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 not the mountain” of 19:15 is mirrored in “touch not the neighbor’s spouse, his life, his goods . . .” 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