How should strangers be treated?

Two different Hebrew words lie behind the English ‘stranger’. In Leviticus 19:33-34 and Deuteronomy 10:19 the word is ger (Strong’s H1616), a foreigner who had come to live among Israel, a resident alien. The law protected him again and again. He was not to be wronged or oppressed (Exodus 22:21); he shared the Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10) and the gleanings of the harvest (Leviticus 19:10); and he was to be loved “as thyself”, because Israel knew what it was to be foreigners in Egypt. God himself “loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment” (Deuteronomy 10:18).

In Numbers 1:51 the word is zar (from zur, Strong’s H2114), ‘an outsider’: anyone who did not belong to the group set apart for a task. Here it means anyone who was not a Levite, ordinary Israelites included. In Numbers 3:10 and 18:7 it means anyone outside Aaron’s family, as Numbers 16:40 explains: “no stranger, which is not of the seed of Aaron, come near to offer incense”. The BSB renders 1:51, “Any outsider who goes near it must be put to death”, and Keil and Delitzsch gloss the word ‘non-Levite’. The rule guarded the holiness of the tabernacle; it said nothing about how to treat foreigners.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 is about neither group. It concerns seven named nations of Canaan, whom God was judging for long and grievous wickedness (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 18:24-25), and with whom Israel was to make no covenants or marriages (Deuteronomy 7:2-3). It was a command for the conquest of that land, not a rule for foreigners in general. Even then, a Canaanite who turned to the Lord, as Rahab did, was spared and lived in Israel (Joshua 6:25). The command raises hard questions of its own, but it does not contradict the law of love for the foreigner living in Israel.

Some differences remained

Haley notes that the law did draw some lines between Israelite and foreigner, for example on debts and interest (Deuteronomy 15:3; 23:20), and suggests that Leviticus 19:34 may have in view a foreigner who had become a proselyte. In matters of fundamental importance, he says, the foreign-born and the native-born were under the same law (Exodus 12:49), while in lesser matters the foreigner was left more at liberty.

How the command to destroy the Canaanites fits with God’s love for all peoples is one of the hardest questions in the Old Testament, and Christians answer it in more than one way. This entry deals only with the meaning of ‘stranger’.