a resident alien: a long-term, tolerated outsider who lives among a people but never counts as a full member
The word is built from two ordinary Greek pieces: a preposition meaning "beside" and a word for the household or family estate. Literally it names someone who lives beside the household rather than inside it. In the Greek and Roman cities of the day this was a recognized rank: a resident alien allowed to live and work in a city for years, even for a lifetime, but barred from voting, usually kept from owning land freely, and taxed as an outsider. Tolerated and protected, yet permanently on the edge.
The Greek Old Testament had already lifted this everyday civic word to something weightier. It became the usual translation for the Hebrew name of the resident foreigner (גר) whom Israel was commanded to shelter alongside the widow and the orphan, and it shaped Abraham's confession that he was only a resident alien even in the land God had promised him. By the New Testament the word sounds both notes at once: a real, lowly social standing, and a picture of God's people as those who do not finally belong to the world around them.
The New Testament turns the word in two directions:
- Of literal outsiders far from home, as when Stephen recounts that Abraham's descendants would live as foreigners in Egypt and that Moses fled and settled as an alien in Midian.
- Of the community of faith itself, as when Peter urges his readers to live "as resident aliens" among their neighbors, and when Ephesians tells Gentile believers that they are "no longer strangers and resident aliens" but full members of God's household.
A close companion word travels with it: παρεπίδημος, the short-term visitor merely passing through, paired with it at Genesis 23:4 and in 1 Peter. The broader word ξένος means simply "stranger" or "guest," without the note of settled residence that gives this word its edge.
Nuances
Whether the resident-alien language in 1 Peter names an actual legal class the readers already belonged to, or is a theological image for the estrangement produced by their conversion.
- minorityThe addressees were literally resident aliens in Roman Anatolia, a pre-existing social and legal underclass; the letter's household imagery answers their real homelessness.; John H. Elliott, A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter (Fortress, 1981; 2nd ed. 1990); John H. Elliott, 1 Peter (Anchor Yale Bible, 2000)
- majorityThe word is a theological metaphor: estrangement is created by conversion and becomes the central image of Christian identity, not a status the readers held beforehand.; Reinhard Feldmeier, Die Christen als Fremde (WUNT 64; Mohr Siebeck, 1992); Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1996); Steven Richard Bechtler, Following in His Steps (SBLDS 162; Scholars Press, 1998)