Migratory Thought: Dialogues Between Biblical Scholarship and Anthropology on Human Mobility

Abstract

In recent decades, biblical scholars have begun to read the narratives about ancient persons and peoples on the move in dialogue with modern migration studies. As part of this broader trend, I became involved in a research project focused on descriptions of the earliest Jewish diaspora in the Hebrew Bible and historical documents due to my background as an anthropologist specializing in contemporary migration. This article aims to strengthen and systemize this emerging interdisciplinary conversation about human mobility. It provides a methodological catalog outlining four different ways biblical scholars and students may draw comparatively from the study of modern mobilities to shed new light on ancient and biblical worlds of motion. These four methods are tentatively labeled (1) applying new categories, (2) asking new questions, (3) thinking through concepts, and (4) exposing implicit biases. The article defines these as different comparative heuristics and uses the book of Ruth to reflect upon their respective strengths, limits, and unintended consequences.

1. Introduction

Anthropology is a migratory discipline by design. From the get-go, its practitioners ventured out into far-away corners of the world, propelled by romantic and colonialist desires to discover new places, peoples, and cultures. Biblical scholarship, in juxtaposition, is a relatively sedentary discipline. This discipline grew out of the patient study of a shared collection of texts passed down through the millennia to the present. Despite, or perhaps exactly because of, the fixity of their object of study, biblical scholars have practiced a different sort of mobility. Long before interdisciplinary research became a buzzword in the knowledge-producing industry, biblical scholars traveled beyond the boundaries of their own discipline in the pursuit of new methodologies and theories to incorporate into their work with the biblical texts (McKenzie 2013; Boxall and Gregory 2023). The 19th century and most of the 20th century were devoted to investigating the Bible as a historical source to the past. The 1960s–70s initiated a general shift in terms of reading the Bible as literature and engaging with narrative criticism, literary analysis, and reader-response theory. The 1980s–90s saw a significant turn towards the social sciences, including feminist and postcolonial criticism. More recently, biblical scholars have begun to engage with modern migration studies (for a great overview of this emerging field, see Trinka, forthcoming).

As part of this broader trend, researchers at the University of Copenhagen launched the research project “Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism” in 2022.1 The project aims to identify and analyze different depictions of the earliest Jewish diaspora in the biblical texts and the existing historical records (e.g., the Al-Yahudu documents and the Elephantine papyri). As indicated in the title, one of the project’s core ambitions is to unfold the myriad divergent attitudes towards living abroad that arise from the texts, including different opinions on whether to remain or return to the ancestral land, whether to accommodate or oppose the demands of new authorities, and whether to preserve or discard old customs. From the outset, the project aspires to explore these questions in light of modern migration studies and, hence, to contribute to a sustained interdisciplinary conversation on the topic of human mobility.

That was my ticket on the team. I am a trained anthropologist working at the interstices between migration and religion. For nearly a decade, my own research has focused on Islam as a lived tradition, first in Turkey, and later among Muslims in Europe. As part of the Divergent Views project, however, my role was to guide the research team of biblical scholars and ancient historians through the terrain of modern migration studies. During weekly seminars held throughout 2024, we read modern migration studies in dialogue with Old Testament/Hebrew Bible texts and historical documents. These excursions aimed to identify methodologies and theories that were developed through research among contemporary migrants and discuss how they could be repurposed to shed new light on ancient movers as well. This article springs from these interdisciplinary conversations. As such, it is deeply indebted to my colleagues on the project, who opened the world of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East to me.2

The ambition of this article is to provide a methodological catalog that outlines four different ways biblical scholars and students may draw from migration studies broadly, and the anthropology of migration more specifically, to add nuance and texture to their study of mobilities and movers in the Bible.3 None of these four approaches is new per se, as I have identified them from within the growing biblical scholarship that already engages with modern migration studies. However, these varying approaches have often been applied without reflecting systematically on the analytical strengths and weaknesses of their chosen approach. Hence, the contribution of this article is to define four modes of forging an interdisciplinary conversation between biblical scholarship and anthropology on the topic of mobility and to discuss their respective potentials and pitfalls. The article is thus intended as a resource for biblical students and scholars who either wish to enter into conversation with the anthropology of migration or who are already part of that conversation and would like to reflect more systematically upon their chosen approach.

