Why does the Bible call Abraham a stranger and sojourner?

Because Abraham said it first. Standing before the Hittite assembly at Hebron, with the body of his wife still unburied behind him, the father of the faith opened his negotiation with a self-description:

גֵּר וְתוֹשָׁב אָנֹכִי עִמָּכֶם תְּנוּ לִי אֲחֻזַּת קֶבֶר עִמָּכֶם וְאֶקְבְּרָה מֵתִי מִלְּפָנָי

ger ve-toshav anokhi imakhem tenu li achuzat-qever imakhem ve-eqberah meti millefanai

«A sojourner and a resident-alien I am with you; give me a possession of a tomb with you, and I will bury my dead from before me.» — Genesis 23:4

Two Hebrew words carry the confession. The first, ger (גֵּר, H1616), names the temporary inhabitant — the foreigner who lives among a people not his own. The second, toshav (תּוֹשָׁב, H8453), names the resident-alien who has settled but holds no civic standing. Abraham invents the second word at this very verse — it is its first appearance in the canon, coined at the gate of a city he was promised but does not own.

The pair ger + toshav co-occurs in only seven verses across the entire Hebrew Bible — and every one of them sits in a covenant-status or grave-and-mortality context. After Abraham at the cave, God himself picks up the same vocabulary on the lips of the Law:

כִּי לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי

«For the land is mine; for you are sojourners and resident-aliens with me.» — Leviticus 25:23

Notice what shifts. Abraham said «with you» (the Hittites). God says «with me.» The patriarch's posture at his wife's grave becomes the constitutional standing of the entire nation under the Sinai covenant. Israel does not own the land; Israel holds it as a sojourner before God. David picks up the same pair in his lament: «for I am a sojourner with you, a resident-alien, like all my fathers» (Psalm 39:12).

When the Greek translators of the Septuagint rendered Abraham's confession, they coined a phrase that the apostles would never forget: paroikos kai parepidemos (πάροικος καὶ παρεπίδημος) — «sojourner and stranger.» The second word, parepidēmos (G3927), occurs in only five verses across the entire Greek Bible. The five are Abraham at Genesis 23:4, David at Psalm 38:13 LXX, the patriarchs in Hebrews 11:13, and Peter's two letters:

«Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and strangers (πάροικους καὶ παρεπιδήμους) to abstain from the passions of the flesh.» — 1 Peter 2:11

This is the only New Testament verse pairing both halves of Abraham's Greek confession verbatim. Peter takes the patriarch's word at the cave and applies it directly to the diaspora church.

Paul then closes the circle by inversion. To the Gentile believers at Ephesus he writes: «So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners (ξένοι καὶ πάροικοι), but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God» (Ephesians 2:19). What Abraham confessed himself to be, the Gentile in Christ is «no longer.»

The pilgrim theology of the New Testament hangs on the closed set of those five verses — and every one of them traces back to Abraham at his wife's graveside. The full study walks the chain in canonical order and shows how the same eight Hebrew words bracket the patriarchal book from Sarah's death to Jacob's burial.