This week we watched in horror as 50,000 Moroccan migrants (all of them Muslim) crossed the border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, overran the city, rampaged about for two days, and had to be forcibly ejected by the Spanish military. Many of these were criminals, and their invasion was aided and abetted by Moroccan authorities; videos clearly show them being brought to the border by Moroccan police, and Spanish officials, including the Defense Minister, have accused Morocco of deliberately loosening border controls. It was a deliberate act of aggression against Spain using human beings as weapons.
Oh but that didn't stop the usual suspects from giving the worst possible takes imaginable. Mainstream media predictably framed the event as a "humanitarian crisis"; news coverage was focused on the viewpoints of the migrants—their opinions, their needs, their desires; I did not see a single interview with Ceutans seeing how they felt about 50,000 Moroccans suddenly converging on their city.
The pope and various Catholic prelates also chimed in about the incident; these comments were universally about the humanitarian needs of the migrants, the justice due the migrants, the human dignity of the migrants; nobody spoke of the rights of Spaniards to possess their own territory in peace without having to accomodate hordes of impoverished foreigners. Other bleeding-heart Catholics jumped on the bandwagon, trotting out tired old arguments from the Old Testament about our "moral obligation" to bend over and take a virtually unlimited amount of migrants into our society even if it means certain cultural suicide.
The Old Testament's teaching on foreigners is usually reduced to a handful of hospitality verses (leave the corners of your field unharvested, do not oppress the sojourner, remember you were once slaves in Egypt, etc.) These texts are certainly part of the Old Testament's teaching and they matter; but they are only half the picture, and reading them in isolation, filtered through modern assumptions about statehood and immigration, produces a distorted account of what the biblical authors actually believed.
The pope and various Catholic prelates also chimed in about the incident; these comments were universally about the humanitarian needs of the migrants, the justice due the migrants, the human dignity of the migrants; nobody spoke of the rights of Spaniards to possess their own territory in peace without having to accomodate hordes of impoverished foreigners. Other bleeding-heart Catholics jumped on the bandwagon, trotting out tired old arguments from the Old Testament about our "moral obligation" to bend over and take a virtually unlimited amount of migrants into our society even if it means certain cultural suicide.
The Old Testament's teaching on foreigners is usually reduced to a handful of hospitality verses (leave the corners of your field unharvested, do not oppress the sojourner, remember you were once slaves in Egypt, etc.) These texts are certainly part of the Old Testament's teaching and they matter; but they are only half the picture, and reading them in isolation, filtered through modern assumptions about statehood and immigration, produces a distorted account of what the biblical authors actually believed.
This essay attempts to flesh out the real picture by synthesizing what we might call the "hospitality verses" with other, more negative passages about foreigners, what we might call the "foreigner-as-curse" passages, all understood in the context of ancient views of borders and territorial jurisdiction.Taken together, these passages complicate any simple invocation of "biblical hospitality" for use in contemporary immigration debates.
To see why this reading is incomplete, we need to start with how differently the ancient world understood territory itself.
To see why this reading is incomplete, we need to start with how differently the ancient world understood territory itself.
I. The Permeable Nature of Ancient Boundaries
Ancient Near East kingdoms in Old Testament times did not have fixed national borders the way we understand them today. Borders were flexible frontier zones, natural barriers like rivers and mountains, or dynamic areas defined by military control and tax collection. Rather than stopping at a precise coordinate on a map, authority faded out gradually into borderlands or buffer zones where influence overlapped. Even the famous Roman limes along the empire's northern border were not formal immigration "checkpoints"; they were posts to control trade, monitor the military situation locally, and project Roman power into the frontier zone.
This means that frontier regions were vastly more permeable in biblical times. That's not to say that hard boundaries didn't exist, but rather that these boundaries were not conceived as lines drawn on a map. Rather, a boundary was a locus of control: the kingdom ended at the point where it could no longer exercise control effectively. Control was focused much more on populated areas with productive capabilities (i.e., taxable wealth), such as cities and their surrounding farmlands—and these areas were heavily defended, with walled cities being built atop elevated hills or tells, a position that not only afforded security but also allowed them to monitor and defend the surrounding farmlands. While migrants might have been tolerated passing through the countryside, they certainly would not have been allowed to simply enter at will into fortified cities in large groups. The city walls of the ancient Near East are akin to the natonal border of today's nation-state.