In the following, I discuss the four methodological approaches as different forms of comparison between biblical and anthropological representations of migration. Comparison has always been a cornerstone of the anthropological enterprise. The anthropologist Matei Candea defines comparison in very broad strokes as “the move which brings together two different entities in order to produce some effect (epistemic, ontological, political, etc.) through a consideration of their differences and similarities” (Candea 2016, p. 5). In that sense, a comparison is a “heuristic device”, a tool for thinking and writing that does something to the analytical process or the final product. To define an approach as a heuristic is to acknowledge that it is not the only, or even the best, approach; other forms of comparison could have been chosen, and they would have produced a different effect. “A heuristic goes bad when it forgets it is a heuristic” (ibid., p. 3), as Candea puts it. That, however, does not leave us in the land of free rein eclecticism. To characterize an approach as a heuristic is to commit to reflect critically on its failures and how these are bound up with its “temporary vantages and unstable achievements” (ibid.). Or, to say it plainly, it is to think carefully about the benefits, limits, and unintended consequences of a given mode of comparison.

I have called the four comparative methods identified here (1) applying new categories, (2) asking new questions, (3) thinking through concepts, and (4) exposing implicit biases. In the following, I critically assess each of these comparative modes, and, towards the end, I discuss how they may be combined to complement each other. To make this methodological discussion more concrete and engaging, I will anchor it in the book of Ruth. I am not a biblical scholar, and it is beyond my capacity and ambition to provide a fully-fledged reading of this multifaceted biblical text. Instead, in this article, I use the book of Ruth as an exemplary case for describing different comparative methodologies and discussing their potentials and pitfalls from an anthropological perspective. Hence, first, a closer look at the book of Ruth.

2. Biblical Case: Ruth on the Move

For a non-biblical scholar, the book of Ruth is an appealing and accessible text. It is short, has a clear narrative arch, and is textured with rich dialogues.4 The text reads as distinctly “down to earth”: there are no otherworldly creatures, miracles, or prophesies. God even remains relatively peripheral to the text. Moreover, with its strong female component, the book of Ruth stands out from within the corpus of the Hebrew Bible. It is one of only two texts named after a woman (the other being the book of Esther), and the story is driven forward by its two female protagonists, Ruth and Naomi.

The story begins when Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, leave Bethlehem, which is tormented by famine, and settle in the land of Moab. Elimelech soon dies. Some ten years later, the two sons die as well. Naomi is now left alone in a foreign land with her daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, who are both local Moabite women. Naomi decides to return to her ancestral lands and asks Ruth and Orpah to go back to their Moabite families as well. But Ruth refuses. In a pivotal and much-cited scene, Ruth declares her unwavering loyalty not only to Naomi but also to Naomi’s people and to her God:

“Do not press me to leave you, to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried”.

(1:16–17 NRSVUE)

Back in Bethlehem, Naomi and Ruth struggle to provide for themselves. Widowed and childless, they need a male heir to claim Elimelech’s property. Luckily, Ruth proves industrious. She soon wins the sympathy of Boaz, a well-off kinsman of Elimelech. Boaz allows Ruth to glean barley in his fields, and he instructs the young men working for him not to bother Ruth or chase her away. But as the harvest season comes to an end, Ruth and Naomi need to find a more long-term solution to their precarious situation. Naomi instructs Ruth to beautify herself, seek out Boaz at the threshing floor, and make advances to him. The plan pays off, and Boaz agrees to marry Ruth. When Ruth births a son, Obed, the male heir is provided, and Naomi’s honor restored.

In line with broader trends in biblical scholarship, early commentaries on Ruth followed a historical-critical approach and focused on questions of dating, authorship, and purpose of the text. Then followed a literary approach, which explored the genre, intertextuality, literary themes, and plot. More recently, the text has been subjected to feminist, indigenous, and migration-sensitive readings (Matheny 2020).

