FRANCISCO JULIÃO'S BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION IN THE SUGARCANE FIELDS

Abstract

The article intends to highlight an admittedly complex issue. It is about the hermeneutics of the Bible made by an activist of socialist inspiration, declared an atheist and legal advisor to the Peasant Leagues. Initially, an effort is made to clarify the possibilities of understanding the meaning of the term hermeneutics. Then, an attempt is made to delimit what is the perspective of understanding socialism. In third place, we consider Francisco Julião's role in the Peasant Leagues, which, in addition to his functions as a legal advisor, assumes the role of educator in the development of awareness of the reality experienced by peasants in the land work and in the cultivation of sugarcane. In order to promote a new way of evaluating his own circumstance and finding alternatives for his life experience marked by the suffering arising from working conditions that resulted in a situation of misery and oppression, he resorted to the interpretation of the Bible that revealed an experience similar to which was experienced by the workers at that time and presented the intervention of God as a liberating action from the situation of misery and oppression and the offer of a “land where milk and honey flowed”. As a connoisseur of the peasant dynamics of the state, he perceived the three pillars in the daily life of the rural man: religion, cachaça and henchmen. Based on this knowledge, he developed a training process aimed at transforming the reality of the lives of the people in terms of a new way of living in harmony with the will of God. The production of documents, the use of simple language and the effort to make the hermeneutics of biblical texts were in function of this great objective. In other words, Julião practiced a true hermeneutics of existence in terms of life itself that could be lived as an event collective with the smell of wet earth and the taste of sugarcane honey.