Love Thy "Neighbor"

Since my earliest Sunday and Bible school days, I had been taught that the greatest instruction of God was to "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18)¹. Having grown up on the Ten Commandments, the most known passages of the Old Testament, I now wondered how such Old Testament genocide could be understood in light of "thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt not steal," and "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house" (Exodus 20:13, 15, and 17)².

I decided to look up the scripture that discusses loving thy neighbor as thyself. I found it in Leviticus 19:18 in the Revised Standard Version Old Testament that had belonged to my grandmother. It read

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but shall love your neighbor as yourself… (Leviticus 19:18)³

The following is the Jewish translation of the text for their bible according to Hebrew texts:

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. Love your fellow as yourself. -TANAKH⁴

The verse made it clear that neighbors were "the sons of your own people" - in other words, neighbor meant a fellow Israelite and not other peoples. The most recent Jewish translation of the verse uses "your countrymen" in place of "the sons of your own people."

The Talmud explains in Baba Kamma 113b⁵ that the term neighbor specifically does not apply to a Gentile. The Jewish Encyclopedia says it clearly, "Here the Gentile is excepted, as he is not a neighbor…"⁶ Years later I read an article by Dr. John Hartung in which he explained that the Ten Commandments' legal proscriptions were clearly directed at offenses against a "neighbor," which excluded non-Israelites. He pointed out that the scrolls from which the Ten Commandments were translated had no periods, commas, or first-word capitalization. Therefore, the part about "Thou shalt not kill" becomes part of a larger context. It could read:⁷

Thou shalt not kill, neither shalt though commit adultery, neither shalt thou steal, neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor, neither shalt thou covet your neighbor's wife and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.

So who are the Israelites proscribed from killing? "Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor… the children of thy people, the sons of your own people, your fellow Israelites." Now the mass killing and theft of other people's lands as commanded by Moses became very consistent with the laws of the Ten Commandments.