Traditionally, readings have assessed the conduct of Ruth “positively”, depicting her as the “ideal convert to Judaism” and a “model immigrant” who enthusiastically adopts the Judean God and customs, displays unwavering loyalty to her family-in-law, and works hard for the benefit of the Judean society (Sweeney 2012, pp. 429–33; Ozick 1994). André LaCoque even asserts that Ruth’s “’heroism’ is to become more of a Judean than those who are Judean by birth!” (quoted in Yee 2009, p. 129). Yet, several scholars problematize such idealizing and romantic readings. Honig (1997) observes that the portrait of Ruth as the model immigrant perpetuates a propagandistic image of the Judeans as the chosen people, a people Ruth feels drawn towards but can only hope to become part of because she, unlike Oprah, is exceptionally virtuous and loyal. Others note that the optimistic readings obscure issues of ethnic hierarchies, labor exploitation, and prejudices about the sexuality of foreigners, which are also alive in the text. Yee (2009) observes that Ruth is not only celebrated as the “model minority” but also entrapped in the role of the “perpetual foreigner” (see also Hwang 2023). Others have highlighted Ruth’s vulnerability to violence and sexual abuse (Dagley 2019), and Katherine Doob Sakenfeld punctuates any romantic readings of the relationship between Ruth and Boaz: “This is not a slightly adventurous tryst. It is a desperate act by a desperate person” (Sakenfeld 2002, p. 174).5

My purpose in the following is not to add yet another reading to this rich and nuanced conversation but to use the book of Ruth to exemplify the heuristic consequences (desired as well as undesired) of reading the text through different modes of comparison. The book of Ruth invites such comparative experimentation. Towards its end, Ruth quietly vanishes from the narrative that carries her name, but Ruth’s discreet disappearance does not close the narrative so much as it unsettles or ruptures it. The book’s ambiguous and open-ended conclusion sets thoughts in motion and stirs comparative thinking.

3. One: Applying Categories

One trend in recent biblical scholarship is to take the categories developed to describe and regulate modern migration flows and apply them to biblical or historical representations of people on the move (Ahn 2011; Crouch and Strine 2018; Berlejung 2022). A paradigmatic example of this approach is Strine’s (2019) re-reading of the patriarchal narratives (Genesis 12–50) through the technically dense terminology of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR). Here, Strine describes Abraham as an “environmentally induced externally displaced person”, Isaac is categorized as an “environmentally induced internally displaced person”, Jacob becomes an “asylum seeker”, and Joseph is labelled a “victim of human trafficking”.

We could perform a similar comparative exercise in the book of Ruth. Elimelech and his family, who leave Bethlehem and settle in Moab due to famine, could also be categorized as “environmentally induced externally displaced persons”. Ruth, who leaves her ancestral land in search for a sustainable livelihood, could be described as a “foreign worker” (Brenner 2010), “labor migrant”, or “guest worker”. Pushing it further still, with reference to Naomi’s encouragement that Ruth makes advances to Boaz, we could also characterize Ruth as a “sex-worker migrant” or perhaps even as a “victim of human trafficking”, Naomi as a “procurer” or “madam”, and Boaz as a “sugar daddy”. To be clear, I am here evoking these deliberately jarring labels not as serious character readings, but as a way to test how far, and how awkwardly, certain modern categories stretch when retrofitted to ancient contexts.

This mode of comparison is a powerful rhetorical tool. The contrast between the biblical narratives and the distinctly modern—often quite dense and technical terminology—is surprising, evocative, and perhaps also provocative. Calling Elimelech and his family “environmentally induced externally displaced persons” pulls them out of their ancient-fictive universe and inserts them into a recognizable modern context of climate change, border regulation, and humanitarian aid agencies. There is something refreshing and bold about the cognitive dissonance created by recasting familiar biblical figures in the garbs of modern migration categories.

Naming biblical figures through modern migration categories also does a particular moral work. It invokes sympathy with the countless migrants who flee draught and flooding today, and it indicates that the Hebrew Bible might offer some guidance on how to relate and respond to the unfolding climate crisis. As such, reading modern migration terminology into these ancient texts revitalizes them and asserts their continuing relevance in a tumultuous and rapidly changing world.

Lastly, some biblical scholars see the fine-grained categories developed by modern migration agencies as a tool for unsettling the monolith of exile and providing a more nuanced and variegated description of different forms of mobility in the ancient Near East (Ahn 2011, pp. 40–42; Strine 2018, p. 292). This is a worthy cause, but the question is if modern migration categories are up for the task. As Eric Trinka points out, uncritically applying terms developed to describe and regulate contemporary migratory practices risks obfuscating rather than illuminating ancient movers and the socio-political terrains they moved through. He writes,

“Applying modern categories from international migration infrastructures and agencies produces very few gains in understanding ancient migration practices because such terms are tailored to nation-state contexts of securitized migration, citizenship regimes, diplomatic protocols, and international human rights agreements that lack parity with ancient contexts”.

