Bible Review

On the text, see Alan H. Gardiner, “Davies’ Copy of the Great Speos Artemidos Inscription,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 32 (1946), pp. 43–56. Gardiner rendered the word sðm3w, “foreigners,” as the harsher “roving hordes.”

It is often assumed that the legal and moral principles invoked in laws concerning the geµr are based on the account of the Hebrews suffering during the bondage in Egypt. But surely the geµr laws also recall this earlier period as well. According to Exodus 1:8–11, the Hebrews were mistreated only during the last phase of their stay in Egypt.

One might argue that the legal distinctions among Hebrew and non-Hebrew citizens were incorporated into the law codes at a later date in history, when settlement in Canaan brought the Israelites side by side with diverse ethnic groups in the Promised Land. This may well be the case for such classes as slaves, hired laborers, foreigners and “natives” (Hebrew, ’ezraµh\.), but I believe these classes must be separated from the category of geµr because of its use in Egypt.

This message is subtly anticipated in the etymology provided twice for Gershom, the firstborn son of Moses in Midian, whose name incorporates the Hebrew term geµr. Gershom, we are told, is so named because Moses was a “stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22, 18:3). The Bible does not specify whether in Egypt or Midian, but in the biblical law codes, the foreign land is always Egypt.

Earlier, in the patriarchal narratives, the term “stranger” (geµr) is used to describe the future condition of the Hebrews in “a land not theirs” (Genesis 15:13) and to define the status of Abraham in Canaan (Genesis 23:4).

A first-century C.E. Aramaic translation rendered ‘eµreb_ rab_ as “numerous strangers”; in the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was begun in Egypt in the third century B.C.E), both terms are translated as “mixed multitude” (Greek, epikmitos polys), thereby affirming the historical equation of the two groups.

Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.16.6; 3.23.1–2; 5.21.1–2; 4.40.1; and Proof 32.

Bernard Prusak, “Women: Seductive Siren and Source of Sin? Pseudepigraphical Myth and Christian Origins,” in Ruether, Religion and Sexism, p. 97.