a person in unfamiliar surroundings
—When I arrived at the university campus from my small-town home, I felt like a stranger in a strange land.

The descendants of Israel, called Israelites, grew in number while they lived in Egypt. In fact, there came to be so many of them that the Egyptians became afraid. A new pharaoh, who didn’t know about Joseph, made them slaves, forcing them to work making bricks and laboring in the fields. He even told the midwives to kill the Israelites’ newborn baby boys. One of these babies was Moses, whose mother put him in a basket and hid him in the water near the shore of the Nile River. The pharaoh’s daughter found him, felt sorry for him, and raised him as her own son.

When Moses grew up, he was angry at how the Egyptians treated his people. After killing an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite, he ran away to the unfamiliar territory of Midian, where he met Reuel, the priest of that area.

Moses agreed to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. When she bore a son, Moses named him Gershom, for he said, “I have become a resident foreigner in a foreign land [a stranger in a strange land—KJV].” (Exodus 2:21,22)

The name Gershom sounds like the Hebrew for “an alien there.”