(Trinka, forthcoming)

Hence, applying modern migration categories to ancient contexts requires caution.6 First, it is paramount to reflect critically on how these categories emerged and have been used in their contemporary context. Second, it is necessary to carefully tease out the differences between the terms’ modern context of “origin” and their potential ancient context of “arrival”. Doing so will reveal that the most technical of these categories—those that create the most evocative analogies when applied to biblical or historical material—are also those most firmly anchored in modern institutions and topographies. Other categories, such as “labor migrant”, might travel with more grace because they are more generic and general, but because of that they also generate a less evocative effect.

Moreover, offhand and excessive use of modern migration categories can be ethically problematic. Terms such as “asylum seeker” or “victim of human trafficking” are used to label contemporary movers in precarious positions. In their modern context, many of these terms are politically powerful labels, used to regulate access to rights and resources. For this reason—and because these labels fail to capture the actual lived experience of leaving, moving, and arriving (and perhaps leaving again)—scholars of contemporary migration are often reluctant to reproduce such categories (Plambech 2023; Richter 2019). Appropriating these categories to playfully and provocatively convey ancient forms of migration is perhaps even more problematic. It risks reducing the struggles and sufferings of many contemporary movers to a typology that may be instrumentalized for purely academic purposes. Again, Trinka pinpoints the issue:

“Employing these terms uncarefully or for the sake of generating ‘cutting-edge’ scholarship ultimately undermines the historical enterprise and, more importantly, trivializes the categories according to which migrants literally live and die”.

(Trinka 2022, p. 22)

While this heuristic comparison comes with laudable achievements, especially in terms of retelling the tales of the Bible in evocative, surprising, and reinvigorating ways, from an anthropological perspective, its costs, in many cases, seem to outweigh its gains.

4. Two: Asking New Questions

Another mode of comparison works by juxtaposing a biblical text not with categories developed by migration agencies, but with ethnographic accounts of migratory experiences and narratives. One excellent example of this approach is provided by Buch-Hansen and Poulsen (2022). Through the prism of “ethnographic exegesis”, the two authors read the book of Ruth in dialogue with stories of undocumented migrants and female sex workers in Copenhagen. They describe the gains of this heuristic approach:

“When we read biblical texts with migration as theme or background alongside the experiences and interpretations of contemporary migrants, our historical imagination is stimulated in new ways. In our case, we did not get answers, but we learned to ask new questions”.

(ibid., p. 363)

Although the book is named after Ruth, the two authors note that the text, in fact, tells us little about why Ruth acts as she does and how those acts affect her: “the narrative often leaves her silent” (ibid., p. 371). Conversations with an Iranian asylum-seeker who has converted to Christianity and with a group of Nigerian women who have traveled to Denmark to sell sex inspire Buch-Hansen and Poulsen to probe into these silences and gaps with a string of new and more “migration sensitive” questions:

“Why did Ruth—unlike Orpah—not want to return to her Moabite family? What motivated her choice to follow Naomi to Bethlehem? How authentic is her conversion to her mother-in-law’s culture and religion? How much of her Moabite background does she retain? Is life in Bethlehem as idyllic as traditional readings want it to be? Why does she as Naomi’s daughter-in-law identify herself as a ‘foreigner’ (2:10–13) and a ‘slave maid’ (3:9) in her nightly encounter with Naomi’s kinsman”.

(ibid., p. 371)

Here, the experiences of the Iranian and Nigerian women, whose lifeworlds differ significantly from those of the two authors, offer a new vantage point from where a different attention and, hence, a different set of questions arise. As such, the ethnographic encounter here works to open up the text to a broader diversity of readings. This certainly is a significant achievement, although it is, perhaps, worth noting that other kinds of encounters—with art or literature, for instance—might have produced a similar effect.

One risk of this mode of comparison is that ethnographic accounts are used not only to ask new questions but also to provide or bolster confident answers. Gaps and silences are far from unique to the book of Ruth; they proliferate across the patchwork of texts that is the Hebrew Bible. Biblical scholars have long debated how to approach such discontinuities and disjuncture. An early voice in this debate was Meir Sternberg, who argued that “illegitimate gap-filling is one launched and sustained by the reader’s subjective concerns (or dictated by more general preconceptions) rather than by the text’s own norms and directives” (Sternberg 1985, p. 188). In light of such debate, it is tempting to see ethnographic accounts as an alternative and perhaps more legitimate material for gap-filling. Surely, it must be better to fill in the blanks in Ruth’s story with the experiences and motivations of “real” migrants rather than with the biblical scholar’s own unacknowledged intuitions?

