stranger

Distinctions

zar (זר)

Ibn Ezra (long commentary to Shemos 21:2): zar implies someone of the speaker's own nation but a different tribe within it. The Vilna Gaon (to Mishlei 27:2) reads the pasuk the same way. Malbim: a zar is from the familiar locality but counts as strange with respect to some particular matter, strange in one way only.

Malbim's own illustrations carry the point. A non-Kohen is a zar toward terumah and the korbanos he may not eat (Vayikra 22:10, 22:12-13), yet he is plainly no total stranger. A man other than a married woman's husband is a zar to her (Devarim 25:5, Yechezkel 16:32) because she is forbidden to him, and no more than that. Chazal derive mamzer from zar (Yevamos 76b), which fits: a mamzer is a full Jew, foreign only as regards marrying into unblemished lineage.

The same reasoning explains a Gemara. Tehillim 81:10 pairs el zar with el nechar, yet Shabbos 105b declines to read the first clause as literal idolatry and applies el zar to the yetzer hara. Since from a Jewish perspective no "other god" could be anything but wholly foreign, the word zar would have no place; the yetzer hara, on the other hand, is intimate (it lives inside a man) and estranged (it stands against everything the Torah is) at once.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim traces zar to the two-letter ז-ר, "estrangement, disconnection": the stranger is cut off from the society he finds himself in.

nachri (נכרי)

Ibn Ezra: from an entirely different nation. Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Wertheimer notes that nachri is several times set against a relative (Bereishis 31:15, Devarim 23:21). Malbim: a complete foreigner, from another land and another people, strange in many ways at once.

Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg: the root נ-כ-ר bears opposite senses, "recognizing" (makir, lehakir) and "not recognizing" (nachri), and a verb of the same root means to deny or repudiate (Devarim 32:27, Iyov 21:29). This is why the Mechilta (to Shemos 12:43) defines ben-neichar as any heretic who denies Hashem, Jew or not.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim holds that nachri and zar denote the same degree of estrangement and differ only in what their roots fix on. Nachri is tied to lehakir, recognition: meeting a nachri, one has no ready mental picture of him, and so feels the pull to find out who he is. Zar fixes on his disconnection from the society around him. One and the same man can be called both, depending which aspect is in view.

Mishlei (2:16, 5:20, 7:5) likens foreign wisdoms to a zarah and a nachriah. Sefer Chassidim 619: the nachriah is a non-Jewish woman, the zarah a Jewish one. Malbim reads the two as two kinds of wisdom: the zarah is a discipline outside Torah that a man may nonetheless press into Torah's service, as he could marry that woman were the procedure right; the nachriah is a wisdom that can never enhance Torah, as a Jew may never marry a non-Jewish woman, its heresies staying irreconcilable.

chiloni (חילוני)

The Targumim render Hebrew zar into Aramaic as chiloni (Onkelos to Shemos 29:33, 30:33), and nachri as nochrae (Targum to Devarim 17:15, Shmuel II 15:19, Mishlei 27:2); the Targum to Tehillim (81:10, 137:4) reverses the pair. The Midrash (Vayikra Rabbah 24:7) uses chiloni for a non-Kohen: a Kohen Gadol meets a chiloni on the road who asks to walk with him, and is told that a Kohen keeps to ritually pure paths and does not pass through cemeteries; join me at that standard or I walk alone. In Modern Hebrew chiloni is a secular Jew, estranged in exactly this sense, failing to live at the standard of the rest of the nation.

hedyot (הדיוט)

Frequent in the Mishnah in three senses: a commoner against the political or spiritual leadership (Nedarim 5:5, Sanhedrin 7:10, Horayos 3:2-3); an ordinary non-professional against a skilled craftsman (Moed Katan 1:8, Bava Metzia 4:4, Keilim 26:1); and as a modifier, Kohen hedyot, the ordinary Kohen against the Kohen Gadol (Yoma 7:5, Yevamos 2:4, Sotah 8:3). A Greek loanword, from the word that also gave English "idiot," but the Hebrew carries none of that sense.

Rendering guidance

• Zar in Kodashim or terumah: non-Kohen, always. Elsewhere: stranger or outsider, and where the estrangement is partial, "one who is a stranger to it."
• Nachri: foreigner or gentile according to context; ben-neichar, an alien (Mechilta: a denier).
• Hedyot: commoner, layman, or ordinary as a modifier. Never "idiot."
• Chiloni in the Targum or Midrash: whatever zar was rendered in that passage. In a modern context, secular.
• Trap: English "stranger" absorbs both zar and nachri, and the pesukim that use them together are exactly the pesukim where that ruins the sense. Mishlei 27:2, "let a zar praise you and not your own mouth, a nachri and not your own lips," is climactic: render it "an outsider... a stranger from elsewhere," keeping the widening distance. The same holds at Yeshayahu 28:21, 61:5, Ovadiah 1:11, and Tehillim 81:10.
• Trap: do not import "gentile" into zar. The zar is normally a Jew.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Strange Aliens," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 19 Iyar 5781 (2021-05-01): raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/9192-strange-aliens.md. Primary loci: Mishlei 2:16, 5:10, 5:20, 7:5, 20:16, 27:2; Yeshayahu 28:21, 61:5; Ovadiah 1:11; Tehillim 81:10, 137:4; Shemos 21:2 (Ibn Ezra, long commentary), 12:43 with the Mechilta, 29:33, 30:33; Vayikra 19:2, 22:10, 22:12-13; Devarim 17:15, 23:21, 25:5, 32:27; Bereishis 31:15, 42:7; Yechezkel 16:32; Iyov 21:29; Shmuel II 15:19; Yevamos 76b; Shabbos 105b; Vayikra Rabbah 24:7; Sefer Chassidim 619; Vilna Gaon to Mishlei 27:2.