In addition to frontier zones, one might also encounter foreigners along the caravan routes or natural highways, which were considered generally open to anyone. These routes might pass right through Israelite territory but were consistently populated by foreigners moving to and fro. An example of this is the Shephelah, a transit zone used for trade and foreign travel, acting as the primary gateway connecting the Mediterranean coastal highway with the interior mountains of Judea. It was comprised of five east-west valleys (Aijalon, Sorek, Elah, Guvrin, and Lachish) which cut through the foothills. The Shephelah valleys served as natural roads for merchants, travelers, and caravans moving between the coast and highland cities like Jerusalem and Hebron and were always populated by foreigners, even in the midst of Israel.
The takeaway here is that ancient conceptions of territory and boundaries were fundamentally different from the modern nation-state model, where borders are fixed lines demarcating exclusive sovereignty and controlled entry. In the ancient Near East, a kingdom's jurisdiction was graduated rather than binary: strongest at its fortified cities and farmlands, fading out through frontier zones, and effectively absent along transit corridors like the Shephelah's valleys, which foreigners could traverse freely regardless of whose "territory" they nominally passed through. Because of this, modern categories like citizenship, immigration control, or border security have no clean analogue in the biblical world, and applying them retroactively—treating the presence of foreign travelers in the Shephelah as equivalent to, say, undocumented border crossing in a modern state—imposes a modern framework onto the Bible that the ancient text and its authors would not have recognized.
The takeaway here is that ancient conceptions of territory and boundaries were fundamentally different from the modern nation-state model, where borders are fixed lines demarcating exclusive sovereignty and controlled entry. In the ancient Near East, a kingdom's jurisdiction was graduated rather than binary: strongest at its fortified cities and farmlands, fading out through frontier zones, and effectively absent along transit corridors like the Shephelah's valleys, which foreigners could traverse freely regardless of whose "territory" they nominally passed through. Because of this, modern categories like citizenship, immigration control, or border security have no clean analogue in the biblical world, and applying them retroactively—treating the presence of foreign travelers in the Shephelah as equivalent to, say, undocumented border crossing in a modern state—imposes a modern framework onto the Bible that the ancient text and its authors would not have recognized.
II. What Were Migrants and What Were Expectations Surrounding Them?
Given the permeable nature of ancient boundaries, how are we to view ancient migration? Clearly it was not the mere crossing of administrative boundaries, the way, say, a migrant from Latin America hops over the U.S. border fence. Ancient migration was viewed not as crossing a rigid bureaucratic line, but as moving through different kin-groups, local loyalties, and sacred geographies. It was less about leaving a place and more about leaving one's kin groups.
Without anything like modern border control, passports, or government oversight, movement across physical terrain was largely unregulated. And without one's kin group, the migrant was essentially at the mercy of the local population for sustenance. Without a clan or ancestral lands, they depended upon the hospitality of the resident population. This is the justification for the biblical obligation of hachnasat orchim, "bringing in of strangers," the Israelite version of the universal law of hospitality. This is why they were commanded to leave the edges of their fields ungleaned so that the foreigner could scavenge, why they were forbidden from oppressing them, and so on (cf. Lev. 19:9-10; Deut. 10:18-19). For their part, foreigners were expected to be subject to the laws of their host peoples, both criminal and religious. They were, for all intents and purposes, expected to assimilate (cf. Ex. 12:49; Num. 15:16, 35:15; Deut. 16:14).
Finally, it is clear that these prescriptions consider the foreigner as an individual, not as part of a horde of hundreds or thousands. The law requiring a farmer to leave some ungleaned crops at the edge of his fields, for example, is obviously envisioning very small groups of people (if it were not, a few ungleaned stalks at the edge of a field would scarcely be sufficient). These passages are envisioning situations like that described in the Book of Ruth, where we see Ruth the Moabitess literally taking advantage of the provision mentioned in Lev. 19 (cf. Ruth 2:1-7). The very fact that the hachnasat orchim is meant to help people with no kin group is in itself a testimony to the fact that the foreigners were considered as individuals; in other words, had they been migrating into Israel by the hundreds of thousands, they would not have lacked a kin group, and the hachnasat orchim would have been unnecessary.
Given all this, hachnasat orchim was never a policy of unrestricted movement but a personal obligation triggered by the vulnerability of an individual severed from their kin group, paired with an expectation of submission to the host society's law and cult. It has no relevance to modern debates about immigration policy, which concern the state's authority to regulate mass entry across a fixed frontier. The biblical text does not concern itself with this, since the foreigner it envisions has already crossed an unregulated, permeable landscape and stands before the community not as a claimant on state policy but as a person requiring the ordinary charity owed to anyone without land or kin. Reading Leviticus 19 as a foundational principle for contemporary immigration policy therefore asks the text to answer a question it was never framed to ask.