As an anthropologist, however, I would caution against such an approach. To assume that female migrants anno 2025 share a closer kinship with Ruth than the biblical scholar herself is to essentialize the category of migration as well as “certain-kinds” of migrants themselves. It is to assume that migration is a sui generis phenomenon that has its own inherent quality regardless of when, where, and why it is undertaken. Such an approach amounts to “ahistorical parallelism” (Pfoh 2023, p. 3) and, as such, risks disregarding both the particular struggles and aspirations of contemporary movers and what Steinberg calls the Biblical “text’s own norms and directives”.

Hence, as a heuristic device, the comparison between biblical texts and what anthropologists would call “raw” (i.e., unanalyzed) ethnographic material can help biblical scholars who wish to decenter their own perspective on the text and approach its crevices from a different angle. But rather than rush to also fill these gaps, however, my advice would be that biblical scholars are careful to forge this kind of comparison in way that “holds space for ambiguity, ambivalence and non-resolution” (Graybill 2021, p. 4), and not in a way that assumes that contemporary movers—and their biblical scholar interlocutors—could be “speaking in place of” (ibid., p. 147) their ancient or biblical counterparts. In other words, this mode of comparison should not aim to substitute one voice for another, but to let the encounter with contemporary experience reorient the questions we ask of ancient texts without presuming too much continuity.

The epistemological risk of ahistorical parallelism, and the related ethical risk of appropriating the narratives and experiences of contemporary migrants for a kind of knowledge-generation that they might not have consented to or have a stake in can, to some extent, be circumvented if we forge the comparison, not at the level of “raw” ethnography, but at the more abstract level of analytical frameworks and concepts.

5. Three: Thinking Through Concepts

While comparison at the level of ethnographic descriptions generates new questions, comparison at the level of analytical frameworks makes a more forceful intervention into the text and, if done with care, without fixating and providing definite answers. To illustrate what I mean, let us return to Ruth for a moment. When the harvest season is over, and Ruth can no longer glean Boaz’s fields, Naomi says to her,

“My daughter, I need to seek some security for you, so that it may be well with you. Now here is our kinsman Boaz, with whose young women you have been working. See, he is winnowing barley tonight at the threshing floor. Now wash and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor, but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, observe the place where he lies; then go and uncover his feet and lie down, and he will tell you what to do.” She said to her, “All that you say I will do”.

(3:1–5 NRSVUE)

Given the Hebrew Bible’s occasional use of “feet” as a euphemism for genitalia, many biblical scholars hold that Naomi’s words carry an ill-disguised instruction for Ruth to have sexual intercourse with Boaz. Others, however, insist that the text is too vague and ambiguous to confirm this with confidence (cf. Matheny 2020, p. 17). Regardless of what Ruth does during this nightly encounter, it pays off. Before the sun rises, she leaves the threshing floor with six measures of barley in her cloak (3:15). And before the sun sets again, Boaz has declared his intention to marry her in front of ten male elders at the town gate (4:2).

The night scene on the threshing floor has divided biblical scholars. Some read Ruth as a heroine. Her conduct is seen as a token of her loyalty to Naomi and her family and as a manifestation of her courage and perseverance in doing what it takes to ensure a better life. Others read Ruth as a victim of labor and sexual exploitation in the hands of Naomi and/or Boaz. Strikingly, the same binary between the agentive heroine and the exploited victim is a leitmotif also in contemporary studies of female migration. Much effort has gone into trying to nuance, unsettle, or transcend that binary (Dasgupta 2024).

Based on fieldwork among Nigerian and Thai women who migrate to Denmark to sell sex, Sine Plambech, for instance, develops the concept of “indentured sex-work migration”. The concept captures an apparently abusive relationship between migration facilitators and madams, in which the women knowingly and willingly enter by “borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specific term, sometimes under a restrictive contract of employment in a foreign country” (Plambech 2023, p. 589). The concept thus highlights how the women make their decisions based on careful calculations of whether the costs of undertaking sex-work migration, including exploitation and potential security risks, outweigh its potential future gains. Hence, indentured sex-work migration offers a lens for foregrounding that, in many cases, contemporary sex-worker migrants “are not just victims but also decision-makers who, despite having limited opportunities, manoeuvre through various challenges in their search for a form of livelihood and security in their lives” (ibid.). It is, in other words, a concept that describes sex-worker migrants as rational agents who strive to improve their lives within severely constrained conditions, who set out on a path towards emancipation, accepting that it runs through exploitation.

