Foreigner
The foreigner stands across the Israelite gate, the tabernacle court, the Passover table, and finally the household of God. The category covers the resident sojourner under Israel's law, the alien army pressed against Israel from outside, the wisdom-counsel about un-vetted outsiders, the Gentile who comes to Christ in the gospels, and the figurative reversal where Gentile believers cease to be foreigners at all.
The Sojourner under One Law
A common rule binds home-born and stranger alike. The Sabbath ban on labor extends to "your stranger who is inside your gates" (Ex 20:10; repeated at Deut 5:14). The Day of Atonement self-affliction binds "the home-born, or the stranger who sojourns among you⁺" (Lev 16:29). The Passover-leaven cut-off applies "whether he is a sojourner, or one who is born in the land" (Ex 12:19), and a single Passover law covers "the home-born, and... the stranger who sojourns among you⁺" (Ex 12:49). Carcass-eater cleansing (Lev 17:15) and high-hand blasphemy (Num 15:30) likewise treat sojourner and native without distinction.
Prohibitions Bounded by the Foreigner
Other rules cut the other direction, fencing off sacral and royal acts the foreigner may not enter. No foreigner may eat the Passover (Ex 12:43). No stranger who comes near the tabernacle-handling may live: "the stranger who comes near will be put to death" (Num 1:51), and the altar-plate memorial warns "no stranger, who is not of the seed of Aaron, comes near to burn incense before Yahweh; that he will not be as Korah, and as his company" (Num 16:40). Tent-of-meeting sacrifice covers "any man of the house of Israel, or of the strangers who sojourn among them" who brings a burnt-offering or sacrifice (Lev 17:8). Name-blasphemy is a death-rule for "the foreigner as well as the home-born" (Lev 24:16). The kingship is barred to outsiders: "you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother" (Deut 17:15). And Ezekiel's restored sanctuary closes the gate on "No foreigner, uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh" (Ezek 44:9).
The Foreign Army and the Holy Places
In the Maccabean record, the foreigner is the alien power gripping Jerusalem. Mattathias laments that "The holy places have come into the hands of strangers: Her temple has become as a man without honor" (1 Macc 2:8). Antiochus's resettlement order moves foreigners "to live in all their coasts, and divide their land by lot" (1 Macc 3:36). The merchants buying captured Israelites for slaves come "from the land of the strangers" (1 Macc 3:41); the Syrian camp at Emmaus is the body that "lifted up their eyes, and saw them coming against them" (1 Macc 4:12), and after defeat "they all fled away into the land of the strangers" (1 Macc 4:22). Judas later turns to Azotus "into the land of the strangers, and he threw down their altars, and he burned the statues of their gods with fire" (1 Macc 5:68). Demetrius keeps "the foreign army, which he had drawn together from the islands of the nations: so all the troops of his fathers hated him" (1 Macc 11:38), and Jonathan at Asor faces an army of strangers that "met him in the plain, and they laid an ambush for him in the mountains" (1 Macc 11:68).
Wisdom about the Stranger
The sage warns the householder against trusting the un-vetted outsider. "Do no secret thing before a stranger; For you do not know to what end he will bring it" (Sir 8:18). "Do not bring every man into your house; For how many are the wounds of a scammer!" (Sir 11:29). And the dependent who eats at another man's table tastes the cost of stranger-status from the inside: "You are a stranger and drink contempt; Besides this you will bear bitter things" (Sir 29:25); "A man who looks upon a stranger's table, His life is not accounted life. A pollution of his soul are the dainties presented" (Sir 40:29). The same wisdom turns outward in the prayer for divine vindication: "Shake your hand against the strange people, That they may see your power" (Sir 36:3), with its companion line "And cast your fear upon all the nations" (Sir 36:2).
Gentile Approach in the Gospels
Two Gentile figures step into the gospel through respectful indirection and eyewitness confession. The centurion at Capernaum approaches Christ through a Jewish delegation: "he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him that he would come and save his slave" (Lu 7:3). The Roman captain at the cross watches the manner of dying and names what he saw: "And when the captain, who stood by across from him, saw that he so breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God" (Lu 23:47).
No More Strangers
The figurative reversal is set in Ephesians. The Gentile believer who once stood outside is rewritten into household-membership: "So then you⁺ are no more strangers and sojourners, but you⁺ are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God" (Eph 2:19). The walk follows the same logic — Christians live in their own countries "but as sojourners; they partake of all things as citizens, and endure all things as strangers; every foreign land is their country, and every country a foreign land" (Gr 5:5). The believer carries forward the stranger-posture toward the world while losing the stranger-status toward God's house.