Embrace the foreigner: the גר in the Pentateuchal law

Abstract

Immigrants and refugees are one of the most controversial topics worldwide. This topic was already important in Ancient Israel, and occurs throughout the Old Testament. Investigating this topic in the Old Testament may help us to have useful theological insight to discuss this critical issue. In the Old Testament, some texts are very positive towards accepting foreigners into the Israelite society or the faith community (Deut. 24:14, 17; Isaiah 56:1-7). But some are very negative and try to exclude foreigners (Deut. 23:3-6; Ezra 9-10). In order to discuss the issue constructively, the texts in the Old Testament should be sorted by the character of the treatment of foreigners. In this mini-dissertation, at first the studies on foreigners in Old Testament are surveyed in Chapter 2. And then, to make it possible to handle, the problem investigated is limited to the גר in the Pentateuch. In Chapter 3, the laws concerning the גר in the Pentateuch are grouped by their functions (not by the sources) according to the grouping suggested by Ramírez Kidd (1999:130). In Chapter 4, in order to detect some of the perspectives included in the laws addressed to the Israelites for the protection of the גר , the two characteristic motive clauses (“you were a slave in Egypt” and “you were גר in Egypt”) are focused on.