How should strangers be treated?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Two opposite imperatives toward outsiders stand in the same legal corpus. Leviticus 19:34 commands, "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself," grounding the command in Israel's own experience as strangers in Egypt; Deuteronomy 10:19 repeats it, "Love ye therefore the stranger." Yet Deuteronomy 7:2 commands of the Canaanite nations, "thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." Welcome and love on one hand, extermination without mercy on the other.

The harmonization rests on a real lexical and legal distinction, and its strongest form is precise. The word in Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 10:19 is גֵּר (gēr), the resident alien — a foreigner dwelling within Israel under its authority and substantially incorporated into its covenantal and legal order, distinct from the נָכְרִי (nokrî), the transient foreigner. Biblical law treats the gēr as a protected class alongside the widow and orphan (Exod 22:21; 23:9; Deut 24:17-21). The populations marked for destruction in Deuteronomy 7:2 are not gērîm at all but the named Canaanite nations — Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites — placed under the חֵרֶם (ḥērem), the ban of devoted destruction, on the stated theological rationale of preventing idolatrous contamination of the land (7:4). Copan (Is God a Moral Monster?), Merrill (NAC Deuteronomy), and Tigay (JPS) all press this point, and they are right: the love-command and the extermination-command do not address the same people, and the SAB's flat "love them / kill them" framing collapses a distinction the text carefully maintains. To that extent the contradiction is overstated.

What the lexical distinction does not resolve is the moral tension the texts embed. The Canaanite ḥērem in Deuteronomy 7:2 and, still more starkly, 20:16-18 ("thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth…thou shalt utterly destroy them") is not displacement or expulsion but the total killing of men, women, children, and livestock, justified theologically as a prophylactic against religious apostasy. Niditch (War in the Hebrew Bible) classifies this as a "ban ideology" that is internally coherent within Ancient Near Eastern warfare categories — the Mesha Stele records an analogous Moabite ḥērem of Israelite towns devoted to the god Chemosh — but morally toxic by any modern standard. Collins (Does the Bible Justify Violence?) argues that even granting the gēr / Canaanite distinction, the Deuteronomic command to annihilate whole populations has functioned across history as a biblical warrant for sacralized violence, repeatedly invoked by later readers. Brueggemann (Theology of the Old Testament) likewise treats the extermination texts as an unresolved problem the canon does not soften. The point is not that Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 7:2 contradict each other on the same referent — they do not — but that the same legal tradition holds together an ethic of love for the incorporated outsider and an ethic of devoted destruction for the designated outsider, and these are not reducible to a single coherent stance toward foreigners.

Weighing it: the apologetic reading wins the narrow lexical charge cleanly, and the SAB oversimplifies by treating two distinct Hebrew categories as one. But the harmonization purchases that resolution only by reframing the question; it does not dissolve the embedded tension between hospitality and extermination, which remains textually present and morally acute.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonized — the gēr / Canaanite distinction defeats the surface contradiction, but the deeper tension between welcome and ḥērem is real and unresolved.