Bible Verses about Xenophobia
Introduction
Xenophobia is the fear or hatred of people from other countries, cultures, or backgrounds. The word comes from the Greek xenos, meaning stranger or foreigner, and phobos, meaning fear. It shows up in every generation and every culture, including the cultures of the Bible, and it shows up in the church today in ways that should trouble anyone who reads Scripture carefully.
The Bible does not use the word xenophobia, but it addresses the reality behind it more extensively than almost any other social sin. The treatment of foreigners and outsiders is not a peripheral concern in Scripture. It is one of the most repeated commands in the entire Torah, appearing in various forms more than thirty-six times, more than any other ethical instruction. The God of Israel identifies himself as the defender of the stranger. Jesus makes a stranger the hero of his most famous parable. The final vision of Scripture is a city filled with people from every nation, tribe, language, and tongue. The arc of the biblical story bends consistently and decisively away from xenophobia and toward a vision of human community that fear of the other cannot produce.
These verses speak to anyone trying to understand what God actually says about the fear and rejection of outsiders, anyone in a church wrestling with questions of welcome and belonging, and anyone who wants to bring their instincts about people from other places into alignment with the character of the God they worship.
What the Bible Means When It Talks About the Foreigner
The Old Testament uses several distinct Hebrew words for different categories of outsider. The ger was a resident alien, someone from another nation who lived among the Israelites and was therefore under the protection of Israelite law. The nokri and the zar described foreigners who were passing through or who lived outside the covenant community. The distinction mattered legally and socially, but the ethical trajectory of Scripture moves consistently toward the inclusion and protection of all categories of outsider rather than toward their exclusion or exploitation.
What is striking is that God grounds the command to treat foreigners well not in abstract humanitarian principle but in Israel's own story. You were foreigners in Egypt. The people being commanded to welcome the stranger are people who know from direct experience what it means to be unwelcome, exploited, and afraid. The memory of their own vulnerability is the basis of the command to extend protection to others in the same position. The logic is experiential before it is theological: you know what this feels like, so you know what it requires of you.
Bible Verses About God's Care for the Foreigner
Deuteronomy 10:17-19 — ("For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.") God's love for the foreigner is stated plainly and without qualification. The one who is great and mighty and awesome is the same one who attends to the practical needs of the outsider: food and clothing. The command to love the foreigner flows directly from God's own love for them.
Psalm 146:9 — ("The LORD watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.") The LORD watches over the foreigner. The watching is active and protective. The foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow are grouped together as the people whose vulnerability God takes personally. To harm them is to contend with the one who watches over them.
Leviticus 19:33-34 — ("When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.") The command to love the foreigner as yourself places the outsider within the same ethical framework as the neighbor. There is no category of person who falls outside the love command. The I am the LORD your God at the end is the seal of the command. This is not cultural preference. It is the character of God expressed as law.
Zechariah 7:10 — ("Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.") The prophetic tradition consistently lists the foreigner among those whose oppression is a direct violation of covenant faithfulness. Zechariah's list names the foreigner alongside the widow, the fatherless, and the poor as the people whose treatment is a diagnostic of a community's relationship with God.
Malachi 3:5 — ("So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me, says the LORD Almighty.") God names depriving foreigners of justice as a covenant violation serious enough to warrant his direct testimony against the offender. The absence of the fear of God is both the cause of the injustice and the summary of what makes it so serious.
Bible Verses About Israel's Identity as Foreigners
Leviticus 19:34 — ("The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.") The repeated grounding of the command in Israel's own experience as foreigners in Egypt is one of the most powerful rhetorical moves in the Torah. The people cannot claim distance from the experience they are commanded to address. They have lived it.
Deuteronomy 26:5 — ("Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: 'My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.'") The confession of faith that accompanied the offering of firstfruits began with the acknowledgment of wandering and foreignness. Israel's identity was rooted in displacement and dependence. That rootedness was supposed to produce a particular kind of solidarity with those in the same position.
