Love of the Stranger

Among the hundreds of commandments in the Torah, one interpersonal instruction is repeated more often than any other — more often even than "love your neighbor as yourself": the command to love, protect, and refrain from oppressing the stranger (a non-Israelite living among the community). This command appears in various formulations 36 times across the Five Books of Moses.

The Commandment in Its Own Words

The command appears in several distinct forms across different books of the Torah:

• "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 22:21)
• "Love the stranger as yourself." (Leviticus 19:34)
• "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:19)
• "One law shall be for the native-born and for the stranger who dwells among you." (Exodus 12:49; Numbers 15:16)

Why Repetition Is the Point

In a legal and literary tradition where a command is typically stated once and then developed through later legal discussion, having the same basic instruction repeated three dozen times is itself a form of emphasis — a deliberate signal that this specific ethical demand needed to be heard, and re-heard, more than almost anything else in the text. The command is also unusual in explicitly grounding itself in the Israelites' own historical experience of vulnerability: having been strangers and slaves in Egypt, they are commanded to remember that experience and extend precisely the protection they once lacked to the outsiders living among them.

The requirement that "one law" apply equally to the native-born and the stranger goes further than sentiment — it is a demand for equal legal standing, not merely charitable feeling. Together with the principle that all humanity descends from a single common ancestor, this command forms one of the clearest textual foundations for the broader Jewish ethic of care and fair treatment toward non-Jews.