Transgressing Boundaries: Biblical and Social Scientific Studies of Migration

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to highlight and feature the work presented, and thereafter polished, at a workshop hosted at the University of Copenhagen on 12–13 September 2024 with the same title.

The transgression of boundaries is essential to the study of migration. People on the move cross geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, and migration scholars have long traversed interdisciplinary terrains. The workshop’s aim was to facilitate a conversation between biblical scholars and social science scholars, looking not only at the role played by the Bible in contemporary migration but also at how ancient migration is depicted in the Bible. The published papers fall under three categories but easily demonstrate the porous nature of borders, as most of them naturally discuss the others: (1) the Bible in Migration, (2) Migration in the Bible, and (3) Transgressing Disciplinary Boundaries. We aim to answer questions such as the following:

How do contemporary migrants relate to the Bible? How do biblical narratives and religious practises and rituals affect migratory experiences and/or processes? How does the migratory experience strengthen, alter, or weaken the role of and/or relations to the Bible in migrants’ lives? How do we discuss and point out migration(s) as depicted in the Bible? What do the narratives surrounding these movements tell us about shifts not only in location but also in identity? How do we understand “home” and “away”, alongside political and religious ideologies and polemics of such notions? What might scholars of contemporary migration learn from studies of ancient migration in the Bible and vice versa? How might we establish an interdisciplinary conversation that fosters methodological and theoretical experimentation at the crossroads between social sciences and biblical studies and between contemporary and ancient forms of migration? What has been achieved so far, and how might we improve in this dialogue?

This Special Issue is part of the “Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism” research project of the Department of Biblical Exegesis, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen (https://teol.ku.dk/english/dept/diaspora/). Our project investigates the earliest stage of the Jewish diaspora (597-331 BCE). Applying newly developed theory from Diaspora Studies, a key goal of this project is to identify and map all textual depictions in the Hebrew Bible and in archival sources from Egypt (the Elephantine Papyri) and Babylonia (e.g., the Al-Yahudu documents). The workshop was generously funded by the Nils Klim Prize 2020, while the project was funded by The Independent Research Fund Denmark and its Sapere Aude programme.

Dr. Alexiana Fry
Dr. Ida Hartmann
Dr. Frederik Poulsen
Guest Editors

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• Bible
• anthropology
• interdisciplinary
• migration
• religion
• mobility
• social science