Reading the book of Ruth through the lens of “indentured sex-work migration” allows us to hold the tension between the exploitative and the agentive within the same framework. Yes, Ruth is squeezed by forces of famine, patriarchy, economic inequalities, ethnic hierarchies, and sexualized stereotypes. But, she is also finding ways of manoeuvring and perhaps advancing, not by acting against these repressive structures, but by acting within and through them. Yes, we can read Ruth as used and utilized, but at the same time, we can ponder if she is also trying to make the most of it.

By the end of the book, Ruth mysteriously vanishes. Naomi adopts her son, and the narrative fades out with Naomi, not Ruth, as the center of attention. Some have read this as a sign of Ruth’s inferior or enslaved status. But the notion of indentured sex-work migration also opens the text to a different reading. Perhaps Ruth’s disappearance signals her emancipation? By paying off her debt with the almost unbearable price of her newborn son, has she, in fact, set herself free?

So, what does reading the book of Ruth through an anthropological concept do? In very broad strokes, concepts help us foreground certain contours in the text and push others into the background. They help us illuminate a particular narrative figure in the text. In that sense, concepts work like the chemical developer used to render a photograph’s latent image visible. Unlike the chemical developer, though, what the concept helps us elicit, is not the latent image, but one among many possible. Putting it more dryly, we could say that the ambition of an anthropological analysis is less to be descriptive or explanatory and more to be evocative and expressive (Hastrup 1997). A concept, thus, does not help us represent the world, ancient or contemporary, as it really is, but it helps us to create one version of the world.

Like migration categories, analytical concepts time-travel with more or less ease. A concept, such as “transnationalism”, which captures how persons, resources, and ideas circulate across national borders and form relational fields that cut across nation-states (Basch et al. 1994), loses its analytical potential when transposed to a biblical world that is neither divided into nation-states nor interconnected through globalization or capitalism (see Hartmann et al., forthcoming for an elaboration on this). A concept like “indentured sex-worker migration” travels more readily because it is less anchored in distinctly modern institutions and phenomena. It names a contract-like relation that is exploitative but entered voluntarily. Nonetheless, when extracting it from its contemporary context and putting it to work in a biblical one, we must be careful that we are not mapping too many contemporary contours onto the ancient-fictive world of the Bible. Rather than assume that the constraints and the motivations that shape Ruth’s trajectory are the same as those of the female sex-worker migrants in Plambech’s study, this comparative method should encourage us to explore the specific social structures Ruth is trying to navigate and to query into the specific rationales, hopes, and fears that propel her to act as she does.

If we are reckless with how we transpose and translate contemporary concepts into the biblical universe, comparison comes at the cost of “domestication”. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti used this notion to define a mode of translation that rewrites the text in terms that resonate with the receiving audience, thereby “bringing the author [of the translated text] back home” (Venuti 1995, p. 20). Domestication erases or glosses over a text’s Otherness and makes it a familiar, digestible, and smooth read (Demir 2022, pp. 51–54). Venuti contrasts this with another mode of translation, namely “foreignization”. By refusing to cater to the receiving audiences’ linguistic and cultural sensitivities and by preserving the Otherness of the text, foreignization results in “sending the reader abroad” (Venuti 1995, p. 20).

Even if we shed the concept of “indentured sex-work migration” of its obviously modern assets, such as its connection between indebtedness and a monetary economy, it is still underpinned by implicit—but distinctly modern—assumptions that are so ingrained in many of us that they might be difficult to pinpoint. For instance, the notion of “indentured sex-work migration” rests on the assumption that the persons it is used to describe are driven by a wish for emancipation. This makes sense in the context of Plambech’s study, where the Nigerian and Thai women agree to work under exploitative conditions because they hope that exploitation in the now will set them free of debt in the future. But did Ruth or her authors and redactors share this aspiration for emancipation? Or were they driven by a different set of aspirations, such as a wish for survival, security, or perhaps honor? Have we, in our reading of the closing verses of Ruth, refashioned her too forcefully in our own image? Have we imbued her with our own modern liberal fantasies about agency, resistance and freedom? Have we, in other words, missed out on this biblical text’s invitation to “go abroad”, to paraphrase Venuti?

