In the exodus story the word appears in both the masculine and feminine in the account of how Moses instructs the Israelites to ask their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold items before their exodus from Egypt.16 The word there refers precisely to non-Israelites. On the other hand, in the story of Moses’ early life in Egypt, when he intervenes between two “Hebrews” who are fighting, he says to the one at fault, “Why do you strike your rē‘a?”17 So in that episode it refers to an Israelite.
In short, the word rē‘a is used to refer to an Israelite, a Canaanite, an Egyptian, or to everyone on earth. And still people say that “Love your rē‘a as yourself” means just your fellow Israelite. When the Ten Commandments include one that says: “You shall not bear false witness against your rē‘a” (Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 5:17), do they think that this meant that it was okay to lie in a trial if the defendant was a foreigner—even though elsewhere, as we saw, the law forbids Israel to “bend the judgment of an alien”? When another of the Ten Commandments says not to covet your rē‘a’s wife (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:20), do they think that this meant that it was okay to covet a Hittite’s wife—even though elsewhere the Bible condemns King David for doing just that? David desires Bathsheba, who is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and the prophet Nathan brings God’s condemnation for David’s behavior.18
AN ERROR OF CONTEXT
So, again, from where did this idea come that one is supposed to love only one’s own group? Some get it from context. When we read it with the preceding line, it says:
You shall not take revenge, and you shall not keep on at the children of your people.
And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Since the line before it is about “the children of your people,” and the two lines were put together into a single verse when verse numbers were added to the Bible, some have assumed that the “love your neighbor as yourself” line must also be just about “the children of your people.” Why? No reason at all. In fact, read the chapter, Leviticus 19, carefully. Coming near the very center of the Torah, it is a remarkable mixture of laws of all kinds. It goes back and forth between ethical laws and ritual laws: sacrifice, heresy, injustice, mixing seeds, wearing mixed fabrics (shaatnez), consulting the dead, gossip, robbing, molten idols, caring for the poor. It has everything! I tell my students: if you are on a desert island and can have only one chapter of the Bible with you, take Leviticus 19. And its laws all come mixed in between each other. No line can be judged by what comes before it or after it. And remember, there are no verse numbers or periods or commas in the original. And people want to use context to judge the meaning of this line?! That is baseless.
The biblical scholar Harry Orlinsky made the context argument in 1974.19 He said, “Alas,” he could not see any way around it. As he was a respected biblical scholar, he was followed by others. Robert Wright cited him in The Evolution of God.20 (Wright had consulted with me on the matter of loving the alien, but unfortunately we did not discuss the neighbor verse, so I did not get to caution him about this.) Hector Avalos also followed Orlinsky, saying, “as Orlinsky has deftly noted . . .”21 Look at the Internet and you will find numerous sites quoting his “deftly noted” remark. It was not deft. It actually was not defended at all.
Indeed, there is context and there is context. As we saw, in the full context of the first books of the Bible, starting with creation and with caring for all the families of the earth, we would not imagine the verse about loving your neighbor to apply only to one’s own people. And in the full context of the occurrences of the word rē‘a, too, we would never take the verse about loving your neighbor to mean: now that is just if your neighbor has the same religion as you. These people who have been reading the verse as meaning just-your-own-kind were both misreading the immediate context of the passage and completely missing its total context in the Bible.
The same undefended mistake of context was made by John Hartung, a professor of anesthesiology.22 He in turn was trusted by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling The God Delusion, saying,
“Love thy neighbour” didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only “Love another Jew.” The point is devastatingly made by the American physician and evolutionary anthropologist John Hartung.23
It was not devastating. Hartung emphasized the importance of context, but he then used only the one verse (quoted above), even though he was aware that the joining of its two statements was done by those who created numbered verses centuries after the Bible was written. And, reading the Bible only in translation, he did not understand the meaning of the word rē‘a. Regarding the debates between atheists and theists, if Dawkins thinks he knows better about the question of the existence of a God than theologians and religious people, then that is between him and them. But when he presents himself as knowing something better about a Hebrew term in the Bible, a book that he cannot read unless someone translates it for him, now that is something else. When he denigrates the Bible and the Jews by saying that one of their very greatest gifts—“love your neighbor as yourself”—was no gift but was a piece of ethnic superiority, then it is my job as a Bible scholar to set the record straight. It would be one thing if Hartung and Dawkins made some little mistake about the meaning of a verse in the Bible. People do that all the time. But they picked a big verse, a verse that makes all the difference in the world, a verse with a tremendous context. And then they used their uninformed view of that verse to disparage the Bible and the persons who wrote it. That is irresponsible in a scholar. The bottom line is simply that they were incorrect in claiming that “love your neighbor” meant anything limited or negative. In this book we have seen the fruits of two revolutions that are still taking place in biblical studies: archaeology and critical biblical scholarship: literary, historical, linguistic, and anthropological. We can be generous and say that Dawkins and others did not know the extent to which these revolutions have enriched our understanding. Many people did not know. Let us grant the maximum: that they made an honest mistake because they did not know of the tremendous leaps that have been made in the lifetimes of all of us living now. Fair enough. But now we know. So let us just not repeat this mistake again. Something extraordinary happened in ancient Israel. The writers of the Bible who came from the stock of those who had experienced the exodus bequeathed to us all something tremendous: Treat the alien the same. Love your neighbor as yourself. This piece of wisdom has reached us from a text written over two millennia ago. And if we are right in our analysis, it derived from an event over three millennia ago. Now we no longer need to argue over whether love of neighbor really means what we thought. It does. Perhaps now we can use our time on trying more than ever to live it.
