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 5:45, 48; Luke 6:35) in a way that is not spelled out for any other of the commands or any other area of ethics.
Thirdly, for generations there had been development in Israel (continuing in Judaism) toward mitigating the retribution of “talion.” As in other 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