III. The Foreigner as a Curse: Related Old Testament Passages
But we are really only getting half of the story if we stop at these passages. While the Bible prescribes certain rules for the just treatment of foreigners who happen to be in the land, their presence is clearly viewed as an exception and they are expected to remain in a socially subordinate position. We know this because there are a plethora of passages warning not only against the presence of too many foreigners, but against their social elevation as well. In fact, the empowerment of foreigners is specifically treated as a curse from God. We will be reviewing these passages in detail, which, though lengthy, is necessary to understand the biblical view of the foreigner correctly. I will be summing this all up at the end of this section, so if you are not interested in a lengthy digression through the Old Testament, skip to Section IV.
Deuteronomy 28:43-44
The most pivotal verse is Deuteronomy 28:43-44, which is notable because it is part of the so-called "covenant curses," the list of woes God threatens to bring upon Israel for breaking His law. One of the punishments for abandoning God is:
The sojourner who is among you shall mount above you higher and higher; and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. (Deut. 28:43-44, RSV CE)
Let's be clear on what this says: That the resident foreigner's social status rises "higher and higher" is considered a curse from God. The distribution of social capital between the foreigner and indigenous is a zero sum game in which the elevation of the foreigner corresponds to the socio-economic emasculation of the indigenous, who sink "lower and lower." This is exemplified by the foreigner's access to capital that is denied to the native population. The foreigner is meant to stay subordinate; his social elevation is a sign of God's disfavor and is considered a punishment.
Deuteronomy 28:30-33
This is likewise part of the covenant curses and presents a more fleshed out illustration of what was spoken of in the passage above. Here we specifically see the fruit of the Israelites' labor being consumed by foreigners. The Israelites do the work, but others reap the benefits:
You shall build a house, and you shall not dwell in it; you shall plant a vineyard, and you shall not use the fruit of it. Your ox shall be slain before your eyes, and you shall not eat of it...A nation which you have not known shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors; and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually. (Deut. 28:30-33)
The passage and those like it describe a scenario in which foreigners have overrun the land and are gobbling up the economic benefits of Israelite labor—or, to put it in a modern context, the migrants are growing fat off the largesse of government programs funded almost exclusively by the taxes paid by the native-born population. It is a massive wealth transfer from one population to another.
Hosea 7:8-9
Hosea is another book that describes penalties for abandoning God. One of these penalties applies to the tribe of Ephraim specifically, which it describes as having its strength utterly consumed by foreigners:
Ephraim mixes himself with the peoples; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Aliens devour his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not. (Hos. 7:8-9)I find this passage particularly striking because the Scripture highlights the gradual nature of Ephraim's dilution. "Aliens devour his strength and he knows it not"; the overthrow did not happen overnight; it was subtle, perhaps generations in the making. Ephraim has slowly been consumed by foreigners without realizing it the way that a man starts getting gray hairs slowly and takes no notice at first. Incidentally, this also demonstrates that the Bible is not talking about a military conquest here; if it were a military conquest, Ephraim would notice it. Rather, it is the gradual social dilution of Israelite vigor brought about by too many "aliens" who "devour" Ephraim's strength over a prolonged period of immigration. And again, this is presented as a punishment from God.
Neh. 13:23-25
This scene takes place after the exile. The Judahites have returned to the land, but there is a strong foreign population living among them. Nehemiah is scandalized to learn that many of the younger generation are no longer fluent in their own native language because of foreign influence:
In those days also I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab; and half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but the language of each people. And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair...(Neh. 13:23-25).
Now we have to be careful with the passages of Nehemiah 13 because they are bound up with the religious prohibition against marrying pagans and as such aren't entirely applicable to our discussion. I do cite these particular passages, however, because Nehemiah's concern about the language is not merely religious; he is alarmed that the presence of a large foreign population is diluting the cultural identity of Judah, which he (and by extension, the text) considers uniformly negative.
Lamentations 5:2
After the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah laments that lands that were formerly in the hands of Israelites have passed into the ownership of foreigners:
Lamentations 5:2
After the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah laments that lands that were formerly in the hands of Israelites have passed into the ownership of foreigners:
Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. (Lam 5:2)Now it could be objected that Jeremiah here is not bewailing the fact of aliens owning the land, but the reality of Judah's military conquest by Nebuchadnezzar, which would obviously be considered a national disaster. Thus, one could argue this passage is not primarily about foreigners. But to say this is to fundamentally misunderstand the hamartiology of the Old Testament. The ultimate punishment of the Old Covenant is dispossession from the land; it is the severest of God's curses and of all chastisements the most feared by the Israelites. The Babylonian conquest is merely the mechanism by which God inflicts this curse. In other words, that the land has been given over to aliens is the entire reason why the conquest was so awful to begin with. Had the Babylonians defeated Israel in battle but left the Israelites in control of their own land, the Israelite defeat would have been no more severe than many of their prior defeats, as narrated in books like Judges and 1 Kings. It is specifically the handing over of their inheritance to foreigners that make Nebuchadnezzar's campaign the subject of special lamentation.
