ancient legal systems, the lesser punishment—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe—had been progressively transmuted into fines in money or in kind. The death penalty for offenses other than murder had fallen into desuetude well before the time of Jesus. Pagan cult practices (a major early capital offense) had lost much of their attraction and threat after the exile, and the series of gentiles that took turns occupying Palestine had reserved other capital penal prerogatives to themselves. The room for non-execution of the manslaughterer, which was first opened for the case of accidental killing, came to extend further, beginning with the case where there are not two witnesses (Num 35:30). Later Judaism extended restraints concerning the number and the quality of judges and witnesses to the point where capital condemnation became quite improbable.
Fourthly, the prohibition of killing is expanded by its juxtaposition with the work of the cross. As Cain’s fratricide is prototypical of the rebellion of the race (1 John 3:11ff., 15), so Christ’s sacrifice for others is a model of our community love (3:16).6 The work of redemption consists in Jesus’s being the victim of a breach of the sixth commandment. None of the other Decalogue prohibitions is brought into the work of redemption in this way. As at the beginning in the covenants with Cain and with Noah, life was the supreme good needing protection, the shedding of blood being the only necessary prohibition; so in the light of the cross the bodily life of the neighbor, even of the enemy, is revealed to be the prerequisite and the prototype of all the other values needing to be protected, even died for, in and for the neighbor, even the enemy.
So it should be no surprise, no distortion, no sell-out, but a fulfillment, as Jesus called it, and also an extrapolation of what Judaism had already been doing, when the New Testament and the early Christians, for generations, rejected all killing. “Extrapolation” is a lifeless, mechanical image for that expansion. What had been going on, on the path from Sinai to the early Church, was organic growth and fruition. The sacredness of life as belonging to YHWH alone was defended initially by blood vengeance, then defended better in the Decalogue by reservation to the judges, then progressively still better (as in Numbers 35) by various kinds of mitigation, and still more from the age of Jeremiah to that of Akiba through the abandonment by Jews of the structures of civil justice. The same development has now been radicalized and generalized.
Socially important in facilitating the definition of the newly broadened view, yet also logically ambivalent as it contributes to our interpretation of the change, was the falling-away of occasions for the previously justified exceptions to the sacredness of life. Christians from the outset, like most Jews after Josiah and all Jews after Bar Kochba, living in a world under the sword of Gentiles, had no occasion for either capital justice or war. Leaving vengeance to God (Rom 12:19) meant letting the pagan powers be the instruments of God (13:4). This was not the resignation of impotence but the subordination of conscience.
The exclusion of Christians from civil responsibilities (until Constantine) made it simpler for the ante-Nicene fathers to round out in their thinking the progression begun by the Sinai covenant. The distinction between the prohibition of killing and the enforcement of the prohibition by punishing the killers, which we noticed at the outset as a semantic/hermeneutic challenge, is now consummated.
Yet this last aspect of the change was not causative. The deepening, broadening, and heightening detailed above are not dependent upon the Jews’ loss of sovereignty. The Judaism of Menahem in 70 CE and of Bar Kochba in 135 CE lost civil sovereignty in battle, but not so the Judaism of Jochanan ben Zakkai or that of Jesus. Theirs was a principled renunciation, explained on other grounds than weakness or defeat. For Jesus’s followers, to hold that the grounds for the exclusion of all bloodshed are revoked as soon as Christians have access to civil power is to relativize the finality of Christ in a way that jeopardizes far more than the Decalogue, and far more than the neighbor’s life.
With this reference to the later developments we have left our text and the canon behind. It is nonetheless important to have noticed this development. It illustrates and implements one more of the perennial issues of hermeneutics. Does the notion of the unity of the canon support or undercut our taking the line of movement we have discerned, from Sinai to Jesus and Jochanan, as itself “canonical,” in the sense that its direction should continue to be our own? Or does the Church (or the Synagogue) in changing circumstances retain the liberty to “reach back behind” that direction of fulfillment marked by Jesus (or by Jochanan) for resources deemed more fitting? That seems to have mattered in this way in later history only for the sixth commandment (because of later Christians’ commitment to civil office) and the second (in the much later controversies over icons). Only these two commands are routinely read with a defensive concern, nourished by later experience, for determining from the early context what they do not exclude, thereby cramping the life-giving potential of Torah for continuing guidance.
To correct adequately for this minimizing thrust, we would have needed to review the broader issues that I here have only named but had to set aside: the meaning of Torah as grace and liberation;7 the place of cultic recital in covenant renewal; the abiding difference between covenant obedience and civil enforcement; and the abiding meaning of the rejection of “other gods,” gods other than the one who sanctifies the neighbor’s life.
1. Reprinted by permission from the theological quarterly Interpretation (October 1980) 393ff. The topic had been assigned to me by the editors. Passages removed by the editors of Interpretation have been restored. This first sentence in its original phrasing referred to the kind of articles for which that particular quarterly was best known.
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