The Christian discipline of receiving strangers, brethren, and travelers into one's home with food, lodging, and substantive fellowship. The Greek philoxenia literally means love of strangers. The biblical pattern is established in the OT patriarchs: Abraham's reception of the three visitors at the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18:1-8, the famous narrative in which the three turn out to be the LORD and two angels); Lot's reception of the angels in Sodom (Genesis 19:1-3); the Shunammite woman's deliberate accommodation of Elisha (2 Kings 4:8-10). The NT extends the discipline as obligatory: distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality (Romans 12:13); use hospitality one to another without grudging (1 Peter 4:9); Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares (Hebrews 13:2, recalling Abraham). Elders are particularly required to be hospitable (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). The Lord Jesus identifies Himself with the stranger: I was a stranger, and ye took me in (Matthew 25:35). The patriarchal-Reformed reader recovers hospitality as the substantive household discipline of opening the home to brethren and strangers with food, lodging, and the substantive fellowship of conversation around the table, the family worship in the evening, the breakfast the next morning. The household-economy patriarchal vision integrates hospitality structurally: the wife as given to hospitality, the father as the master of the household receiving the stranger, the children formed in the practice from an early age, the church-of-strangers learning the brotherhood of Christ around the dinner table.