greenbaggins
Puritan Board Doctor
Robert P. Carroll is normally as liberal as it gets. However, even he has some insights every now and then. This one was so good, I thought it belonged in the daily devotional forum.
So we may include the Bible as part of the description of the human condition in this scrutiny of the phenomena of expulsion, deportation, displacement, and hopes for return to the homeland. In so many different ways the whole Bible reflects and represents the discourses and narratives of deportation, displacement, and diaspora. The grand narratives, even the metanarrative itself, of the Bible are about deportations, little and large, real and symbolic, and the constant hope of return, of restoration, of homecoming. From Abraham (I would say, Adam and Eve!, LK) to Cyrus and Ezra, diaspora is the context of biblical Jews; the whole Bible itself may well be regarded as the production of such diasporic experiences (from his article "Exile, Restoration, and Colony: Judah in the Persian Empire" in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, p. 103).
