{"id":89974,"date":"2026-07-04T21:11:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T01:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-stories\/ger-meaning-bible-what-does-god-say-about-the-stranger\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T21:12:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T01:12:02","slug":"ger-meaning-bible-what-does-god-say-about-the-stranger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-answers\/ger-meaning-bible-what-does-god-say-about-the-stranger\/","title":{"rendered":"On America’s 250th Birthday, the Pope Flew to Where 28,000 People Drowned. The Bible Has a Name for That Person."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 10 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

On Friday, while most Americans were watching fireworks or grilling in backyards, Pope Leo XIV flew to a small Italian island that most people have never heard of.<\/p>\n

The island is called Lampedusa. It sits in the Mediterranean Sea, roughly equidistant between Tunisia and Sicily \u2014 so close to North Africa that on clear days you can almost see the Saharan dust hanging in the air. It is a vacation spot in the summer, popular for its beaches and clear blue water.<\/p>\n

It is also the place where, over the past three decades, an estimated 28,000 people have drowned.<\/p>\n

Not in one event. Not in a single disaster. One by one, year after year \u2014 people crossing on overcrowded boats, on inflatable rafts, on anything that might float \u2014 trying to reach Europe. Most were fleeing. War. Famine. Violence. The ordinary forces that have always pushed people to pick up what they can carry and walk away from everything they knew.<\/p>\n

Pope Leo XIV chose July 4 for his visit. The date was not accidental. He is an American \u2014 the first American pope. He knows what July 4 means. He chose to spend America’s 250th birthday standing at the place where tens of thousands of people died trying to reach safety.<\/p>\n

He is the second pope to make this trip. Pope Francis stood in the same place in 2013 and threw flowers into the sea. The journey keeps getting made because the dying keeps happening.<\/p>\n

The word that appeared 93 times<\/h2>\n

Here is something most people do not know about ancient Hebrew law.<\/p>\n

The Torah \u2014 the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures \u2014 contains a word that appears more than 90 times. More than any other social category in the entire text. More than king. More than priest. More than prophet.<\/p>\n

The word is ger<\/em> (\u05d2\u05b5\u05bc\u05e8). It is usually translated as stranger, foreigner, or sojourner. In practice it described a specific kind of person: someone living in a community they were not born into, someone who had crossed into another territory and was trying to make a life there without the legal protections that citizenship or tribal membership would provide.<\/p>\n

In the ancient Near East, that was an extraordinarily vulnerable position. No land inheritance. No clan to advocate for you. No legal standing in local disputes. No safety net if things went wrong. The ancient world understood this danger well enough that it required a specific word for it.<\/p>\n

What is remarkable is not just the word’s existence. It is the frequency with which God returned to it \u2014 and the reasoning attached to each time.<\/p>\n

What the law actually said<\/h2>\n

“You shall not oppress the sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9)<\/p>\n

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)<\/p>\n

“The Lord your God loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:18-19)<\/p>\n

The repetition is not accidental. The covenant law returned to the ger<\/em> again and again because the people it was written for were themselves former sojourners \u2014 a whole nation that had crossed a border to survive, spent generations as displaced people in Egypt, and then fled. The law built that memory into its structure: do not forget what it was like to be that person.<\/em><\/p>\n

That is a striking way to build an ethical framework. Not “treat the foreigner well because it is virtuous.” Not “treat the foreigner well because God commands it.” Both of those are there. But underneath them, repeated like a chorus: because you know what it is to be one.<\/em><\/p>\n

The law grounded its ethics in memory. In the felt experience of displacement. In the specific knowledge that comes from having been on the other side.<\/p>\n

The ger who changed the story<\/h2>\n

The ger<\/em> does not only appear in law codes. It runs through the most important stories in the entire biblical narrative \u2014 often at the hinge points, the places where everything turns.<\/p>\n

Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers and forced to live as a foreigner in Egypt. He had no legal standing, no clan, no safety net. He spent years in an Egyptian prison. And then, in one of the Bible’s most compressed reversals, he became the second most powerful person in the country and ultimately the person who kept two nations from starving during a famine. The foreigner became the rescuer. The displaced person became the one who kept the story alive.<\/p>\n

Ruth was a Moabite woman who followed her Israelite mother-in-law back to Bethlehem after both their husbands died. She crossed a cultural and ethnic border in the most vulnerable of circumstances \u2014 a widow in a foreign land with no resources and no prospects. She is one of only five women named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. She became the great-grandmother of King David. The foreigner became, quite literally, part of the lineage.<\/p>\n

Moses fled Egypt as a fugitive and lived as a sojourner in Midian for forty years before the burning bush encounter that changed everything. He named one of his sons Gershom \u2014 from the Hebrew root ger<\/em> \u2014 explaining, “I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.” (Exodus 2:22) The man who would lead a whole people out of slavery had spent half his life as a foreigner himself. His own name for his child carried that displacement forward.<\/p>\n

And then there is a detail in the story of Jesus that is easy to pass over: when he was still a toddler, his parents fled with him to Egypt. A king wanted him dead. The family crossed a border in the middle of the night and lived as refugees in a foreign country until it was safe to go home. The first years of Jesus’s life were spent as a ger<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The stranger is not a footnote in the story of Scripture. The stranger is often the story.<\/p>\n

A word the Pope did not need to say<\/h2>\n

When Leo stood at Lampedusa on July 4, he did not deliver a policy speech. He stood at the water and honored people who had names, who had families that waited for them, who tried to cross and did not make it.<\/p>\n

Whether or not faith is part of your life, there is something worth sitting with in that choice \u2014 standing at that place, on that date, as an American. What he was standing at was the modern geography of an ancient human experience. People have always been pushed across borders by forces they could not control. The ancient Hebrew world had a word for it. (The same precision shows up in what the Hebrew word for peace actually means<\/a> \u2014 it too carries more weight than the English translation suggests.) That word carried the weight of law, of memory, of story. It kept showing up \u2014 in the legislation, in the courtrooms, in the biographies of the people who changed everything.<\/p>\n

The 93 mentions of the ger<\/em> in the Torah do not read like a legal formality. They read like a recurring reminder to a people who were prone to forgetting: you were this person. That experience belongs to you. Do not let it make you indifferent to someone else having it now.<\/em><\/p>\n

That is not a political argument. It is something older than politics. Something the ancient law built into its own architecture, because the people who wrote it had crossed a border themselves and knew \u2014 in their bones, in their history, in the names they gave their children \u2014 what it was to be the one without a net.<\/p>\n

There is a Hebrew word for that person. It has appeared in the oldest literature in the world for three thousand years. It appeared the same week the fireworks went up over America’s harbors, at the edge of a sea where those people are still crossing.<\/p>\n

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What do you think?<\/h3>\n

When you hear about events like the deaths at Lampedusa, what’s your first instinct \u2014 to engage, or to look away? What shapes that for you? Leave a comment below.<\/p>\n