Love thy neighbor

The sentence is centuries older than the Gospels. It sits in Leviticus 19, a chapter that opens with the call "Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy" and then turns to practical rules. Leave the corners of the field for the poor and the stranger. Do not hold back a hired worker's wages overnight. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind.

Verse 18 arrives in that list, and the King James Version gives it like this: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD." The verse before it reads: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him."

Read the two together and the command has a specific job. It addresses the moment after somebody has wronged you. You are told to say so openly, to refuse revenge, and to refuse to nurse the grievance. Love is the alternative offered to a grudge. That is a harder setting than a greeting card suggests.

The Hebrew word behind neighbor is rea. Brown-Driver-Briggs lists a close sense, friend or intimate, and a weaker sense, fellow or fellow citizen, even another person with whom one stands in reciprocal relations. It cites Leviticus 19:18 under the weaker sense. The noun covers the people you deal with, whether or not they live next door.

One more detail keeps the reader honest. Verse 19, the very next line, forbids sowing a field with mixed seed and wearing a garment of mixed linen and wool. The chapter places the love command beside laws most Christians no longer keep, which is why the New Testament use of the verse matters so much in the sections below.

Verse 18 names "the children of thy people." Stop reading at that verse and the command seems to cover fellow Israelites only. The chapter keeps going. Verses 33 and 34 in the American Standard Version read: "And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt: I am Jehovah your God."

The phrase love him as thyself is repeated almost word for word, and this time the object is an outsider living among the people. The reason given is memory. Israel was once the foreigner.

Jewish interpreters argued over the scope of verse 18 long before anyone wrote it on a coffee mug. The Sifra, an early rabbinic commentary on Leviticus, reads the phrase about the children of your people as limiting the ban on revenge. In the Sifra it is Rabbi Akiva who calls love your neighbor as yourself "an all-embracing principle in the Torah," in Rabbi Shraga Silverstein's English. Ben Azzai answers with Genesis 5:1, "This is the book of the generations of Adam," and calls that "an even greater principle."

Ben Azzai's verse is about the descent of every human being from one ancestor made in God's likeness. Read that way, setting it above Leviticus 19:18 widens the circle to everyone. Akiva's principle, read by itself, keeps the focus on the neighbor the verse names. Both men are honored teachers in the same tradition, and the Sifra records the disagreement without settling it.

The Christian reading inherited this argument. When the lawyer in Luke asks who his neighbor is, he is asking a question his own scriptures had left open to debate.

In Matthew 22 the Pharisees regroup after the Sadducees have been silenced, and a lawyer asks a question "tempting him," in the King James wording. Which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus answers with love of God and then adds a second that nobody asked for: "And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Mark 12 tells it with a warmer tone. A scribe hears Jesus answer others well and asks which commandment is first of all. Jesus begins with the Shema, Hear, O Israel, then gives both commands and says "There is none other commandment greater than these." The scribe agrees and adds that loving God and neighbor "is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God.

Luke 10 reverses the roles. A lawyer asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him what is written in the law, and the lawyer is the one who joins Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 into a single answer. Jesus replies, "Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live."

Matthew also has Jesus add the neighbor command to the commandments he lists for the rich young man in 19:19. So the same command appears as a test answered in Matthew 22, a point of agreement in Mark, and a correct answer that leads to a harder question in Luke. Only Luke continues past the agreement, and that continuation is where the Samaritan comes in.

Luke gives the motive for the next question plainly. The King James reads: "But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" The lawyer wants the boundary drawn, so he knows where his obligation ends.

The answer begins: "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side."

"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him."

"And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."

The choice of a Samaritan carried weight with the first audience. The Gospels themselves record the friction. In John 4:9 a Samaritan woman is surprised that a Jew would ask her for a drink, and the narrator adds that Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. One chapter before the parable, in Luke 9:52-54, a Samaritan village refuses to receive Jesus because he is heading for Jerusalem, and James and John ask whether they should call down fire on it.

Why the priest and the Levite walked past is a long-running dispute. Geza Vermes points to ritual purity: contact with a corpse made a person unclean, and the man looked half dead. Joel Green answers that both men were going down from Jerusalem, so their temple service was likely over. The parable itself gives no reason for either man.

Then Jesus turns the question around. The lawyer asked who his neighbor was, meaning whom he was required to love. Jesus closes with this, in the King James: "Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?"

The question has flipped. The wounded man was never in doubt; nobody in the story asks whether he deserves help. The question is which traveler became a neighbor by what he did. The American Standard Version makes the movement visible: "Which of these three, thinkest thou, proved neighbor unto him that fell among the robbers?" The World English Bible says "seemed to be a neighbor."

