nor social analysis with unthinking obedience. They change the calculation of common good. They place realism in a framework of faith and hope.10
Further suggested readings:
Bauman, Sermon on the Mount
Crosby, Spirituality of the Beatitudes
Crosby, Thy Will be Done
Davies, Setting of the Sermon on the Mount
Hunter, Design for Life
Jeremias, Sermon on the Mount
Minear, “Bible’s Authority in the Congregation.”
1. Previously published as “Jesus’ Life-Style Sermon and Prayer.” There is some overlap with the chapter, “Political Axioms of the Sermon the Mount,” in my Original Revolution, 34–54.
2. Tolstoy, What I Believe. Tolstoy expanded his argument in several fuller exegetical works on the Gospels.
3. The best surveys of the great diversity of perspectives are McArthur, Understanding the Sermon, and Bauman, Sermon on the Mount. Further sources are provided in the bibliography.
4. One very important component of interpretation—which the format of an essay like this, based on the lectionary and limited in length, must lay aside—is the critical consideration of the contexts, both literary and historical. Some such matters were dealt with more adequately in the other text named in note 1 above. [This footnote is missing from the first edition. —Ed.]
5. “The Kingdom is at hand” characterizes the first preaching of John and the first preaching of Jesus, just before our text. “Great Reversal” is one way to characterize the mood of that proclamation.
6. This notion of a shift between the testaments is especially at home in the post- and anti-Constantinian renewal movements: i.e., the Czech Brethren, the Anabaptists, and Tolstoy.
7. Classical Lutheran theology described this as the usus elenchthicus legis, the “condemning use of the law.” A rough analogy to that is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought about the “relevance of an impossible ideal.”
8. Jewish reverence for the proper names of God prescribed that those names not be pronounced. Thus the noun “Name” came to be used as substitute for the unspoken proper names. Therefore to “sanctify the Name” means to ascribe holiness to God himself, and in later rabbinic thought it came to mean suffering for that witness.
9. See my Body Politics, 14ff.
10. [See bibliography for complete title and publication details. —Ed.]
3
“Thou Shalt Not Kill” (Exodus 20:13)
“Interpretation” as a theological task1 is most at home with the kind of inductive exposition that can make the most of the longitudinal unity and thrust of a text as passage, long enough to enable the analysis of texture and structure. Here, however, we must deal with a text of the kind that affords the least occasion to draw from its literary structure the sort of guidance that is normally provided by the wider framework of a passage of narrative or prophecy. The briefer a text is, and the more it has been bent and polished by frequent ritual use or by long redactional evolution, the more likely it is that it existed independently before it was placed in this setting, the less any observations about the context can tell us. Here we have only two words, one of them the simple “not.”
Some redaction-critical wisdom might be found if we could be sure why some of the Ten Commandments are brief, like this one, while others are extended by itemizations, or by explanations and motivations. It probably is important that most of them, like this one, are negative, while two are affirmative. Even the standard catechetical division into “two tables,” one of duties to sanctify the Name of YHWH and one of duties to the neighbor, might point to some underlying redactional intent that could throw more light on what this particular prohibition means.
It must mean something that “YHWH thy God” speaks in the first person in the first two Words, shifts to the third person in the next three, and is not named in the second table. But no analysis of these formal differences is solid or reliable enough to lead us beyond the canonical text in understanding specifically the sixth commandment.2
Nor will research on the lexical level help much to narrow for us the meaning field of rtz, as it might be distinguished from other verbs more currently used in ancient Hebrew for slaughtering animals, for executing offenders, and for killing humans in war.
That this command did not prohibit other forms of taking human life is common sense on the contextual level, on the grounds that other laws elsewhere in the “Mosaic” corpus command those lethal activities. A sanction of death for profaning the holy mountain is present within this very narrative.3 As those who passed on this tradition saw it, those other kinds of (what we call) “killing” were not incompatible with this prohibition. Yet the assumption I have just made, broadly shared in our culture, that the total corpus must properly serve to interpret the Decalogue, may become petitionary at a certain point. This assumption might just conceivably not apply to Decalogues, i.e., to the particular genre of the covenantal charter text. The United States Bill of Rights is not necessarily compatible with all of the legislation or with all the administrative practices that have stood and still stand on the books beside it. In fact the function of a Bill of Rights is that it may be called on to stand in judgment on both laws and customs with which it had previously co-existed for generations. A charter text may stand in judgment, once or perennially, over the positive laws and customs that surround it, rather than letting the proper understandings of its essential meaning be limited by them. Yet to argue that point regarding the Decalogue in general or “do not kill” in particular would be beyond my present intent. I refer to these matters only as part of acknowledging the severe limits of our definitional resources.
In the text as it now stands, Exod 19:1—20:21 represents a unified narrative, with one clear setting, the encounter on the mountain. The setting recurs in chapter 24 and in 32, whereas the interspersed material is a broad mix of social (vv. 21–23) and ritual (vv. 25–31) prescriptions.
The beginning of chapter 19 is a clear narrative hinge. YHWH speaks in a different way from before. For the first time since 3:1—4:17 he speaks in a special place. Thus these two chapters are literarily set on a pedestal, as the central event toward which the escape through the sea and the wilderness wanderings were leading:
I have carried you by eagle’s wings and brought you here to me. If only you will now listen to me and keep my covenant. . . .
To remind ourselves even hastily of all the meanings of covenant and of the rootage of all Torah in providence and hope, as it applies to all the commands, would take us too far. The terrifying “touch
