Читать книгу To Hear the Word - Second Edition - John Howard Yoder - Страница 11

“Interpretation” as a theological task1 is most at home with the kind of inductive exposition that can make the most of the longitudinal unity and thrust of a text as passage, long enough to enable the analysis of texture and structure. Here, however, we must deal with a text of the kind that affords the least occasion to draw from its literary structure the sort of guidance that is normally provided by the wider framework of a passage of narrative or prophecy. The briefer a text is, and the more it has been bent and polished by frequent ritual use or by long redactional evolution, the more likely it is that it existed independently before it was placed in this setting, the less any observations about the context can tell us. Here we have only two words, one of them the simple “not.”

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 own instrument. If Israel is to be a covenantal community, then the power over life and death must be surrendered by the clan, which held it before, to YHWH himself or to the judge acting in his name. Again the untouchability or jealousy of YHWH is at work.

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 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.