The last comparative method I want to bring in offers an opportunity to expose, if not entirely undo, some of those implicit intuitions that trick us, again and again, to read Others, including biblical characters, authors, and redactors, in domesticating ways.

6. Four: Exposing Implicit Biases

The three methods outlined above are all designed as variations of what Candea calls “lateral comparison” and defines as a mode of comparison in which two or more “’cases’ are laid side by side” (Candea 2016, p. 2). In each of them, I have placed the book of Ruth next to a “case” (or configuration) from modern migration studies. In the first, the comparative material consisted of the categories developed by international agencies to regulate migratory flows; in the second, the “case” of comparison was an ethnographic account; and in the third, the juxtaposition was forged between the book of Ruth and the conceptual framework developed by Plambech.

Candea contrasts “lateral comparison” with another mode, which he calls “frontal comparison”. Whereas lateral comparison is a comparison between “that” and “that”, frontal comparison juxtaposes “us” and “them” (ibid., p. 5), i.e., between the world of the researcher and that of the research participants. This mode of comparison gained prominence as part of “the epistemological bonfire of the 1980s” (ibid.), which saw the rise of the so-called “postmodernist” and “reflexive” turns. As grand narratives and objective knowledge were declared dead, anthropologists cultivated a growing awareness of the entanglements of knowledge and power (largely inspired by Michel Foucault) and learned to see anthropology itself as a “knowledge regime” intertwined with political and ideological forces, including colonialism and imperialism (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001, pp. 143–50). Hence, many anthropologists began to reflect more systematically on how their own positionality, including the norms, assumptions, and anxieties they carried into their fieldwork and writing, shaped the knowledge they produced. Ethnography became the main ammunition in these attempts to expose and denaturalize the often-unacknowledged biases inherent not only in the researchers’ tacit everyday intuitions but also in their theoretical frameworks.

A paradigmatic example of frontal comparison, and one that has direct implications for how we might read the book of Ruth, is provided by Saba Mahmood in her widely acclaimed and equally criticized monograph Politics of Piety (2005). Here, Mahmood offers a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of how highly devout Muslim women in Cairo submit themselves to an Islamic disciplinary program, which includes veiling, praying, fasting, and attending mosque sermons, with the aim of forming and perfecting themselves as pious and subservient subjects. Mahmood’s analysis is relevant for us because she does not leave it at that. Rather than “just” offer an analysis of the commitments of pious women in Cairo, she mobilizes those commitments to “speak back” (Mahmood 2005, p. 5), as she says, against feminist scholarship and its secular liberal underpinnings.

Feminist scholarship of the Middle East, Mahmood argues, has been marked by two trends. In the earlier writings, feminist scholars rushed to expose the repressive effects of patriarchal and conservative Islamic traditions. When the women who lived under these conditions did not revolt or at least express dissatisfaction with the exploitation they were subjected to, this was commonly explained in terms of Marxian “false consciousness” or as an effect of their having internalized patriarchal norms. In one way or the other, these women were seen as oblivious to their own repression. At one point, such analysis, which reduced women in patriarchal societies to silent non-subjects, grew out of fashion. Instead, a new generation of feminist anthropologists set out to document the different modes of female agency that exist and even flourish, also within patriarchal structures. They showed the myriad ways women creatively reappropriated the instruments of their oppression as means for emancipation.

If we move beyond the Middle East, Plambech’s analysis of female sex-workers in Denmark can, indeed, be seen as a more recent example of this same trend. Her concept “indentured sex-work migration” also stresses how women industriously and innovatively mobilize the structures of their suppression—here, especially the commercialization of their bodies—as a ticket to a better future. There is something intuitively appealing about such analyses. They restore the agency of subjects we feel sorry for and recast them as resilient and imaginative. In Plambech’s case, that might very well be a sensitive representation of her ethnographic material. But, on a broader level, it is worth to be cautious about what Lila Abu-Lughod describes as a tendency to “romanticize resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990, p. 42).

