Leviticus 19:33

Leviticus 19 opens with the LORD’s call, “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), and the rest of Leviticus 19 shows what that holiness looks like in ordinary life. It runs from offerings and the Sabbath to honouring mother and father (Leviticus 19:3), leaving the gleanings of the field for the poor and the stranger (Leviticus 19:9–10), and loving one’s neighbour as oneself (Leviticus 19:18). Straight after these verses come the laws of just weights and measures (Leviticus 19:35–36). A holy people is holy in the field, the market and the home as surely as at the tabernacle. These three verses carry that holiness to the people with the least power to demand it: those whose strength is failing with age, and those who live as foreigners in another people’s land.

The first command is something the body does. To rise up, qûwm, is to get to your feet, and here it means standing when an old person comes into your presence. It gives him the first place and acknowledges his standing, and it can mean making way for him. The “hoary head” is sêybâh, grey or white hair. Grey hair stands for old age itself, the visible mark of a long life, and Scripture counts it a glory: “The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of righteousness” (Proverbs 16:31).

The second command joins the inward attitude to the outward act: “honour the face of the old man”. The verb hâdar comes from a root meaning to swell up, and by implication to favour or honour someone, to treat him as high. The word for face, pânîym, is plural in form but always used as a singular, and from the face itself it reaches to the front of a thing and to a person’s presence. To honour the face of the old man is to honour the man himself, to his face, as someone of worth.

The word for old man, zâqên, is used of persons, both the old and the elders, and in Israel the two belonged together. Elders served as judges, counsellors and leaders among the people. A long life was seen as a blessing from God, and grey hair spoke of experience and of the memory of the people’s history and ways. Honour for the aged kept that wisdom passing from one generation to the next.

The same command also protects. When strength fades, the old can be pushed aside or taken advantage of, and the LORD gives them a place of dignity among his people. The fifth commandment had already told Israel to honour father and mother (Exodus 20:12), and here the honour reaches every grey head in the land.

Verse 33 turns to a second person who is easily overlooked. The stranger, gêr, is a sojourner or resident alien, someone living away from the land of his origin. His stay could be permanent or for a long time, which sets him apart from a traveller passing through, and he lived among Israel in peace, unlike a foreign enemy. The verb in “sojourn” is gûwr, whose root meaning is to turn aside from the road for a lodging, and so to stay as a guest or to abide. The noun gêr comes from it, and the same verb stands behind “dwelleth” in verse 34. The stranger is someone who has turned aside and stayed.

Such a person was counted among the weaker classes. He had no tribal land and no family ties in Israel, so he depended on the justice and kindness of the people around him. That is why the law sets his cause beside the cause of the fatherless and the widow (Deuteronomy 24:17–18), and Zechariah names the same group with the poor (Zechariah 7:10). The stranger lived under Israel’s protection and its statutes (Leviticus 24:22), and he was expected to keep certain laws though he was born outside the covenant people.

“Ye shall not vex him” forbids every wrong against him. The verb yânâh means to oppress or mistreat, and it covers harm of any kind: cheating a stranger of his wages or his property, treating him as beneath everyone else, abusing him with words, or hurting him. Exodus gives Israel the same charge in two places (Exodus 22:21, Exodus 23:9), and both times it reminds them that they were strangers in Egypt.

Verse 34 moves from what Israel must avoid to what it must do. “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you.” The resident alien is to be counted as a native-born Israelite, with the same respect and the same standing. In a world where foreigners lived at the mercy of their hosts’ goodwill, this gave him a secure place among the people of God.

Then comes the heart of it: “thou shalt love him as thyself.” The verb ʼâhab means to love, to have affection for, the warm regard a person feels for someone. Earlier in this chapter the LORD commanded, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18), and now he gives the stranger that same love. The measure is “as thyself”. The care, fairness and concern for his own good that a man has for himself, he is to have for the foreigner beside him, and “as one born among you” shows that this love takes shape in the way the stranger is treated.

The New Testament keeps both commands and fills them out. Paul tells Timothy to treat older men as fathers and older women as mothers (1 Timothy 5:1–2), and he gives teaching for older and younger men and women in Titus 2:2–5. All believers are to prefer one another in honour (Romans 12:10) and to submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21), counting others better than themselves after the pattern of Christ, who humbled himself (Philippians 2:3–8). In Christ, the fear of God becomes a loving reverence that serves and honours all people, the old among them.

Jesus names “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” as the second great commandment, on which with the first hang all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:39–40), and Leviticus 19:34 shows that the neighbour includes the stranger. Jesus himself went to the people on the edges: the sick, the poor, the Samaritan, the Gentile. In the account of the sheep and the goats he says, “I was a stranger, and ye took me in”, and he counts what is done for the least of his brethren as done for him (Matthew 25:35–40). The letter to the Hebrews tells believers to entertain strangers, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

The Son of God came to dwell among us: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Through the cross he broke down “the middle wall of partition” between Jew and Gentile and made of the two “one new man” (Ephesians 2:14–15). Gentiles who were “strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12) are now “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). Peter calls believers “strangers and pilgrims” in this world (1 Peter 2:11), on the way to their true home. So we have our own memory to keep, as Israel kept the memory of Egypt.

The LORD sees the people others pass by. He notices the old man whose strength is going and the foreigner without land or kin, and he sets his own name over each of them. These verses give the shape of a holy people: they stand for the grey head, deal fairly with the stranger, and love him as one of their own, because they fear the LORD and remember what he did for them.

They also show us God’s way with us. Israel was told to love the stranger because they had been strangers and the LORD had brought them out. We were once strangers from the covenants of promise, and in Christ he has made us members of his own household. The honour and love he asks his people to give the old and the outsider are the honour and love he first gave them, and Christ counts the welcome given to a stranger as given to himself.