You Shall Love the Alien as Yourself

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Don’t oppress the alien who has come to live among you. In fact, love the alien as yourself. That last part is an echo of Leviticus 19:18, which Jesus identified as the second great commandment. 

Does Leviticus 19:33-34 only apply to some immigrants? Of course not, but like the lawyer who asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor,” (Luke 10:29) some people will always look for ways to excuse themselves from love’s demands.

John Piper recently posted these verses in his social feed and the online pushback from a certain sphere of American Christians was immediate. Piper is Reformed and Baptist in his theological outlook. Until recently, Piper has been a popular writer in those circles. I am neither, so I don’t read his work regularly. Piper’s quotation from Leviticus, however, created an outpouring of opposition from conservative Christians, especially those who lean toward Christian Nationalism.

I happened to run across one of the critics who said that Piper weaponized the verse. Why yes, the word of God is a weapons against heartlessness. The word of God is sharper than the sword of empire (Hebrews 4:12).

The critic reminded me of the Pharisees who looked for loopholes in the law so that they wouldn’t have to honor their parents by supporting them in their old age (Matthew 15:3-5, Mark 7:9-13).

Here is the critic’s loophole. According to his analysis, there are three words for foreigners present in Israel in the Old Testament: ger, zar, and nochri. One, he says, corresponds to green card holders, permanent residents legally admitted. That’s the word (ger) in Leviticus 19:33-34. Another (nochri) corresponds to temporary guests, people on tourist or work visas. They can be treated adversely. For example, you can charge them interest. The final word (zar) corresponds to undocumented immigrants. The critic followed the administration in equating migration with invasion. The undocumented are threats, and it is the government’s job to use force to expel them.

Does the Bible have an anti-immigrant loophole? No. His linguistic analysis, his understanding of ancient migration, and his application to our current situation are all wrong.

I looked at every instance of each word in the Hebrew Bible, and here’s what I found.

Migration and Immigration

To begin with, that’s not how things worked in the ancient world. People just moved about. In the ancient Near East, people migrated. Families migrated. If the local people didn’t kill you or chase you away, you lived among them as resident aliens. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived in Canaan as resident aliens. Jacob and his descendants lived in Egypt as resident aliens. The Holy family sought refuge in Egypt as aliens.

For the first hundred years, our country mostly followed that same pattern. Immigrants just showed up at our shores. Our racist laws initially said that if you were white, you could apply for citizenship after a period of residency. With a few exceptions (chiefly the Chinese Exclusion Act), immigration per se was not regulated or controlled.

All Resident Aliens are Gerim

Alien (Ger) is the word found in Leviticus 19 and throughout the Torah. Gerim were migrants who came to live in the land of Israel. The word applied to every non-Israelite living in Israel’s territory and under Israel’s authority. There were no legal or illegal immigrants. There were no passports or visas. There were no border checkpoints or fences. There were no immigration officials in the government. No one had to give permission.

The Torah said that aliens residing in Israel must be treated equitably. Resident aliens were subject to the law, but they should receive the same justice as the children of Israel. They should also receive the same benefits as other poor and vulnerable people, the orphan and the widow. Aliens living in Israel could even celebrate the Passover and offer sacrifices in the tabernacle or temple. Among the sins for which the prophets denounced Israel was its mistreatment of the Gerim in its midst. Israel was commanded not to treat immigrants in the same evil ways that Israel’s ancestors had themselves been treated.

Following Rome’s destruction of Judea as a national entity, Jews were scattered across the face of the world. In rabbinic Judaism, The word Gerim eventually came to represent Gentiles drawn to convert to the religion of Israel.

As a Christian looking back on the Old Testament, I see the presence of Gerim in Israel as missional. It was the first glimmer of God’s mission to draw all the peoples of the world to himself and his messiah.

Zarim and Nochrim are Foreigners

The other two words cited by the critic were Zar and Nochri.

Zar basically means strange or different. In the Torah, it usually refers to either laity who were doing things reserved for priests, or worship activities conducted in the wrong way. Where Zarim does refer to foreigners, it is a virtual synonym for the word, Nochrim. The two words are often found together in parallel phrasing within the same verse.

Nochri means foreign. It can be foreign nations, people, ideas, things, or gods. It can be a synonym for goyim (nations or ethnic groups). It doesn’t mean migrants. Foreign gods don’t belong in Israel or Judah at all. More broadly, the prophet Zephaniah didn’t like kings or royal official styling themselves like pagan kings (Zephaniah 1:8). The prophets weren’t big on Israel adopting the ostentatious trappings of empire, including the reliance on military power or the accumulation of wealth by a powerful elite.

At its most basic, foreigners (nochrim) are people living in another land. Those entering Judah might be envoys, traders, pilgrims coming to worship at the Temple, invading armies, or people who poured in to occupy the land after the Jewish people were driven out to Babylon. Generally, people living in Israel or Judah are not nochrim or zarim unless they came there as the result of the Assyrian or Babylonian invasions. Occupiers are not the same thing as migrants.

God’s Mission to the Foreigner

On one hand foreigners were a threat, both militarily and religiously. On the other hand, God’s long game was to attract foreigners to himself. In his prayer dedicating the temple in Jerusalem, Solomon prayed for the foreigners who would make pilgrimages to this place. He asked God to hear their prayers.

Likewise when foreigners, who are not of your people Israel, come from a distant land because of your name —for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm—when foreigners come and pray toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place and do whatever the foreigners ask of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built. (1 Kings 8:41-43)

The prophets, too, looked forward to the day when the world will be drawn to Israel.

