All four versions of the Ten Commandments (as listed on Wikipedia) share the following wording for the ninth (or eighth for Catholics and Lutherans) commandment:
Now I assume the wording of commandment number 9 (#8 for Catholics/Lutherans), and generally for the entire group of ten, was chosen with some care and precision. Likewise, I’m going to assume that they don’t contain any unnecessary caveats or conditions; no superfluous words, if it’s there, it’s there for a good reason. Which brings us back to commandment number 9 again and the words “against your neighbour” (with similar wording also used to qualify the 10th commandment).
So, finally, my question: Am I overinterpreting or is the phrase “against your neighbour” (and similarly, “your neighbour’s wife” and “anything that belongs to your neighbour”) evidence that such behaviours can be okay so long as they’re done against strangers? Certainly okay against enemies, no?
As stated, I’m probably overcalling this. Still, I find it odd that instead of a blanket commandment not to ‘bear false witness’ period, it’s limited to “your neighbour”. Indeed, why is the 6th commandment “You shall not murder” and not "You shall not murder your neighbour?
For Christians, it’s irrelevant, since Jesus taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan that we should regard everyone as our neighbor. I don’t know about the Jewish answer, though.
The answer is that in most traditions I know of the commandments are not taken literally and word-for-word, but rather as if you like subject headings for whole areas of moral law.
Thus, in Judaism, the Rabbincal commentaries found in the Talmud and elsewhere interpret “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” as prohibiting, in general, lying in a court or other such context; it was not taken to literally mean that bearing false witness against non-neighbours was okay.
It seems pretty clear to me that Jesus is not saying that everyone is your neighbor. Your neighbor is someone who has done you a good turn. The priest and the Levite were not neighbors to the man who was attacked, and certainly the bandits were not. Your enemies, and even those who are indifferent to you, are not your neighbors (within the meaning of the act).
Of course, we are also told that Jesus said “Love thy enemy,” which does seem, by implication, to universalize the scope of the relevant commandments, but it isn’t done in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Until I read njtt’s post, I thought it all was boiling down to the idea of the Good Samaritan, like you said. But now, knowing that at least one person doesn’t seem to buy it, I’m not so sure again.
One thing that even the Good Samaritan parable (used implicitly or explicitly) doesn’t reconcile is why some commandments mention “your neighbour” whereas others, such as “You shall not murder” are unqualified and can be seen to apply to all humanity from square one.
Maybe whoever wrote down the Commandments wasn’t all that interested in parallelism.
Also, words can have more than one meaning, of course. “Neighbor” can mean the person living next door or it can mean anyone. Yet someone who is “neighborly” is kind.
While Jesus does ask who acted like a neighbor, he also says to “Go and do likewise.” So it seems more like he is saying “The Samaritan, you know, that race you hate, new how to follow this commandment. Why not you?”
I’ve always taken it that most of the questions asked of Jesus were the Scriptural controversies of the day. Some people actually wanted answers (or at least what Jesus thought), while others knew there were arguments for both sides, and expected to be able to argue with Jesus either way.
Anyways, I contend that “Who is my neighbor?” was a legitimate question in that day. Many would have argued that it only meant the traditional Jews, while others would include the Hellenistic Jews. Jesus astounded them by including not just those two, but also the Samaritan, the half-Jews who were hated by most regular Jews. And he carefully did not pick a side on the other.
In other words, the idea is, if even a Samaritan can be a neighbor, then anyone can. The traditional interpretation (mentioned multiple times in this thread) seems to agree.
It isn’t down to “The Good Samaritan”. That parable naturally enough is only of interest to Christians. Jews, OTOH, quite clearly independently arrived at the conclusion that those commandments do not only apply to one’s “neighbours” - they certainly do not believe that you can go to court and bear false witness against a person living on the other side of town!
The problem here is that you are attempting to take the commandments with an excessive degree of literal-ness. This wasn’t a problem for the Rabbis drafting the commentaries to the religious laws - generalizing from “neighbour” wasn’t difficult for them.
Actually, the word used in the original Hebrew is “Re’akha” (רעך), which I would probably translate as “your peer.”
(This may, or may not, have anything to do with the origin of the phrase “Jury of one’s peers.”)
In modern Hebrew, the word is often used as a synonym for “friend,” but it probably originally meant someone you were in the same milieu with. Possibly meaning “someone you saw often.” But it’s a stretch to use “neighbor” as the meaning here. There’s a perfectly good word for that in Hebrew (Shakhen - שכן), and this isn’t it.
As Noone Special said, the word doesn’t genuinely mean “neighbor.” Probably the best English equivalent would be “colleague.” That said, it really means “anyone else”.
Fair enough, but my complementary question still stands: why do some commandments mention “your neighbour” whereas others, such as “You shall not murder” are as general as possible and thus clearly refer to everyone, with no interpretation required?
Well, they explained that it may be a mistranslation of ‘neighbour’. That doesn’t explain why “Thou shalt not murder” (for example) has no words qualifying it, mistranslated or not.
Murder implies someone you know, by a traditional definition. These days we accept that such a thing as random murder exists, but that was probably not true at the time of writing. Any other killing, like in a war, isn’t murder and isn’t someone you know.
The best way to look at the matter is to see whether the inclusion of the term has influenced the way the meaning has been interpreted by those following the tradition. For them, it has not mattered; it has been interpreted, in essence, as meaning “don’t bear false witness” without qualification.
Given that the term was originally redacted something like 2,500 years ago, we can’t know why the original redactors wrote it one way and not another.