Mahmood argues that the binary between resistance and repression, which she detects in feminist scholarship on the Middle East, and which we have already found to prevail also in biblical scholarship on Ruth, fails to grasp the commitments and concerns of her Cairene interlocutors. For them, Mahmood argues, agency was not a matter of resisting patriarchal or religious-conservative norms, but one of inhabiting them and shaping their selves accordingly; a mode that Mahmood calls “docile agency”. With this notion, Mahmood pushes back against the often-implicit equation of agency with resistance. Such an idea of agency, she argues, rests on the assumption that everyone aspires for freedom and individual autonomy. But her interlocutors do not necessarily share that aspiration. For them, the cultivation of Islamic virtues, such as modesty and fear for God, is at the forefront of their strivings, and, therefore, Mahmood argues, they operate with a different idea of what agency is and does.

This frontal comparison does not offer any direct guidance on how to read Ruth, but it teaches us something about the inherent and often unacknowledged assumptions that constrain us to think of her either as a heroine or as a victim. At one level, it encourages us to ask what happens to our reading of Ruth if we decouple the notion of agency from that of resistance. Could Ruth then emerge as something other than a heroine trying to emancipate herself or a victim doomed to perpetual exploitation? At a broader level, frontal comparisons remind us that even the most foundational building blocks of our worlds—such as love, death, or personhood—are understood and practiced differently across space and time.

The drawback of this mode of comparison is, of course, that it is a bit of a detour. The three first comparisons offered biblical scholars a method for using anthropology to read the biblical texts anew. This last comparative mode, however, offers them a method to investigate their own positionality and cultivate a greater awareness of the intuitions and biases that structure and constrict their worldview, reading, and writing. As such, this mode of comparison is not immediately “applicable”; it does not use ethnography to speak for or to biblical characters or authors but allows the ethnographic material, instead, to speak back at the readers of the Bible themselves. This is a slow and laborious way of working. Such a mode of comparison is not a bounded technique, which we can pull out of our methodological toolbox and “apply” when we deem it useful. It is a reflexive disposition which must be honed and refined over time; it entails that we incorporate its cultivation into how bible scholarship is taught to students and practiced among colleagues. Doing so may be unsettling or even painful because it entails undoing some of what we think we know. And once such a habit of self-reflexivity has sedimented, it cannot easily be switched off again.

7. Concluding Notes

Reflecting on the growing conversation between anthropologists and theologians, Lemons (2018) differentiates between two modes of interdisciplinary engagement. Although the kind of theology Lemons focuses on is systematic or practical theology rather than biblical scholarship, his discussion is still helpful for our purposes. The first mode of engagement, which Lemons calls “stratified” but I call “bounded” to avoid any connotations of hierarchy, accepts a certain division of labor. Here, anthropologists and theologians strive to create two distinct types of knowledge, but they incorporate elements from the other discipline to bolster their own (2018, p. 5). Lemons contrasts this with a “transformative” encounter, which entails a deeper engagement with the theories and methods of the other discipline in ways that might also change the contours of one’s own (ibid, p. 6; see also Robbins 2019). I would suggest that we think of the bounded and the transformative encounter not as two distinct modalities but as opposing ends of a continuum.

Doing so, we can place the four comparative methods outlined above on the continuum. From an anthropological perspective, I would suggest that the four methods proceed from bounded to increasingly transformative, at least in the sense that methods three and four seem to demand the deepest and most comprehensive engagement with the discipline of anthropology. That does not necessarily mean that methods one and two, which fall in the more bounded end of the spectrum, are less good. This is not a normative scale, and I think it is perfectly fine that biblical scholars incorporate insights from anthropology without adopting that discipline wholesale. I do think, however, that when doing so, it is important to be aware not only of the achievements but also of the limitations and unintended consequences that one’s chosen heuristic comes with. One ambition of this article has been to begin to think about these in more systematic ways.

Another ambition is to encourage biblical scholars who wish to engage in this kind of interdisciplinary conversation with anthropology—regardless of whether they favor method one, two, or three, perhaps want to combine several of these approaches (great!), or work in a way I have not anticipated—to always add an element of method four. Some amount of self-reflexivity is always a strength, but it is indispensable when doing comparative work across vastly different time periods and especially when doing so on a topic as existentially unsettling and politically contested as migration.

Working self-reflexively with comparison shares an affinity with what Olufemi (2021) calls “experiments in imagining otherwise”. When we learn to see and question the maps and models that structure our thinking, it opens space for more perceptive readings and more nuanced analyses. As Katherine Southwood also notes in her contribution to this special issue, doing this kind of work enhances our “intellectual agility” and opens for a “critically informed creativity” (Southwood 2024, p. 3). It allows, in other words, for a more mobile and, indeed, migratory form of scholarship.