In days to come the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. (Isaiah 2:2)

Nations shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn. (Isaiah 60:5)

Just as the presence of resident aliens in the land of Israel presaged something greater to come, so does the prophetic hope for the nations. The hope that foreigners would be drawn to Israel’s God continues into the New Testament where it become visible in the ministry of Jesus and the mission to the Gentiles.

Thank the Lord, he loves the nochrim. I, and probably you, are nochrim. We are Gentiles by birth, and not by genealogy heirs of God’s promises to the patriarchs. We are not by nature members of God’s chosen nation. Thus, the apostle Paul wrote,

Remember that you were at that time without Christ, separated from the commonwealth of Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world… So then, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God. (Ephesians 2:12, 19)

God turns hostile foreigners into his friends. That’s us. We were foreigners and strangers. Now we belong to the people of God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

After the Exile

When Persia liberated the Judean captives from Babylon, the returnees did not come back into an empty land. As a result of the Babylonian conquest, foreigners had moved into Judea, not as migrants under Israel’s God but as occupiers with their own gods. After the return from exile, to a greater or lesser degree, the land of Judea had a mixed religious population.

The new arrivals weren’t always happy to see the exiles return. There was conflict and opposition to the Judeans reestablishing their temple and their institutions. Additionally, some Judeans who stayed behind during the time of the exile, and some who returned, had married with the people who had occupied the land, bringing with them foreign gods and ways of life inconsistent with the Torah.

The question that faced Nehemiah and Ezra was, “How can we, a small remnant of the people of Israel, maintain our unique identity as God’s people and live in faithfulness to God under these new circumstances?” It’s a question Jews have faced ever since.

The solution put forth by Ezra and Nehemiah was to prohibit intermarriage and to do their best at chasing the foreigners out. Nehemiah reminded the people that King Solomon had sinned by marrying foreign women. King Solomon married foreign wives to form international alliances. The alliances came with a side of idolatry. More basically, Ezra and Nehemiah were responding to the directions of Exodus 34:15-16 and Deuteronomy 7:3-which prohibited the first generation of Israelites from marrying the people they conquered in Canaan.

There are three important considerations.

First, this was always a religious matter. Until recently, marriage was an economic, political, and religious union of two families, not just a loving relationship between two people. Intermarriage with people committed to worshipping other deities, idols believed to be the rightful gods of the land, did create a serious religious problem for Israel, especially when it involved the priests or other leaders of the Judean community. Every leader was a religious leader. The persistence of Canaanite idolatry vexed Israel in the early years, and it vexed the former exiles after their return as well.

For us, Nehemiah’s actions are more descriptive than prescriptive. If this has any New Testament application, it would pertain to the marriage of Christians with non-Christians, not intermarriage between Christians of different nationalities or ethnic groups. People of all nations are one in Christ. Today, the biggest source of Christian syncretism is not mixed marriages, but Christians who marry the spirit of the age, whether left or right.

Second, marriage is not migration. It was a separate issue. The problem Ezra and Nehemiah faced after the exile does not nullify the Torah’s requirements for migrants. People migrating to Israel were subject to live under the Torah, which prohibited the worship of idols, even for migrants.

Third, the scriptural canon also provides a counter-narrative to Ezra-Nehemiah in the story of Ruth. Ezra 9:1 denounces marriages between Judeans and Moabites. Ruth, however, was a Moabite, a nochri (Ruth 2:10). With Boaz, a Judean, she was an ancestor of King David. “Your people shall be my people and your God my God,” Ruth told her mother-in-law (Ruth 1:16) before following her to the land of Judah. That’s quite a different approach than Ezra and Nehemiah mandated.

Contemporary Relevance and Irrelevance

All of this is mostly irrelevant to the question of immigration in the United States. The United States is not Israel. It is not God’s covenant nation. It is not a Christian nation, as if that were something that exists within the Biblical worldview. As a nation, we are not the heir in any way to God’s promises to Abraham, Moses, David or the prophets. There is nothing of Israel about us, and more of Babylon than we care to admit.

The presence of migrants and foreigners in the United States is not a threat to the mission of God. If anything, it is a blessing for that mission.

A threat to the demographic prevalence of white people, their social and cultural dominance, that immigrants might speak different languages or have different customs or religions, none of this has any relation to the Biblical story of migrants and foreigners.

Christians are God’s people residing as aliens in a foreign culture. We face the same challenge of idolatrous assimilation as Ezra and Nehemiah, but civil separation cannot be the answer. For American Christians, the national idols of wealth, power, and pleasure are far greater temptations than the mosque or the temple.

Since the United States is not God’s covenant nation, Leviticus does not function directly as law for us as it did for ancient Israel. Leviticus 19:33-34 does, however, reveal the heart of God. Migrants are often subject to hatred, mistreatment, violence, and rejection. God loves them all the more. They are among those who most feel the brokenness and sin of the world that God is going to save through Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. He wants to lead them to a place of safety and provision, a place they can call home. In that sense, Leviticus is speaking a prophetic word to Christians in our country today.

Individual versus Government

The final argument Piper’s critic offered was that any kindness due to immigrants of any sort was purely on an individual basis. The government’s only job is to wield the sword against wrongdoers.

In the United States, we are the government. We citizens are the sovereign. Every Christian citizen has a voice. Insofar as the government represents us, insofar as it is an extension of our own will, the government’s role can never be only the punishment of wrong.

The individual versus government distinction is not found in the Torah. When the Torah speaks of justice for the immigrant, and when it requires every landowner to provide food for the immigrant, it is speaking about communal responsibilities. When the prophets denounced Israel’s failure to heed these laws, it was speaking to the entire nation, not just to individuals. If there is a moral example in the scriptures’ immigration story, it applies to both individuals and and their governments.

As a Christian, I demand kindness and mercy from my government. It is our national responsibility, both individually and collectively, to care for the most vulnerable and most needy in our society.