I shall say it again: I recognize that the Bible also contains well-known passages that involve violence or cruelty or unequal treatment. Not only do I not want to smooth over such things; I have tried to present both sides of such things. One does not need to deny what is troubling in order to pay respect to what is heartening.
IN THE END: “ETHICAL MONOTHEISM”
The exodus led both to monotheism and to the exceptional attitude toward others. The two great consequences of this really early stage of religion were a theological one, namely monotheism, and an ethical one, namely love of both one’s fellow and the alien. The two—ethics and monotheism—went hand in hand from the beginning. And this we call: ethical monotheism. This is funny coming from me of all people. I never liked the term “ethical monotheism,” and I have never used it in my teaching or writing. Did it not imply that people who were not monotheists were unethical? Are pagans on average less ethical than monotheists? Are atheists or agnostics less ethical than monotheists? Was the whole world really unethical until the monotheists came along? Was Hammurapi unethical? Was Socrates unethical? With such thoughts as these I rejected the claim that we were superior in ethics if we were monotheistic. But I have changed my thinking—or more accurately: I have nuanced it—in light of this new picture of the
exodus, the merger of Yahweh and El, the rejection of the gods and of the goddess, and the parallel development of the love of aliens and the insistence on treating them equally. Not everyone has to be a monotheist. But perhaps nearly everyone can treat his or her neighbors with kindness. In the last chapter I declined to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. Monotheists are not necessarily superior to others morally. But monotheism and ethical treatment of all humans, whether they are members of the group or not, were both by-products of a common historical development. And that historical development was: the Exodus from Egypt. It did not have two million people who experienced it. But millions of us have been its heirs.
We still are asking what “Love your neighbor as yourself” means. What does it mean to command a feeling? Can you really command someone to feel love? And what does it mean to love others as yourself? What, exactly, does that mean that we are supposed to do? Here is what it means to me. To try to feel inside me what another human being is feeling. Empathy. Sympathy. Compassion.
That feeling is foreshadowed near the beginning of the Bible’s story. Abraham’s seed are to act in a way that will bring blessing to all the earth’s families. Can we not all take on the role of Abraham’s seed? Not just Jews. Not just Christians. Not just Muslims.
That feeling is expressed in the reason for treating the alien right: “because you know the alien’s soul.” So we are commanded to love him or her. The last of the Ten Commandments is: you shall not covet. So the Decalogue too ends in a command about a feeling. And, for the record, let us not forget how the Ten Commandments begin: “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” They premise the whole thing on the exodus from Egypt! Then the first commandment that follows is “no other gods,” and the tenth is not to covet. The Ten Commandments make a perfect finale for the path we have been following. They go from (1) being brought out of Egypt to (2) monotheism to (3) not coveting what belongs to someone else, your rē‘a, your neighbor.
It has been over three thousand years. Why does anybody care all that much whether the exodus happened or not? Why care whether it happened “the way it is told in the Bible”? Why? Because history matters. What happened matters. Understanding how ideas got started and why people hang on to them matters. The exodus of a group of people from Egypt happened. It made a difference. It still makes a difference.
APPENDIX A
FROM EGYPT TO MIDIAN
The Oppression in Egypt and the Revelation in Midian
I have distinguished the sources, thus:
The E text is in italics.
The J text is in standard typeface.
The P source is in SMALL CAPS.
One can read each source separately or read the whole text together.1
EXODUS 1:7–3:12
1:7. AND THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL WERE FRUITFUL AND TEEMED AND MULTIPLIED AND BECAME VERY, VERY POWERFUL, AND THE LAND WAS FILLED WITH THEM.
8. And a new king rose over Egypt—who did not know Joseph. 9. And he said to his people, “Here, the people of the children of Israel is more numerous and powerful than we. 10. Come on, let’s be wise toward it or else it will increase; and it will be, when war will happen, that it, too, will be added to our enemies and will war against us and go up from the land.”