Exodus 22:21 — ("Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.") The simplicity of this command is its force. Do not mistreat. Do not oppress. The reason given is not legal but experiential. You know what this is. You have felt it. Do not do it to someone else.
Exodus 23:9 — ("Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.") The you yourselves know how it feels is one of the most direct appeals to empathy in the entire Bible. The command does not ask Israel to reason abstractly about the rights of foreigners. It asks them to remember a feeling they have not forgotten and to act accordingly.
Hebrews 11:13 — ("All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.") The great heroes of faith in Hebrews 11 are described as foreigners and strangers on earth. The identity of the outsider is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of those who are living toward a home that has not yet been fully received. Every believer shares it.
Bible Verses About Welcoming the Stranger
Matthew 25:35 — ("For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.") Jesus identifies himself with the stranger who is invited in. The welcoming of the stranger is not merely a humanitarian act. It is an encounter with Christ himself. The one who turns the stranger away turns away the one who came as a stranger.
Matthew 25:43 — ("I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.") The failure to welcome the stranger is included in the list of failures that result in judgment. The stranger who was not welcomed was Christ who was not welcomed. The stakes of xenophobia in this passage are as high as they can be.
Romans 12:13 — ("Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality.") The word translated as practice hospitality is philoxenia in Greek, which literally means love of the stranger. It is the direct opposite of xenophobia. The love of the stranger is not a suggestion. It is a practice to be cultivated, which implies it is something that requires intentional effort.
Hebrews 13:2 — ("Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.") The reference to entertaining angels points back to Abraham's welcome of three strangers in Genesis 18. The strangers turned out to be divine messengers. The point is not that every stranger might be an angel. It is that the stranger's identity is not fully known to the one who meets them, and the appropriate response to the unknown is welcome rather than fear.
1 Peter 4:9 — ("Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.") The without grumbling is a realistic acknowledgment that hospitality is sometimes costly and inconvenient. The command stands anyway. The welcome is not contingent on whether it is easy.
Bible Verses About the Equal Standing of All People Before God
Acts 10:34-35 — ("Then Peter began to speak: 'I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.'") Peter's realization, prompted by the vision of the sheet and the encounter with Cornelius, is a turning point in the book of Acts. God does not show favoritism. Every nation. The categories by which human beings sort and rank each other do not operate in the same way in God's economy.
Galatians 3:28 — ("There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.") The ethnic and social divisions that structured the ancient world are declared irrelevant in Christ. Neither Jew nor Gentile is the most direct statement of what the gospel does to xenophobia. The basis of identity in Christ supersedes the basis of identity in ethnicity or national origin.
Acts 17:26 — ("From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.") All nations come from one origin. The diversity of peoples across the earth is God's design, not a problem requiring resolution. The different nations and their different histories are all within God's ordering of human life. There is no hierarchy of peoples in the doctrine of creation.
Colossians 3:11 — ("Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.") The list Paul gives covers the full range of ethnic, cultural, and social divisions of his world. Barbarian and Scythian were terms used for the most culturally distant and feared peoples of the ancient world. They are included in the new humanity that Christ creates. No one is too foreign for the community of Christ.
Revelation 7:9 — ("After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.") The final community of the redeemed is not a homogeneous group. It is the full diversity of human particularity gathered before God. Every nation, every tribe, every language: all present, all together, all before the same throne. The vision of heaven is the defeat of xenophobia.
Bible Verses About the Good Samaritan and the Outsider as Hero
Luke 10:30-33 — ("Jesus replied: 'A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.'") Jesus makes the Samaritan, the most despised outsider in the Jewish imagination, the hero of the story. The two who pass by are religious insiders. The one who stops is the one every listener would have expected to be the villain. The subversion is deliberate and total.
