Cultural memory and ethical behaviour in Israel. Biblical echoes in the language of Pope Francis

Abstract

Taking into account the relationship between biblical interpretation and Christian praxis, and the call of Pope Francis to become a Church “with the smell of sheep”, the article aims to investigate the biblical texts in which the compassionate ethos that characterizes the people of God is expressed, to show that the roots of this ethical and political option are found in the cultural memory of this people: God's option for the poor that is at the origin of Israel requires an option of Israel for the poor. Since the founding history and the fundamental law are inextricably intertwined in the Pentateuch, the relationship established there between history (stories) and law (laws) will be studied, to discover the pragmatic pretensions of both types of texts and the role that they play in shaping the identity of the people of Israel. This mutual intertwining between narrative and law establishes the paradigm of a narrative legal hermeneutic: the motifs of being foreign and being enslaved – which run through the macro- narrative – appear as the starting point of God's liberating intervention and as a narrative justification of the law given to Israel. An educational principle is thus introduced: remembering one's origins as an immigrant and a slave will teach them to treat immigrants and slaves gently, in imitation of how God treated themselves.