You can tell a lot about a person from the company he keeps. The same is true of ethical prescriptions, especially when they occur in a list like the one in Deuteronomy 27. Each item of the list is followed by the people’s ‘Amen!’, pronounced upon a curse that in turn has been declared over the miscreant who has violated one of Israel’s fundamental ethical precepts.
It is helpful to view treatment of the alien among the company that is kept by this particular curse:
Cursed be anyone who misleads a blind person on the road. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’
Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!
Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has violated his father’s rights. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!
Cursed be anyone who lies with any animal. All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’
It would be foolish to draw a straight line from this statement to either a strict or a relaxed attitude to the immigrants who find their way to our North American communities today. The matter calls for more sophistication than that.
Yet for those who take biblical ethics seriously, this reading should at least serve as an alert to how seriously the matters at hand must be treated. Whatever ‘justice for the alien’ (and the orphan and widow) means, an Israelite context would call a curse down upon the life of one who deprived the alien of it.
The quest for a biblically informed starting point for the immigration conversation ought to at least linger here and ask whether this is not one component of what it seeks.
Canter Bridge 
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