Luke 10:36-37 — ("Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The expert in the law replied, 'The one who had mercy on him.' Jesus told him, 'Go and do likewise.'") The question Jesus asks at the end of the parable reframes the original question entirely. The lawyer asked who is my neighbor, expecting to define the category of those who qualify for love. Jesus answers by asking who acted like a neighbor. The question is not who deserves my love but whose love I am showing. The answer to xenophobia in this parable is not a principle. It is a practice: go and do likewise.
Luke 17:16 — ("He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him — and he was a Samaritan.") Among the ten lepers Jesus heals, the only one who returns to give thanks is the Samaritan. The outsider recognizes what the insiders miss. Jesus notes it explicitly. The pattern of the outsider perceiving what the insider overlooks runs through the Gospels as a persistent corrective to religious familiarity.
Bible Verses About Ruth and the Welcome of the Outsider
Ruth 1:16 — ("But Ruth replied, 'Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.'") Ruth is a Moabite, a foreigner from a people who were historically excluded from the assembly of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:3). Her declaration of loyalty to Naomi and to Naomi's God is one of the most striking acts of covenant faithfulness in the Old Testament, and it comes from someone who had every cultural reason to go home.
Ruth 2:10 — ("At this, she bowed down with her face to the ground. She asked him, 'Why have I found such favor in your eyes that you notice me — a foreigner?'") Ruth's question names her own awareness of what she expected: to be overlooked because of her foreignness. Boaz's welcome is remarkable to her precisely because it contradicts the xenophobic norm. The welcome of the outsider is the subject of the entire book.
Ruth 4:13 — ("So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the LORD enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son.") Ruth the Moabite becomes the great-grandmother of David and an ancestor of Jesus. The foreigner who was welcomed into Israel is woven into the genealogy of the Messiah. The inclusion of Ruth in the line of Christ is God's own commentary on the treatment of outsiders.
Matthew 1:5 — ("Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse.") Ruth appears in the genealogy of Jesus alongside Rahab, another foreign woman. The deliberate inclusion of foreign women in the line of Christ signals that the kingdom of God has never been the exclusive possession of any single ethnic or national group.
Bible Verses About the Mission of God to All Nations
Genesis 12:3 — ("I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.") The covenant with Abraham is not ethnically exclusive in its purpose. It is ethnically particular in its instrument and universally inclusive in its goal. All peoples on earth will be blessed through Abraham. The particular calling of Israel exists in service of a universal blessing.
Isaiah 56:6-7 — ("And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant — these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.") God's house is explicitly named as a house of prayer for all nations. The foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD are welcomed into worship on equal terms with native Israelites. The universality of this invitation is the direct refutation of any theology that reserves God's blessing for a particular national or ethnic group.
Matthew 28:19 — ("Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.") All nations is the scope of the Great Commission. The mission of the church is not to preserve a particular cultural expression of Christianity but to carry the gospel into every culture and every nation. A church shaped by xenophobia cannot fulfill the commission it has been given.
Acts 1:8 — ("But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.") The geographic movement of the gospel in Acts is a movement outward into the foreign and the unfamiliar. Samaria is the first stop beyond the familiar, and it is included deliberately. The ends of the earth is the destination. The church moves toward the stranger, not away from them.
Revelation 5:9 — ("And they sang a new song, saying: 'You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.'") The blood of Christ purchased people from every tribe and language and people and nation. The scope of the atonement is as wide as human diversity. No people group is outside its reach. No nation is too foreign for the love of the one who was slain.
Bible Verses About the Heart Behind Xenophobia
1 John 4:18 — ("There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has its own torment. The one who fears has not been made perfect in love.") Xenophobia is, at its root, a form of fear. The antidote John names is love. Perfect love drives out fear. The person whose love is growing is the person whose fear of the other is shrinking. The two move in opposite directions and cannot fully coexist.
Proverbs 14:21 — ("It is a sin to despise one's neighbor, but blessed is the one who is kind to the needy.") Despising the neighbor is named as sin without qualification. The neighbor in Proverbs is not limited to the immediate community. It extends to anyone within reach of your action. The kindness that replaces despising is the practical shape of the love command.
