of 20:13ff. We must protect this numinous untouchable quality of all the neighbor’s rights against diversion by merely utilitarian or contractarian explanations.
There is a still more precise connection between the drama of Sinai, with the literally lethal presence of YHWH just beyond the fence (19:12) and the sacredness of life as the value hedged about by our particular prohibition. Especially is this sacred untouchability evident regarding the neighbor’s life or blood, as the life-protecting measures of Gen 4:15 and 9:5ff. also say. Why killing is wrong cannot be said more briefly, more pointedly, than by saying that human blood belongs to YHWH because humanity is created in the divine image.4 The neighbor’s life is tied to God’s own untouchability even more profoundly, by an even more fitting congruence, than obtains for the other values that the other prohibitions of the Decalogue protect.
The Immediate Legal Sense: Do Not Murder
If we grant that, on a legal level, this text in its ancient context did not exclude war nor judicial execution, just what kind of killing remains forbidden, and just why? We use the world “murder” to designate “forbidden killing,” but that is semantically circular. What kind of prohibition makes a killing “murder”? Its intention? Its contravening a positive law? Its not being authorized by a government? The root rtzh may be used for unintentional homicide (Deut 4:41–43; 19:1–13; Josh 20:3; Numbers 35). It may be used in the same sentence for both the crime and its punishment (Num 35:30, the only use of rtzh to designate an execution). Accidental killing is rtzh, and is forbidden, but when it has happened the offender is not to be killed in return.
Yet to bring in the question of how the offense should be punished is a distraction. Both how the commandments are taught and how they are enforced are separate questions from identifying what they prohibit. The Decalogue provides for no policing of any of its provisions. Nonetheless the distraction has had some value. It has reminded us that whether and how offenses are punished is one of the important distinctions separating different concepts or functions of “Law.” The distinction between moral imperatives and civil sanctions is not only a modern one, wrongly imposed on ancient texts. The distinction is also discernible literarily. In the Decalogue, the “Thou” addressed is the moral agent; enforcement is not in the picture. In the following texts, on the other hand, “Thou” is the enforcer, whether we should take that to mean the judge, or the people personified, or everyone (21:14, 23; 22:18), or the goel (“avenger”).
“Thou” returns as ethical agent from 22:21, but here the commands are philanthropic and YHWH is the enforcer. The “Thou” addressed by the Decalogue is not a person who is told to calculate whether generalizing these words will make a society prosperous, or how to chastise those who do not respect them. The Decalogue’s message is the gracious provision of a life-form of grateful response, motivated by neither positive nor negative reinforcement. That some forms of rtzh are not punishable, or that some forms of homicide are not rtzh, probably should matter less for ethics than if imperative and sanction were more closely linked, as in a judicial text.
Scholastic Protestant orthodoxy sought to separate cleanly within the Old Testament the categories of moral, civil, and ritual law. The ritual, they held, is superseded by the new ritual forms of the New Covenant, and the moral abides timelessly. As to the civil, the sifting becomes more difficult. A host of detailed mosaic regulations were of course inapplicable in Protestant Europe; yet the Reformers wanted to keep as model the outlines of national Israel: Christian sovereigns, wars, death penalty, the repression of blasphemy, heresy, and witchcraft. This kind of categorization is assuredly too coarse, and too inattentive to Jesus, to guide the Christian appropriation of Torah, but it has in its favor the recognition that the law’s being morally obligatory is not conditional upon its being civilly enforceable.
The Social Sense: Do Not Avenge
Numerous interpreters, however, discern in 20:13 a narrower focus than the wrongness of all not civilly sanctioned bloodshed. Koehler, Reventlow, Nielsen, and Childs see in it a move beyond the clan-based blood vengeance of the goel. “Taking the law into one’s own hands” is the phrase used by Koehler and Childs to describe what is forbidden (and what, presumably, had previously been happening). Yet that phrase should not be taken as denoting willfulness or disorder. Avenging one’s own kin had been seen for ages as God’s own instrument. If Israel is to be a covenantal community, then the power over life and death must be surrendered by the clan, which held it before, to YHWH himself or to the judge acting in his name. Again the untouchability or jealousy of YHWH is at work.
To take (even justified) retribution into one’s own hands, as the clan-based “avenger of blood” or goel had done hitherto, is now to be seen as usurping prerogatives that YHWH as sovereign reserves to himself. So what is forbidden is not murder, but the death penalty, as hitherto executed according to the traditional tribal code. This centralizing of life’s protection in the covenant as a new political context fits with the struggle to make Israel a community of judge-mediated law, rather than prolonging into the settled life of national Israel the simple clan-based retribution patterns of an earlier culture. Upon that shift depended the viability of the confederacy as a legal order. This is why it was fitting that the high voltage threat of the lightning on the mountain should be invoked to reinforce the reservation of retributive bloodshed to others than the next of kin. The very meaning of peoplehood under YHWH is that it widens the borders of blood safety from clan to people.
Later biblical texts list duties or offenses in such a way as to echo the Decalogue as representative or prototype of moral obligation. Hosea 4:2 and Jer 7:9 list offenses that are going on. Matthew 5, Jas 2:11, and Rom 13:9ff. itemize commandments as they deal variously with the dynamics of the law’s fulfillment. Luke 18:30 and its parallels (Mark 10, Matthew 19) are Jesus’s response to the “rich young ruler.” No two of these lists are identical, but their commonalities are far-reaching. Murder and adultery appear in all the lists. The broken oath appears three times, honoring parents and false witness three times each (the Gospel parallels), coveting and worshipping other gods only once each. Three other offenses are named that do not correlate literally with the Decalogue (“excess” in Hosea, “snobbery” in James, and “fraud” in Mark). The more we assume that the Decalogue must have been transmitted by rote, the more striking is this diversity. The more striking we hold the diversity to be, on the one hand, the greater is the weight of the omnipresence of the first two one-word prohibitions, adultery and murder. The neighbor’s integrity as body and as spouse represent on the most elemental level the divine image that the entire law calls us to revere in the neighbor.
From Rule to Principle
The briefer and less defined any text is, the less surprising it should be that as the life of a community goes on the meaning of that text will deepen and broaden. The prohibitions of theft and coveting become the sanctity of property. The prohibition of false witness becomes the sanctity of reputation, or the prohibition of all prevarication. “Idolatry” is given all kinds of more spiritual meanings. The wrongness of adultery sanctifies monogamy (as it had certainly not done in the Mosaic setting) and (with Jesus) prohibits even the lustful look.
Is it then proper that in the renewed covenant the sixth command as well should be thus extrapolated? It is not only proper, it is more important and clearer for the sixth than for the others.5 The development moves in several directions. There is the deepening of inwardness, the move from the deed to the motive. Jesus locates murder in the heart (or in the tongue: Matt 5:22), just as he does with adultery (5:25) and with prayer and fasting (6:1–6, 16–18). The wrongness of taboo, the sacred untouchability of the rights of the neighbor, becomes the rightness of love, internalized caring for the worth and wholeness of the brother or sister.
Secondly, there is the broadening of the community to whom reverence for life applies. As the Decalogue had expanded bloodsafety from the family to the tribe, now love of enemy and the missionary universalizing of the faith community make the concept of outsider or outlaw an empty set. Enemy love is compared to the mercy of God the Father (Matt
