Care for the Sojourner

Overview

Care for the sojourner is the biblical ethic that requires Israel—and, in Christian reception, the church—to love, protect, and practice hospitality toward resident aliens and strangers. In Hebrew the primary term is gēr, a nonnative person dwelling within Israel’s community who often lacked family protection, land, or legal security. The Torah repeatedly forbids oppressing the gēr and commands that the sojourner be treated with the same concern given to the poor, widow, and orphan, a duty rooted in Israel’s memory of being aliens in Egypt and in the character of God who “loves the stranger.” The New Testament intensifies this trajectory by framing hospitality as service to Christ and by making former strangers members of God’s household.

Biblical shape

• Origins in ancestral memory: The patriarchs are portrayed as migrants and guests (e.g., Abraham calling himself “a stranger and an alien”), which situates sojourning within Israel’s self-understanding.
• Law as memory and ethics: Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy transform Israel’s history in Egypt into legal commands—sharing Sabbath rest, forbidding oppression, and including the stranger in ritual and social provision.
• Holiness and neighbor-love: Leviticus 19 places care for the alien within the holiness code, connecting ethical life with the refrain “I am the LORD.”
• Covenant and justice: Deuteronomy grounds welcome in God’s impartial care—God “executes justice for the orphan and the widow” and “loves the stranger,” and thus Israel is to imitate that justice in tithes, gleaning, and legal protections.
• Narrative witnesses: Stories (Rahab, Ruth, Naaman, Nineveh) show God’s mercy extending beyond ethnic Israel and depict foreigners both as recipients of and participants in covenant mercy.
• Prophetic and wisdom critique: Prophets indict the mistreatment of strangers as covenant unfaithfulness and envision restoration that includes resident aliens.
• Jesus and the Gospels: Jesus redefines neighbor-love (Good Samaritan), identifies welcome of the stranger with service to him, and his own infancy narrative evokes displacement (flight into Egypt).
• Apostolic teaching and ecclesial practice: Early Christian writing exhorts hospitality (philoxenia), frames Gentiles as once “strangers to the covenants,” and presents the church as a household in which former outsiders belong.

Key passages

• Exodus 22:21 — “You shall not wrong a resident alien.”
• Leviticus 19:33–34 — “When a stranger sojourns with you, you shall love him as yourself.”
• Deuteronomy 10:18–19 — God “loves the sojourner” and commands Israel to remember their own alien status.
• Deuteronomy 24:17–22 — Legal provisions for fair treatment and gleaning that include the stranger.
• Ruth 2:8–12; Ruth 1:16–17 — Narrative exemplars of a foreign widow receiving and entering covenant mercy.
• Psalm 146:9 — God cares for the strangers as part of divine justice.
• Luke 10:25–37 — The Good Samaritan reframes neighborliness around merciful action to the outsider.
• Matthew 25:35 — Welcome of the stranger is counted among works of mercy on the day of judgment.
• Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2; 1 Peter 4:9 — Apostolic exhortations to hospitality and mutual welcome.
• Ephesians 2:11–22 — Salvation rhetoric that moves Gentiles from “strangers” to members of God’s household.

Theological significance

Care for the sojourner is theologically rooted rather than merely pragmatic: it flows from divine memory and character. Israel’s legislation repeatedly links the command to welcome and protect resident aliens with the nation’s own history in Egypt and with the portrait of God who enacts justice for vulnerable persons. This gives the ethic two pillars: remembrance (recalling Israel’s alien status) and imitation (conforming social life to the character of God).

The biblical witness also holds a productive tension between covenant particularity and universal neighbor-love. Laws and narratives preserve Israel’s distinct identity while insisting that that identity must not justify oppression of non-Israelites. The New Testament emphasizes that Christ’s work reconfigures social categories—former strangers become fellow-citizens and household members—while continuing to expect concrete hospitality, care for the vulnerable, and mercy as marks of covenant faithfulness.

Practically, the tradition connects hospitality both to private acts of mercy and to public justice: gleaning laws, tithes, and legal protections show that welcome must include economic and juridical dimensions. Pastoral reflection in the source urges communities to remember their own need for mercy before acting, to encounter strangers concretely (hunger, housing, legal precarity, friendship), and to weigh hospitality alongside questions of public order and the common good.

Related Atlas concepts

• love-of-neighbor
• justice
• hospitality
• imago-dei
• gleaning-laws
• hospitality-to-strangers
• refuge-and-asylum