Isaiah 1:7
The prophet Isaiah delivers a similar message. As Isaiah prophesied during the reigns of "Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah" it is unclear what specific disasters he is referring to, but the meaning is clear: one of the most severe chastisements the nation can endure is to have aliens eating up the prosperity of the land:
The prophet Isaiah delivers a similar message. As Isaiah prophesied during the reigns of "Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah" it is unclear what specific disasters he is referring to, but the meaning is clear: one of the most severe chastisements the nation can endure is to have aliens eating up the prosperity of the land:
Your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence aliens devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by aliens. (Isa. 1:7)Isaiah 60:10; 61:4-8
If the dominance of aliens is a sign of God's judgment, the inverse is also true. When God is with Israel, we see promises that resident foreigners shall be subject to the Israelites—in specifically menial roles. In Isaiah 60, when speaking of the coming of the Messiah and the restoration of Israel, the Lord promises that foreigners will no longer "devour" the land; instead, they will serve in a subordinate position as a sign of God's favor:
Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you, for in my wrath I smote you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you. (Isa 60:10)
A similar message is repeated in Isaiah 61, where the aliens performing menial labor in subservience to Israel is again presented as a sign of God's favor. This is the famous passage that our Lord read in the synagogue of Capernaum, and it concludes with a promise that the foreigners will be humbled, performing menial work as a sign of their humiliation:
They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. Aliens shall stand and feed your flocks, foreigners shall be your plowmen and vinedressers. (Isa. 61:4-8)
IV. Summary of Old Testament Passages on the Foreigner
Taking into account all of these passages, a fuller picture of the Old Testament's view of the migrant emerges:
- Territorial jurisdiction back then was fundamentally different than modern border controls; strict parallels between ancient Israel and the modern nation-state cannot responsibly be made.
- Foreigners are welcome, provided they conform to the laws and customs of Israel, including religious observance.
- Israelites must not oppress nor overlook such people, but extend charity to them.
- The foreigners in the land are nevertheless an outlier; they are never envisioned to be present in such numbers as to threaten the socio-political dominance of the Israelites. They are isolated individuals with no kin group; they are not substantive communities.
- The resident foreigner is expected to remain in a humble social status doing menial work.
- The elevation of the foreigner "higher and higher" is a curse from God. Foreigners with considerable socio-political clout are considered a sign of God's disfavor.
- The ultimate covenant curse is for the land itself to be possessed or "devoured" by foreigners.
- There is a real danger that this can happen gradually, without the Israelites noticing.
- The cultural dilution of the nation, as reflected in the introduction of foreign languages, is considered an absolute negative.
This is a far cry from the modern liberal ideal of the foreigner as an equal rights-bearer, entitled to preserve his own language and customs, free to arrive in whatever numbers circumstance permits, and welcomed as a matter of principle rather than tolerated as an exception. By contrast, the Old Testament's foreigner is a subordinate, assimilating individual whose charity-worthy vulnerability and whose potential to overrun or dilute the nation are two sides of the same coin—in other words, his worthiness of charity depends precisely on him not threatening the cultural, economic, or socio-political hegemony of the Israelites. As soon as he does, he becomes a curse. This is the Old Testament's actual position, which is precisely why the response to Ceuta, from the Vatican on down, struck me as such a betrayal of it.
V. A Case of Selective Applicability
By the way, immigration supporters are certainly aware of some of the passages I brought up, like Deuteronomy 28. They will typically address them by suggesting that these texts are part of a specific historical and conditional covenant with ancient Israel, rather than a universal rule for modern political or immigration policy. If so, we are justified in asking by what logic do we dismiss passages like Deut. 28 as historically conditional to ancient Israel but treat passages like Lev. 19 as universally applicable? They are all part of the same law, given in the same context, part of the same biblical vision. It is another case of selective applicability.
We really have two choices: either take the Old Testament's directives about foreigners in toto (including the parts about religious conformity, ensuring they never attain any socio-economic power, and remain subordinate)...or else maybe just admit that the Old Testament's prescriptions are not relevant to our current situation and stop invoking them selectively?
