a resident alien: a free but landless dependent who lives among a people not his own, without the rights of a native citizen
The word names a specific social class in ancient Israel: a free person, not a slave, who owned no land and lived as a dependent on someone else's property, without the standing of a native citizen. It appears only fourteen times, almost all of them in Israel's laws, where it is regularly paired with the word for a resident foreigner (גֵּר) or the word for a hired worker.
The laws draw his position carefully. He was protected like everyone else: he could gather the sabbath-year harvest, and he could flee to the cities of refuge for safety. But he stood on land that could never permanently be his, he was shut out of the Passover meal, and he could not eat the holy food set aside for priests. A resident foreigner who had been circumcised could keep the Passover; this landless dependent could not, and that line is a main reason scholars insist the two words are not simply the same.
The word's deepest use turns it around. In one law God calls Israel itself a company of resident aliens and tenants on his land, because the land is his and they hold it only from him. A king at the height of his wealth and a psalmist in distress both take up the same confession, until the word comes to describe not a social class but the human condition: to live as a temporary guest on ground that finally belongs to God.
Nuances
Whether the form in Elijah's title (traditionally read "from the toshavim of Gilead") is this noun, meaning "residents of Gilead," or a corrupted spelling of the place-name Tishbe.
- majorityA corrupted place-name: the text originally read "Tishbe," matching Elijah's title "the Tishbite" earlier in the same verse, so this is not an occurrence of the noun.; BDB, s.v. תּוֹשָׁב; Old Greek of 1 Kings (Θεσβίτης ἐκ Θεσβῶν)
- minorityThe received Hebrew text stands as written: the form is this noun, "from the residents of Gilead."; Masoretic Text (Leningrad Codex)
Disputed
Whether the resident dependent (toshav) is a category genuinely distinct from the resident foreigner (ger), or whether the two are effectively one thing when the text pairs them.
- majorityThey are genuinely different statuses. The clearest proof is that a circumcised resident foreigner could keep the Passover while the resident dependent could not, so the pairing is not a single expression.; Rolf Rendtorff, "The Ger in the Priestly Laws of the Pentateuch," in Ethnicity and the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 77-87; Jan Joosten, People and Land in the Holiness Code (VTSup 67; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 63-74
- minorityWhen paired, the words function as a single expression ("resident alien," "resident hireling"), so the resident dependent is not a truly separate class.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27 (Anchor Bible 3B; New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2187, 2221
What exactly the resident dependent's social and economic status was.
- contestedA bound or indentured laborer, seized against a debt and made to live and work in the creditor's household.; Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 74-76; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 170-71
- contestedA resident hireling: the same figure as the hired worker, receiving room and board in return for labor rather than a distinct class.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27 (Anchor Bible 3B; New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2187
- contestedA dependent attached to a particular household, whose livelihood depended on a specific Israelite patron.; Jan Joosten, People and Land in the Holiness Code (VTSup 67; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 63-74
- contestedA rent-paying farming tenant who worked a landlord's land under a lease.; Joram Mayshar, "Who Was the Toshav?" Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014): 225-246