In the Neighborhood

You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Exodus 20:13-16 NASB

You shall not – Aviya Kushner notices something odd. “In Hebrew, four key ‘commandments’ are crammed into one verse in Exodus 20.13. But in the 1611 King James Bible, they have more space, with four verses, not one. Each of the four commandments gets star billing, as if each were a lone pole on a prairie of white space.”[1] Kushner finds the English translation inexplicably odd. But, of course, we don’t, because we have always read these as four lone poles on a white prairie. In other words, we never paid any attention to the neighborhood. Perhaps we need to.

I have argued that the emphasis of the Ten Words is Shabbat. The instructions surrounding Shabbat occupy dozens of words while the instructions about murder, adultery, stealing and lying occupy exactly eleven in total. I argued that the audience addressed understood what it meant to murder, commit adultery, steal and lie as part of their cultural experience, but it had been generations since Shabbat was a regular part of their lives as slaves. Therefore, YHVH needed to re-educate His children about Shabbat. Perhaps this argument is valid, but Kushner points out something else. Using the rabbinic rule klal (what is attached to what – observations about word proximity), she follows Rashi in order to answer the question, “Why are murder, adultery, stealing and lying all found in the same verse?” The answer she discovers is that all of these involve the death penalty. That answer, however, is not obvious. It takes a deeper look to see how stealing and lying are connected.

Murder and adultery are fairly straightforward. Other biblical instructions tell us that a murderer must die. And since adultery is the “murder” of the one-flesh covenant between a husband and wife, a man who commits adultery with another man’s wife must die. But since these four commandments are all in the same sentence, then the commandment, lo tignov (You shall not steal) isn’t really about theft. It is about kidnapping because stealing another person requires the death penalty. Yes, there are prohibitions about theft, and there are provisions for atoning for theft, but in this case, the penalty for stealing a person is death. In biblical terms, kidnapping is a form of murder. Similarly, lo ta’ane vereaka ed shaker (You shall not bear false witness) is not about lying but rather about perpetrating a false accusation that results in loss to another, whether reputation, material or financial. In other words, lo ta’ane is about murdering a person’s public or private standing.

What do we learn from this little investigation? First, we learn that even the disaggregation of the words in translation affects how we understand God’s instructions. The words might be translated correctly but the neighborhood has changed and Hebrew communicates through its neighbors, not just its vocabulary. So we will have to read more carefully.

Second, we might not be murderers or adulterers, and we might not be kidnappers in the legal sense, but are we not skirting the edge of the death penalty commandments when we diminish, castigate, impugn or stereotype another person with malice aforethought? How many of us have said something that was intended to falsely accuse another because we wanted to “bring them down a notch”? Have we never acted in such a way that another person’s character or reputation was harmed without justification?

It seems that the Bible wishes to lump these four together. Murderer, adulterer, kidnapper and slanderer. You might be righteous in one of these circles, but can you say the same for all of them? If not, are you then on any more solid ground than those who violate the other three?

Perhaps God lumped them all together because He intends us to see that any violation of the image of God in the other person carries extremely severe penalties. Perhaps we need to see just how close to the edge we are so that we will have hell scared out of us.

Topical Index: commandments, murder, adultery, stealing, lying, klal, Exodus 20:13-16

[1] Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God, p. 127.