Aliens

In biblical usage an alien is a foreigner who lives among a people not his own, typically a resident sojourner rather than a passing traveler, and Scripture repeatedly places such people under legal and moral protection. The text says, “You shall not wrong an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21), and it grounds the command in Israel’s own experience of foreignness.

Scripture says the resident alien was to be treated as a neighbor, not merely tolerated: “The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). The alien is repeatedly named alongside the fatherless and the widow as a party especially vulnerable to injustice, and the prophets treat withholding justice from the foreigner as a covenant violation (Deuteronomy 24:17; 27:19; Jeremiah 7:6; 22:3; Ezekiel 22:29; Malachi 3:5). The laws also address economic life, forbidding oppression of a hired servant whether “one of your brothers or one of the foreigners who are in your land within your gates” (Deuteronomy 24:14).

Historically, ancient Israel’s kinship and land system left resident foreigners without inherited land or extended family protection, which is why the legal material addresses courts, wages, and food. The same legal corpus preserves distinctions: Deuteronomy 14:21 permits meat that dies of itself to be given or sold “to the foreigner living among you” or “to a foreigner,” while Israel is called “a holy people to Yahweh your God.” Linguistically, English Bibles use “alien,” “stranger,” “foreigner,” and “sojourner” for overlapping Hebrew terms; the Hebrew word most often behind these laws is ger, a resident foreigner, and not every occurrence of “alien” in English translation carries the same legal status.

The New Testament takes up the image of the stranger in Matthew 25:35, where the Son of Man says, “I was a stranger and you took me in”; the Greek word rendered “stranger” can also mean foreigner or guest. Christian traditions differ in how they apply the biblical alien laws. Catholic social teaching and many mainline Protestant bodies read them as a continuing moral paradigm for the treatment of migrants and refugees; other Reformed and evangelical voices distinguish Israel’s civil legislation from modern immigration policy while retaining the call to impartial justice and hospitality; Anabaptist and spiritually oriented readings often emphasize the church as a community of strangers and pilgrims and read Matthew 25 as a call to concrete mercy. These are confessional and interpretive differences rather than a single settled Christian position.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.