However, use of the word “alien” for the Israelites in Egypt is interesting, they were there 400 years, all were serveral generations there and knew nothing of another home except Egypt; so what made them alien? It must have been that they were a distinct racial and cultural minority, that the majority thought of as “not one of us”, and should not be treated with all the rights and priviledges of the majority. That majority would have included many poor and underpriviledged that still thought of the Israelites as “aliens”, and treated them as such.

It might be good for the identifiable majority in America to ponder the above. What should my christian response be? I am in a strange possition, because although recently an alien, I was able to immediatly jump into that identifiable majority, and share all of its priviledges.

But with the laws being set up here in Exodus, many of them are to protect the rights of the minority – the poor, the immigrant, even one’s enemy. Obviously God thought that a society that operating strictly by majority rule would inevitably trample on the minority, so there must be laws in place to ensure that they are protected.

Interestingly, though, looking at 20-33 shows that, as important as it is to protect the rights of the minority, the Israelites are to be uncompromising when it comes to foreign gods, even if it means destroying the other nations. In some ways this seems contradictory, but God must have known what would happen to His people and His plan of salvation if the Israelites fell away from the true God and began to worship other gods. It seems that we must not allow protection of the rights of the minority to turn into an all-out tolerance of everything that causes us to lose our faith in God.