“For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” —1 Chronicles 29:15

The Hebrew word translated as “sojourner” in the King James Bible has no exact equivalent in English. While for us the concept of a sojourn suggests an intentional exploration of a chosen place or an evocative flight of imagination, the Hebrew word holds more somber meanings: stranger, foreigner, alien. God’s commandment to the Hebrews is that they embrace the strangers in their midst and treat them fairly. In the American experience, people who were enslaved could always only be sojourners in the Hebrew sense. Even if they lived out their lives in one place, the threat of forced dislocation loomed: they were aliens in their own land.