Love Thy Neighbor

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke [reason with] thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.
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.

-- Leviticus 19: 17-18 (KJV)

You may think that Jesus invented the phrase "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matthew 5: 43, etc.), but like the rest of us He actually quotes the Hebrew Bible.

So to say that Jesus replaced the harsh and rigorous Torah of Judaism with a new covenant of Love is to oversimplify -- and to insult Hebrew culture. True, Yahweh demands "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," but He also insists that His people respect and forgive their neighbors. On the other hand, He means "neighbors" more literally than Jesus does. He Himself hardly "loved" the Egyptians who held His people captive, nor will He object as the Israelites wage bloody war against their neighbors, the Canaanites, in the Promised Land.

In short, by "neighbors" the Lord means neighbors -- that is, other Israelites, and more specifically members of one's own community or tribe. Nonetheless, He originates a powerful idea: that you should treat your fellow as you yourself would be treated. This is perhaps the oldest definition of empathy, and it marks the Israelites as a people capable of introspection.

If we cannot credit Jesus with the words themselves, we at least owe Him their modern meaning. The phrase is usually quoted today -- often in an irritating fashion -- to mean "love thy (potential) enemy" as well as "love thy kith and kin." Such usage is faithful to the New Testament if not to Leviticus.

But the teachings of Jesus have often proved too difficult for most mortals, and His expansion of "love thy neighbor" would later be greeted skeptically. In 1640 George Herbert recorded as a proverb this qualified version: "Love your neighbor, yet pull not down your hedge" -- in short, "No Tresspassing." (Ben Franklin liked the new version, incorporating it into his 1754 edition of Poor Richard's Almanac.) Woodrow Wilson likewise spoke practically during a 1912 speech in New York: "No one can love his neighbor on an empty stomach." Playwright Eugene O'Neill went furthest of all in The Great God Brown (1926), penning the warning, "Fear thy neighbor as thyself" (Act 2, scene 3).

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!