11. And they set commanders of work-companies over it in order to degrade it with their burdens. And they built storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses. 12. And the more they degraded it, the more it increased, and the more it expanded; and they felt a disgust at the children of Israel. 13. AND EGYPT MADE THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL SERVE WITH HARSHNESS; 14. AND THEY MADE THEIR LIVES BITTER WITH HARD WORK, WITH MORTAR AND WITH BRICKS AND WITH ALL WORK IN THE FIELD—ALL THEIR WORK THAT THEY DID FOR THEM—WITH HARSHNESS.
15. And the King of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives—of whom the name of one was Shiphrah and the name of the second was Puah—16. and he said, “When you deliver the Hebrew women, and you look at the two stones, if it’s a boy then kill him, and if it’s a girl then she’ll live.” 17. And the midwives feared God and did not do what the King of Egypt had spoken to them, and they kept the children alive. 18. And the King of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing and kept the children alive?”
19. And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrews aren’t like the Egyptian women, because they’re animals! Before the midwife comes to them, they’ve given birth!”
20. And God was good to the midwives. And the people increased, and they became very powerful, 21. and it was because the midwives feared God, and He made them households.
22. And Pharaoh commanded all of his people, saying, “Every son who is born: you shall throw him into the Nile. And every daughter you shall keep alive.”
2:1. And a man from the house of Levi went and took a daughter of Levi. 2. And the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. And she saw him, that he was good, and she concealed him for three months. 3. And she was not able to conceal him anymore, and she took an ark made of bulrushes for him and smeared it with bitumen and with pitch and put the boy in it and put it in the reeds by the bank of the Nile. 4. And his sister stood still at a distance to know what would be done to him. 5. And the Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe at the Nile, and her girls were going alongside the Nile, and she saw the ark among the reeds and sent her maid, and she took it. 6. And she opened it and saw him, the child: and here was a boy crying, and she had compassion on him, and she said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”
7. And his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nursing woman from the Hebrews for you, and she’ll nurse the child for you?”
8. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” And the girl went and called the child’s mother. 9. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse him for me, and I’ll give your pay.” And the woman took the boy and nursed him. 10. And the boy grew older, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses, and she said, “Because I drew him from the water.”
11. And it was in those days, and Moses grew older, and he went out to his brothers and saw their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, one of his brothers. 12. And he turned this way and that way and saw that there was no man, and he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13. And he went out on the second day, and here were two Hebrew men fighting. And he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your companion?”
14. And he said, “Who made you a commander and judge over us? Are you saying you’d kill me—the way you killed the Egyptian?!”
And Moses was afraid and said, “The thing is known for sure.” 15. And Pharaoh heard this thing and sought to kill Moses, and Moses fled from Pharaoh’s presence and lived in the land of Midian.
And he sat by a well. 16. And a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock, 17. and the shepherds came and drove them away. And Moses got up and saved them and watered their flock. 18. And they came to Reuel, their father, and he said, “Why were you so quick to come today?”
19. And they said, “An Egyptian man rescued us from the shepherds’ hand, and he drew water for us and watered the flock, too.”
20. And he said to his daughters, “And where is he? Why is this that you’ve left the man? Call him, and let him eat bread.”
21. And Moses was content to live with the man. And he gave Zipporah, his daughter, to Moses, 22. and she gave birth to a son, and he called his name Gershom, “Because,” he said, “I was an alien in a foreign land.”
23. And it was after those many days, and the king of Egypt died.
AND THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL GROANED FROM THE WORK, AND THEY CRIED OUT, AND THEIR WAIL WENT UP TO GOD FROM THE WORK. 24. AND GOD HEARD THEIR MOANING, AND GOD REMEMBERED HIS COVENANT WITH ABRAHAM, WITH ISAAC, AND WITH JACOB. 25. AND GOD SAW THE CHILDRE
N OF ISRAEL. AND GOD KNEW!
3:1. And Moses had been shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian. And he drove the flock at the far side of the wilderness, and he came to the Mountain of God, to Horeb.
2. And an angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a fire’s flame from inside a bush. And he looked, and here: the bush was burning in the fire, and the bush was not consumed! 3. And Moses said, “Let me turn and see this great sight. Why doesn’t the bush burn?”
4. And Yahweh saw that he turned to see. And God called to him from inside a bush, and He said, “Moses, Moses.”
And he said, “I’m here.”
5. And He said, “Don’t come close here. Take off your shoes from your feet, because the place on which you’re standing: it’s holy ground.” 6. And He said, “I’m your father’s God, Abraham’s God, Isaac’s God, and Jacob’s God.” And Moses hid his face, because he was afraid of looking at God. 7. And Yahweh said, “I’ve seen the degradation of my people who are in Egypt, and I’ve heard their wail on account of their taskmasters, because I know their pains. 8. And I’ve come down to rescue them from Egypt’s hand and to bring them up from that land to a good and widespread land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.
9. “And now, here, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me, and also I’ve seen the oppression that Egypt is causing them. 10. And now go, and I’ll send you to Pharaoh, and you shall bring out my people, the children of Israel, from Egypt.”
The Exodus Page 18