The phrase “stranger in a strange land” is something I thought about a lot this past February.

The phrase actually goes back about three-thousand years. I’m not kidding. It’s from a short passage in the Book of Exodus. It’s a reference to a son born to Moses and his wife (they named the baby Gershom, which means “stranger”). A few millennia later, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein borrowed the phrase for the title of his 1961 novel about a human who comes to earth after spending the first 25 years of his life on Mars. Stranger in a Strange Land was the first science fiction novel to make The New York Times best seller list for fiction, and it’s probably Heinlein’s best known book.