to alienate: to make (or leave) someone a stranger to something they ought to belong to, whether a people, a relationship, or God.
This verb pictures a person cut off from something that should have been theirs. It is built from an everyday word for "belonging to someone else," and it can describe cities turned against one another or family members driven apart. Underneath sits an image from the world of property and law: something handed over to a different owner, made to belong elsewhere. To be alienated in this sense is, at root, to have been transferred out of one circle of belonging and into the status of an outsider.
All three times it appears in the New Testament, it names a fixed, settled condition rather than a single dramatic moment. The people described are simply in a state of being cut off, and the word leaves unsaid exactly who did the cutting off, keeping attention on the resulting distance rather than on any one event. Paul uses it three ways that fit together: cut off from the community of Israel and its promises, cut off from the very life of God, and cut off from God while actively hostile toward him.
Greek-speaking Jews had already used this word for a pointed kind of estrangement: the idolater or the apostate, someone made foreign to God and to ancestral faith. That background gives Paul's usage its edge. He is not merely observing that his readers were outsiders; he is placing them, before Christ, in the position once occupied by those who had turned away from God. And in each case he answers it with the matching language of reconciliation, so that the enduring state of estrangement is deliberately set up only to be undone.
Disputed
Whether the verb in Ephesians 2:12 (and, for some, 4:18) implies that Gentiles once belonged to what they are now alienated from and were subsequently cut off, or simply marks a standing condition of being outside it with no prior belonging in view.
- majorityThe perfect participle functions adjectivally, close to "excluded from": it describes the enduring outsider status of Gentiles before Christ, the corollary of Israel's election, without implying they ever belonged to Israel's community and then lost it.; A. T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Word, 1990), 135-39; H. W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker, 2002), 355-57; E. Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians, ICC (T&T Clark, 1998); P. T. O'Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians, Pillar NTC (Eerdmans, 1999), 187-90
- minorityThe verb retains its fuller force of genuine estrangement from what was divinely intended to include all nations, so Gentile alienation is a falling-away from an intended belonging rather than a mere never-having-belonged.; M. Barth, Ephesians 1-3, Anchor Bible 34 (Doubleday, 1974), 256-65