A Stranger in a Strange Land

And Moses was content to dwell with the man [Reuel]: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter.
And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

-- Exodus 2: 21-22 (KJV)

Generations pass, and the Israelites, obeying God's command to "be fruitful and multiply," grow numerous in Egypt. At the same time, Joseph's erstwhile service to the state is forgotten. A new Pharaoh, ignorant of Egypt's historical debt to Israel, finds little comfort in the immigrant nation's increasing prosperity and power; indeed, he views Israel as an enemy within.

So Pharaoh subjects the Israelites to slavery, hoping to humble them. But he doesn't succeed in crushing their spirit, even as he makes their tasks more onerous. Angry and frustrated, Pharaoh ultimately commands that all the Israelites' male children be thrown in the Nile.

This tactic proves unsuccessful, of course, through both Egyptian resistance and Israelite cleverness. For example, when a baby boy named Moses (Moshe in Hebrew) is born to the Israelite tribe of Levi, his mother builds a small papyrus ark, places the boy inside, and floats it down the Nile where she hopes it will be discovered by a sympathetic Egyptian. As luck would have it, Moses is claimed by Pharaoh's daughter, whose tender feelings shield him from death.

So Moses grows to manhood in Pharaoh's palace -- that is, right in the enemy's bosom. As was bound to happen, Moses eventually runs afoul of Pharaoh and is forced to flee the country. He soon finds a home among the Kenites, a Semitic people, in Midian (now in Saudi Arabia, on the east bank of the Gulf of Aqaba). And when Moses one day comes to the aid of some lovely maidens, he finds among them a wife as well -- Zippora, daughter to a Midian priest variously named "Reuel" and "Jethro."

Nature takes its course, and Zippora gives birth to a son, whom Moses names Gershom, after the Hebrew ger, "alien, sojourner, refugee." In case his in-laws haven't caught the reference, Moses provides this gloss: "I have been a stranger (ger) in a strange land (nakhor)" -- that is, Midian. The line is more beautiful in the King James translation than in the original, which Everett Fox more faithfully renders thus: "A sojourner have I become in a foreign land." The King James Version is not, however, all that far off, given that "stranger" and "alien" were once synonymous in English (compare the French étranger), as were "strange" and "foreign." A later rendering of the same phrase as "an alien in a strange land" (Exodus 18: 3) is less misleading to the modern reader, but at the expense of the poetry.

In fact, the former translation is much better remembered -- thanks in part to science-fiction author Robert Heinlein's bestowing the title Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) on what became his best-known novel. Deservedly forgotten, however, is Margaret Mitchell's pun "stranger in a strange town," from her wildly popular Gone with the Wind (1936).

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!