by Darla Turlington 

Biblical Migrations

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man… —Genesis 3:22-23 

These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. —Genesis 10:32 

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.  —Genesis 11:1-2 

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” —Genesis 12:1 

Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. —Genesis 12:10 

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years….” —Genesis 15:13; compare Acts 7:6 

And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God. —Genesis 17:8; also Genesis 20:1, 21:34, 26:3, 28:4, 37:1, Exodus 6:4 

When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or else you will be consumed in the punishment of the city.” —Genesis 19:15 

Abraham rose up from beside his dead, and said to the Hittites, “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you; give me property among you for a burying place, so that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” —Genesis 23:3-4 

When Israel set out on his journey with all that he had … God spoke to Israel in visions of the night, and said … “I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make of you a great nation there.” —Genesis 46:1-3 

They said to Pharaoh, “We have come to reside as aliens in the land; for there is no pasture for your servants’ flocks because the famine is severe in the land of Canaan.” —Genesis 47:4 

When he heard this, Moses fled and became a resident alien in the land of Midian. There he became the father of two sons. —Acts 7:29 

You shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.” —Deuteronomy 26:5 

Then she fell prostrate, with her face to the ground, and said to him, “Why have I found favor in your sight, that you should take notice of me, when I am a foreigner?” —Ruth 2:10 

But the Lord will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel and will set them in their own land; and aliens will join them and attach themselves to the house of Jacob. —Isaiah 14:1 

But if you continue to say, “We will not stay in this land,” thus disobeying the voice of the Lord your God and saying, “No, we will go to the land of Egypt, where we shall not see war, or hear the sound of the trumpet, or be hungry for bread, and there we will stay,” then hear the word of the Lord, O remnant of Judah.… All the people who have determined to go to Egypt to settle there shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. —Jeremiah 42:13-15a,17a 

Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”  —Matthew 2:13 

Equal Treatment Under the Law 

If an alien who resides with you wants to celebrate the passover to the Lord, all his males shall be circumcised; then he may draw near to celebrate it; he shall be regarded as a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it; there shall be one law for the native and for the alien who resides among you. —Exodus 12:48-49; see also Leviticus 24:22 

Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your homeborn slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. —Exodus 23:12 

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. —Numbers 15:15; also Numbers 9:14 

I charged your judges at that time: “Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien.” —Deuteronomy 1:16 

Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns;  the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake. —Deuteronomy 14:28-29; see also Deuteronomy 26:12-13 

These were the cities designated for all the Israelites, and for the aliens residing among them, that anyone who killed a person without intent could flee there, so as not to die by the hand of the avenger of blood, until there was a trial before the congregation. —Joshua 20:9 

Likewise when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name—for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm—when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built. —I Kings 8:41-42 

 So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who reside among you and have begotten children among you. They shall be to you as citizens of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. In whatever tribe aliens reside, there you shall assign them their inheritance, says the Lord God. —Ezekiel 47:21-23 

Just Treatment of the Alien 

You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. —Exodus 23:9 

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 19:33-34; also Leviticus 24:22 

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 23:22; also Leviticus 19:9-10, Deuteronomy 24:19-22  

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.  —Deuteronomy 10:17-19 

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice. —Deuteronomy 24:17a 

The Lord watches over the strangers;
he upholds the orphan and the widow,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. —Psalm 146:9 

Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place. —Jeremiah 22:3; see also Jeremiah 7:6 

The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery; they have oppressed the poor and needy and have extorted from the alien without redress. —Ezekiel 22:29 

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ —Matthew 25:34-36 

Aliens before God 

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. —Leviticus 25:23 

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; do not hold your peace at my tears. For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my forebears. —Psalm 39:12 

Hear my words, O my people; prepare for battle, and in the midst of the calamities be like strangers on the earth. Let the one who sells be like one who will flee; let the one who buys be like one who will lose…. —2 Esdras 16:40-41  

Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. —Ephesians 2:12 

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, —Ephesians 2:19 

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, —Hebrews 11:13 

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. —I Peter 2:11 

Secular Quotations

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.  —Ellsworth Huntington

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.  —Mohsin Hamid 

Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety and a better future. It is part of the social fabric, part of our very make-up as a human family. —Ban Ki-moon  

Migration is as natural as breathing, as eating, as sleeping. It is part of life, part of nature. So we have to find a way of establishing a proper kind of scenario for modern migration to exist.  —Garcia Bernal 

History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner. —Claudio Magris 

Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone…if you didn’t migrate then your father did, and if your father didn’t need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him… ― José Saramago  

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. ― Edward W. Said 

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me. —Carlos Fuentes 

People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America. —Mary Pipher 

What, after all, is the narrative of ‘the American Dream?’ It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.  —Naomi Wolf 

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don’t pay attention or bear witness to it. It’s part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It’s important to put that on the page.  —Jacqueline Woodson 

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.  —Isabel Wilkerson 

Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world.  —Jon Porter 

Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction. ― Paul Murray  

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.  —Michael Ignatieff 

When labor migration is properly managed, it is a conduit for skills and wages to flow where they are most needed. It can, and must, be a triple-win, benefiting migrants and their families, their home country, and their destination.  —Guy Ryder 

Abject poverty, political instability, torture, and other abuses push thousands across our border. There is not a deterrent imaginable that equals the conditions that force their migration.  —Greg Boyle 

I don’t know of any problems countries in Europe are facing – environment, infrastructure, markets, market development, the fifth freedom being digital freedom, border security, terrorism, migration – that can be better solved alone.  —Kersti Kaljulaid 

We must force the government to stop the bird migration. We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops… and force migratory birds to stay where they are.  —Vladimir Zhirinovsky 

I am not against migration. It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe.  —Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door. —Emma Lazarus 

I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong —George Washington 

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. —Franklin D. Roosevelt 

Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life. —John F. Kennedy 

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources—because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples. —Lyndon B. Johnson 

Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans—liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal—the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history. Across the Pacific, across the Atlantic, they came from every point on the compass—many passing beneath the Statue of Liberty—with fear and vision, with sorrow and adventure, fleeing tyranny or terror, seeking haven, and all seeking hope…Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future. —George H. W. Bush 

About the author

Darla Dee Turlington wrote 34 articles for this publication.

The Rev. Dr. Darla Dee Turlington is an ordained American Baptist pastor who served twenty years at the First Baptist Church of Westfield, NJ, the last nine as Senior Pastor, retiring in June 2010. She has been an adjunct professor at New York City area colleges and currently is on the Governing Board of the Ministers Council of the American Baptist Churches USA, the Board of Visitors of the Divinity School of Wake Forest University, and the Advisory Team of American Baptist Women In Ministry.

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