The Greek word is plesion, literally the one near. Thayer's Greek lexicon notices the same shift inside the passage. In verse 29 it reads the word in a passive sense, someone "worthy to be regarded as a friend and companion." In verse 36 it reads it actively, "to perform the offices of a friend and companion." The lawyer asked a question about status. He was handed a question about conduct.

His answer is careful: "He that shewed mercy on him." He does not say the Samaritan. Given the hostility John 4:9 describes, that may be a man who cannot bring himself to name the hero. It may also be the general rule stated plainly, that whoever shows mercy has done what Leviticus asked. The words allow both. The last line is the same either way: "Go, and do thou likewise."

Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine, put the result in one sentence, here in the nineteenth-century English of the New Advent edition: "the name neighbor is a relative one, and no one can be neighbor except to a neighbor." The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 1932, speaks of "the duty of making oneself a neighbor to others." Both describe the same turn in Luke, where being a neighbor is something a person does on a road.

There is a second argument about this parable, and it is old. Origen, and after him Augustine, read it as an allegory. In Origen's version the wounded man is Adam, the robbers are hostile powers, the priest and Levite stand for the law and the prophets, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the Church, and the promised return is the second coming. Stained glass at Bourges and Sens tells the story this way.

John Calvin rejected that reading. In his commentary on the Gospels he says he has "no liking for any of these interpretations" and reads the parable as teaching a mutual obligation between all people, shown by an enemy's compassion toward a Jew. In the twentieth century C. H. Dodd and G. B. Caird dismissed Augustine's version of the allegory in similar terms and read the story as ethics.

The allegory is traditional in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where some icons give the Samaritan a cross-marked halo. Thomas Aquinas kept both readings together. He drew three points from the parable: the misery of the sinner, the pity of Christ toward the sinner, and the rule for imitation in the closing words, go, and do thou likewise.

You do not have to settle that dispute to read Luke 10:37. Whichever reading your tradition favors, the parable ends with a command addressed to the listener, and the command is about what to do.

The phrase as thyself has its own argument. Augustine thought it needed no separate command. In his words, there is "no need of a command that every man should love himself," because people already do. The verse takes that love for granted and uses it as the measure. The Hebrew is a single word, kamokha, like yourself, and the only command in the clause is love.

That leaves the reader with a fair test. Whatever care you would want if you were the one on the road, with the stripped clothes and the empty pockets, is the standard. Matthew 7:12 states the same principle positively: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." The Babylonian Talmud, at Shabbat 31a, records Hillel giving a would-be convert the negative form, do not do to your fellow what is hateful to you, and calling that the whole Torah.

Matthew 5:43 adds a complication people miss. Jesus says, "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy." Leviticus 19:18 contains no clause about hating an enemy, and Matthew does not say where the second half came from. What follows is clear: "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."

Put Matthew 5 next to Luke 10 and the two passages press in the same direction. One tells the listener to love the enemy. The other makes a member of a resented group the example of what love looks like.

Outside the Gospels the verse is quoted three more times, and each time it is used to sum up the rest. Romans 13:9 lists commandments against adultery, killing, stealing, and coveting, with false witness added in the King James, and then says that any other commandment "is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Verse 10 adds: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."

Galatians 5:14 says the same in fewer words: "For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." James 2:8 gives the verse a title, "the royal law," and uses it against the habit of giving a man with a gold ring a good seat while telling the poor man to stand.

First John adds a test that makes the abstract version hard to hold: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" The command keeps being pushed back toward the person in the room.

This verse gets used against people. Someone who is being hit or controlled at home is told that charity "Beareth all things," as 1 Corinthians 13:7 has it in the King James, and that loving the neighbor means putting up with it. Nothing in Leviticus 19 or Luke 10 says that. Leviticus 19:17, the line right before the famous one, commands open rebuke. The Samaritan did not handle everything alone; he paid an innkeeper and brought in help. And the measure of the command is as thyself, which assumes your own safety counts.

If you are in that situation in the United States, advocates at the National Domestic Violence Hotline answer at 1-800-799-7233, and by text at 88788 when you send the word START. Suicidal thoughts belong with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which takes calls and texts at 988 at any hour. If the danger is happening now, call 911.

For the verse itself, talk to a person with a name. A pastor, priest, or rabbi who knows you can help you think through what love requires in your own situation. PrayWithJesus.ai is software that a company makes, without any church's approval or authority to teach, so where your church teaches differently, follow your church.