nokhri

At its core this word marks someone or something as outside the circle of what is yours. A person it describes comes from another nation; a thing it describes belongs to someone else. The same word covers the foreign traveler, the foreign-born king, foreign wives, foreign clothing, and even a foreign land far from home. The common thread is otherness: this is not us, not ours, not from here.

The word carries a sharp edge that plain English "foreign" can blur. In Israel's law and worship it often draws a hard line. A foreigner could be charged interest an Israelite could not, was not bound by the seventh-year release of debts, and could not be made king. Yet the line was not pure hostility: the great prayer at the temple's dedication asks God to hear the foreigner who comes from a distant land to pray, so that all peoples would know his name. So the word can name an outsider to be kept at arm's length or an outsider to be welcomed, depending on the setting.

A distinct use clusters in the book of Proverbs, where the "foreign woman" is a recurring danger the young man is warned against. Scholars debate whether she is literally a non-Israelite or simply another man's wife, an outsider to the hearer's own household and marriage. Either way the word does its usual work: she belongs to someone else, and crossing that line brings ruin.

The word also stretches to mean simply "not one's own" or "strange" in a looser sense: a land where one lives as a stranger, a vine that has turned wild and alien to the one who planted it, even an action of God called his "strange work" because it is so unlike his usual dealings.