The promised and the foreign land: the other Exodus

The narration of Exodus is indissolubly tied to the idea of the Promised Land as the model of each ideal and utopian reference that became archetypical for the civil, social, political and philosophical history of the West. The flight from Egypt and the starting of the path of liberation is not a projecting into the nothing, but from its very beginning an approach to the earth of Canaan. The distance to the Promised Land, which arises particularly distinct in the experience of the desert, is always associated with its constitutive strangeness, which will never disappear also when the Jewish people take possession of the Land. It is also possible to identify another more radical Exodus: beyond the Exodus from the land of slavery lies another impassable and constitutive Exodus of and in the Promised Land, as far as it reveals itself as foreign land, as land of foreigners.