Leviticus 19:18 — ("Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.") The love your neighbor as yourself command, which Jesus names as the second greatest commandment, has no ethnic or national qualifier in its context. The neighbor is not defined by similarity or proximity. They are defined by being within range of your love.
Romans 12:16 — ("Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.") The willingness to associate with people of low position is the practical test of whether pride has been replaced by the mind of Christ. Xenophobia is often driven by a hierarchy of peoples in which some are considered less valuable or trustworthy than others. Paul's counsel is directed precisely at that hierarchy.
James 2:1 — ("My brothers and sisters, believers in our Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism.") Favoritism is the practice of treating some people as more deserving of welcome and consideration than others. The community of Christ has no basis for this practice because its Lord showed none of it. The instruction is direct and without exception.
A Simple Way to Pray These Verses
Xenophobia is addressed by the renewal of the heart and the expansion of love. These verses can become prayers for both.
Deuteronomy 10:19 — ("You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.") Response: "Remind me of my own foreignness. I was once outside. I was welcomed in. Let me extend to others what was extended to me."
Acts 10:34 — ("God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him.") Response: "Expand my vision to match yours. You see every nation as equally yours. Help me see people the way you do."
Romans 12:13 — ("Practice hospitality.") Response: "The word means love of the stranger. That is what I want. Grow it in me. It does not come naturally. It needs to be practiced."
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Bible say about xenophobia? The Bible does not use the word xenophobia but addresses the fear and rejection of outsiders more extensively than almost any other social sin. The Torah commands the protection and equal treatment of foreigners more than thirty-six times. The prophets identify the mistreatment of foreigners as a covenant violation. Jesus makes an outsider the hero of his most famous parable and identifies himself with the stranger who is welcomed or turned away. The New Testament declares that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile and envisions a final community drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language. Scripture is comprehensive and consistent in its rejection of xenophobia.
Is the fear of foreigners ever justified in the Bible? The Bible distinguishes between wisdom about genuine threats and the generalized fear or hatred of people based on their foreignness. Discernment about danger is different from xenophobia. What Scripture consistently rejects is the categorical rejection of people based on their national or cultural identity, the assumption that outsiders are inherently less trustworthy or valuable, and the failure to extend the love command to those who come from different places. The command to love the foreigner as yourself leaves no room for the generalized fear that xenophobia describes.
How does the Good Samaritan story address xenophobia? In Luke 10, Jesus answers a question about who qualifies as a neighbor by making the most despised outsider in Jewish culture the model of neighborly love. The two who pass by the wounded man are religious insiders. The one who stops and helps is the foreigner. Jesus then asks which of the three acted like a neighbor and commands his listener to go and do likewise. The story directly subverts the assumption that ethnic or cultural insiders are more trustworthy or loving than outsiders. It holds up the outsider as the example of what God requires.
What does the inclusion of foreigners in Jesus' genealogy mean? The Gospel of Matthew includes Ruth the Moabite and Rahab the Canaanite in the genealogy of Jesus. Both are foreign women from peoples that Jewish tradition often regarded with suspicion or exclusion. Their inclusion in the line of Christ signals that the kingdom of God has never been the ethnic possession of a single people group. The Messiah himself comes from a line that includes the foreign women who were welcomed and embraced. Their presence in the genealogy is God's own statement about the place of the outsider in his purposes.
How should a Christian respond to their own xenophobic instincts? The Bible's counsel is not primarily about managing behavior but about the transformation of the heart. First John 4:18 identifies love as the force that drives out fear, which means that growing in love is the path away from xenophobia rather than simply deciding to behave differently. Practically, this involves the renewing of the mind through Scripture, deliberate exposure to and relationship with people from different backgrounds, the practice of philoxenia (love of the stranger), and honest confession of the fears and hierarchies that have formed through culture and experience. The goal is not the suppression of instinct but its replacement through the transformation that only the Spirit can accomplish.
