terms certain modes of reading, or explanations of a text’s meaning in a certain context or for a particular person, they will likely struggle to contextualize texts or tropes in a larger scope of reception history. Many biblical scholars have undergone broad base training in historiographical and archaeological methodologies, ancient languages, and textual interpretation. Some specialize in historical geography and histories of science and are therefore equipped to draw earlier moments in trajectories of thought to bear on modern methodological approaches. Biblical scholars can therefore help by articulating important linguistic content, interpretive streams, and by exploring how migrants or receiving communities are reading into or against larger theological trends and trajectories.

Moreover, the purpose of shared reading endeavors should not be merely descriptive. Building an understanding of how readings have emerged, accumulated, and influenced various aspects of the migration undertaking is a start, but this work necessarily includes attempts to articulate the lasting effects of the Bible on the lives of migrants and public life, including the realms of policy. I do not intend to state that this work is mandatory for scholars of the bible and migration, only that if they pursue migrant-centric readings with migrants, such readings should be performed with a clear telos and appropriate structures to protect migrant readers. Here, biblical scholars have much to gain from colleagues in religious studies who also work with migrants and migration. Exemplary studies that cross the historical, theological, and ethnographic boundaries include Agosto and Hidalgo (2018), Hidalgo (2018), and Anna Rebecca Solevåg and Leonardo Marcondes Alves’s article in this special issue.

4. Conclusions

What began as a presentation about bringing migration studies to bear on biblical studies turned into a set of reflections on scholarly reciprocity. This short essay has only scratched the surface of potential ways biblical scholars might (re)envision their interdisciplinary relationships with other disciplines. The future of collaborative work holds much promise. My hope is that biblical scholars might take the first steps with a sense of openness and hospitality to invite migration scholars to comment on how their work is being used in our field, and to critique methodologies within biblical studies that fail to account for what we have learned from mobility and migration studies (Fry and Trinka 2025; Trinka and Fry 2025). Biblical scholarship need not continually find itself in a state of asymmetrical dependency on mobility and migration studies. We have long benefited from the tools and findings of migration studies. It is now time to offer with a sense of heuristic humility what we have learned in return; not analogies or abstractions, but deep, historically grounded frameworks and hermeneutically rich traditions that speak to the complexities of movement.