Vagabond

A vagabond in Scripture denotes a wanderer or fugitive driven from home and community, most memorably in Genesis 4:12, where God's sentence on Cain reads, "You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth" (R.V.). The word comes from the Latin vagabundus and is not used as a term of mere social contempt in the biblical text but carries the solemn weight of exile from the divine presence and the security of land and kin. In Psalm 109:10 the same fate—children wandering and begging—is invoked as a covenantal curse on the wicked.

The word appears in the New Testament in Acts 19:13, where the KJV describes certain Jewish exorcists as "vagabond Jews," meaning itinerant or traveling practitioners who attempted to invoke the name of Jesus without genuine faith. Cain's curse became a type of spiritual rootlessness in later biblical theology: exile from God's presence is the deepest homelessness, and the gospel reversal of that exile is central to the promise of a new creation where the wandering is ended.