You Know What It Felt Like: The Commandment to Love the Convert
"Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Deuteronomy 10:19 commands love for the ger — the convert, the resident foreigner — and grounds that command in something Israel could not deny: its own experience. Two women from outside Israel entirely, Ruth the Moabite and Rahab the Canaanite, embody what this commandment looks like in practice — and both are named in the genealogy that leads, generations later, to the Messiah.
"For Ye Were Strangers in the Land of Egypt"
The verse before this one describes God's own character: He "loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment" (Deuteronomy 10:18). The commandment to Israel follows directly from it — love the ger, because that is what God does, and because Israel has direct personal knowledge of what it means to be one. "Ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" is not a hypothetical. It is Israel's own origin story, still close enough in memory throughout the Torah to be invoked as the reason for a law.
This is a different kind of grounding than "because I said so" or "because it benefits the community." The command rests on shared experience — you know what this felt like, so do not do it to others. The ger in Israel's midst is owed love not because the law happens to require it, but because Israel, of all people, knows exactly what is at stake for someone in that position.
"Thy People Shall Be My People"
Ruth is the Torah's command made into a person. A Moabite widow, with every reason and every social permission to return to her own people and her own gods, she instead declares to Naomi: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." This is not a marriage into Israel by birth or by treaty — it is a personal, voluntary, and total reorientation of identity, made by someone who had every reason to walk away.
Moab and Israel had a fraught history — the nation is the subject of restrictions discussed elsewhere in this series. And yet the Torah's most celebrated story of a ger becoming fully part of Israel is about a Moabite woman. By the end of her story, she is not merely tolerated — she is the great-grandmother of David (Ruth 4:17), woven into the line the rest of the Bible treats as central to its entire story.
Rahab's Declaration at Jericho
Rahab's story moves in the opposite direction from Ruth's, but arrives at the same place. She is a Canaanite, living in a city under threat from the very army whose spies she hides on her roof (Joshua 2:1-6). Nothing about her situation requires her to recognize Israel's God — if anything, every incentive points the other way. And yet she declares, before any covenant binds her to say so, that "the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath."
Both women — one Moabite, one Canaanite, from nations with whom Israel's relationship was complicated at best — become gerim not by accident of birth but by a deliberate turn toward Israel's God and Israel's people, made from outside, before any obligation compelled it. And Matthew 1:5 places both of them — Rahab and Ruth — directly in the genealogy that leads to the Messiah, alongside Tamar (see commandment #121).
Key Figures
Study Questions
Israel was commanded to love the ger because it had been the ger — and two women from the nations Israel most distrusted became living proof of what that love could become.
Open Deuteronomy 10:19 in Torah Reader