A Catholic inclined to defend a pro-migration position will likely reach for the New Testament rather than concede the Old Testament argument above, pointing to Christ's identification with the stranger in Matthew 25:35 ("I was a stranger and you welcomed me") or the Good Samaritan's care for a man outside his own ethnic and religious community (cf. Luke 10:29-37). But these texts operate on the same logic as Leviticus 19. Both describe an individual encountering another individual in need; both prescribe personal charity toward that person, not a policy governing the scale or terms on which a nation admits foreign populations. Christ's judgment in Matthew 25 falls on those who failed to feed, clothe, or visit someone directly in front of them; it says nothing about how many strangers a nation ought to admit across its frontier, under what conditions, or with what expectation of assimilation. Reading these passages as a mandate for open-ended mass migration commits the identical error as reading Leviticus 19 that way: it treats a command addressed to persons as though it were addressed to states.
As unpopular as it is to say, the Bible's take on this matter presumes the maintenance of ethnic homogeneity. None of the Bible's prescriptions direct us to accommodate hundreds of thousands of migrants (especially of a religion hostile to our own) penetrating our borders illegally, nor even legally. Nothing in the Old Testament suggests "diversity" is a virtue; rather, the Old Testament seems to suggest that migrants are welcome only to the degree that they do not cause the nation to become diverse. The Old Testament recognizes the inherent good of preserving one's cultural and ethnic homogeneity while balancing this against the charity owed to the isolated and vulnerable sojourner.
I for one am sick to death of the nonsense that I constantly hear about migrants and I am done letting useful idiots gaslight me about what the Bible says about the foreigner, as if there is some sort of divine mandate to take in every vagrant scrap of humanity that washes up on our doorstep asking for handouts! There is zero obligation under the Old Testament to take in tens of thousands, or millions of migrants—let alone to give them access to our resources and a path to citizenship! I don't care if they "just want a better life." I don't care what episcopal conferences say on the matter. I am absolutely done letting bleeding heart prog-Catholics dictate the terms of this conversation. If I were European, I'd be supporting whatever party is in favor of deporting every single one of them and preventing any more from coming. If we don't, the horrific scenes out of Ceuta will be replicated across the entire Christian west.
We really have two choices: either take the Old Testament's directives about foreigners in toto (including the parts about religious conformity, ensuring they never attain any socio-economic power, and remain subordinate)...or else maybe just admit that the Old Testament's prescriptions are not relevant to our current situation and stop invoking them selectively?
VI. The New Testament Operates on the Same Logic
A Catholic inclined to defend a pro-migration position will likely reach for the New Testament rather than concede the Old Testament argument above, pointing to Christ's identification with the stranger in Matthew 25:35 ("I was a stranger and you welcomed me") or the Good Samaritan's care for a man outside his own ethnic and religious community (cf. Luke 10:29-37). But these texts operate on the same logic as Leviticus 19. Both describe an individual encountering another individual in need; both prescribe personal charity toward that person, not a policy governing the scale or terms on which a nation admits foreign populations. Christ's judgment in Matthew 25 falls on those who failed to feed, clothe, or visit someone directly in front of them; it says nothing about how many strangers a nation ought to admit across its frontier, under what conditions, or with what expectation of assimilation. Reading these passages as a mandate for open-ended mass migration commits the identical error as reading Leviticus 19 that way: it treats a command addressed to persons as though it were addressed to states.
VII. Conclusion: The Bible Presumes the Maintenance of Ethnic Homogeneity
As unpopular as it is to say, the Bible's take on this matter presumes the maintenance of ethnic homogeneity. None of the Bible's prescriptions direct us to accommodate hundreds of thousands of migrants (especially of a religion hostile to our own) penetrating our borders illegally, nor even legally. Nothing in the Old Testament suggests "diversity" is a virtue; rather, the Old Testament seems to suggest that migrants are welcome only to the degree that they do not cause the nation to become diverse. The Old Testament recognizes the inherent good of preserving one's cultural and ethnic homogeneity while balancing this against the charity owed to the isolated and vulnerable sojourner.
I for one am sick to death of the nonsense that I constantly hear about migrants and I am done letting useful idiots gaslight me about what the Bible says about the foreigner, as if there is some sort of divine mandate to take in every vagrant scrap of humanity that washes up on our doorstep asking for handouts! There is zero obligation under the Old Testament to take in tens of thousands, or millions of migrants—let alone to give them access to our resources and a path to citizenship! I don't care if they "just want a better life." I don't care what episcopal conferences say on the matter. I am absolutely done letting bleeding heart prog-Catholics dictate the terms of this conversation. If I were European, I'd be supporting whatever party is in favor of deporting every single one of them and preventing any more from coming. If we don't, the horrific scenes out of Ceuta will be replicated across the entire Christian west.
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