Thou shalt not kill/Thou shalt not covet
Perhaps more than any other part of the Bible, the Ten Commandments have shaped Western culture. They adorn houses of worship and appear in courts of law. Unlike most parts of the Bible, they have influenced secular laws. And it seems that their importance was recognized even in the days of the Bible, for they comprise the only extended passage to appear twice in the Five Books of Moses.
The good news is that most of the commandments have been translated accurately. The bad news is that two have not.
Before we look at what went wrong and what the commandments really mean, it makes sense to understand what the Ten Commandments are and why they are so important.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is no universal agreement about which commandments are the Ten Commandments. Nor does everyone agree that all ten are actually commandments.
The nearly identical lists that appear in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 form the basis of the Ten Commandments. But people disagree about where the introduction to the commandments ends and where the first commandment begins.
Exodus 20:1 reads, “Then God spoke all these words:” (NRSV). Everyone agrees that that line is an introduction (though, surprisingly, many sources nonetheless cite Exodus 20:1 as the start of the Ten Commandments).
Counting to One
But then disagreement sets in. Exodus 20:2 reads, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (NRSV). Exodus 20:3 continues, “You shall have no other gods . . .” (The end of the line is particularly difficult to translate, so we’re leaving it out for now. It probably means “. . . other than Me.”)
Because 20:2 looks like a statement, not a commandment, most Protestants (but not most Lutherans) group 20:2 with the introduction in 20:1, and call Exodus 20:3 the first commandment. So for most Protestants, the first commandment is the entirety of Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods. . . .”
Catholics (and most Lutherans), on the other hand, group 20:2 with 20:3 into one longer first commandment: “I am the Lord your God: you shall have no other gods. . . .” The Catholic first commandment, then, is an abridgement of Exodus 20:2 and all of 20:3.
On the third hand, Jews see two commandments, one in 20:2 and one in 20:3. For Jews, the first commandment is the entirety of 20:2 (“I am the Lord your God. . . .”).
Two
Because Jews have completed the first commandment by the end of 20:2, Exodus 20:3 in its entirety forms the second commandment: “You shall have no other gods. . . .” The Jewish second commandment is thus the same as the Protestant first commandment and the second half of the Catholic first commandment.
Exodus 20:4 deals with what are commonly called “graven images.” There’s some question as to what exactly the Hebrew means—the issue has been the source of more than a little bloodshed, as when Calvin used his understanding of the line to condemn Catholicism—and we’re not going to address the question here. The point of Exodus 20:4, though, is not to make them. Depending on whom you ask, the forbidden “them” may be idols, pictures, pictures of people, carved images, etc.
For Protestants, that’s the second commandment: “You shall not make . . . any graven images.”
Jews and Catholics, though, group Exodus 20:3 with 20:2 as an instance of how not to have other gods. That is, one way not to have any other gods is not to create idols.
As we just saw, Jews have already used Exodus 20:3 for the second commandment. Catholics, however, jump ahead to Exodus 20:7 to find the second commandment: “Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”
Three Through Ten
Jews and Protestants agree that “Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” is one of the Ten Commandments, but, unlike Catholics, the Jews and Protestants have already counted to two by Exodus 20:7. So for both of those groups, Exodus 20:7 is the third commandment.
From here to the tenth commandment, the Jewish/Protestant numbering is ahead by one compared with the Catholic numbering. The Jewish/Protestant fourth commandment is about the Sabbath. For Catholics, that’s the third commandment.
Similarly, the Jewish/Protestant fifth commandment is about honoring parents. For Catholics, that’s the fourth commandment.
At this rate, the Catholics will run out of commandments, because the Jewish/Protestant tenth commandment, commonly translated as “do not covet . . .” is the Catholic ninth commandment. (We’ll see below that it doesn’t really have anything to do with coveting. It’s a major mistranslation.) To get to ten, Catholics have two commandments about “coveting.” The ninth commandment regards “your neighbor’s wife,” and the tenth, “your neighbor’s goods.” Table 2 summarizes the content of the commandments according to the three numbering systems.
The summaries in the table are purposely vague, for two reasons. Most importantly, we don’t want to prejudice our translations before we take a closer look at what the commandments really mean. But also, as we have noted, there are in fact two sets of commandments. So far, we’ve seen the one in Exodus. Deuteronomy contains another set, starting with Deuteronomy 5:6.
The Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy are mostly the same as the ones in Exodus, but there are differences. For example, the fourth or third commandment in Exodus is specifically to “remember” the
TABLE 2. SUMMARY OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
|
JEWISH |
PROTESTANT |
CATHOLIC |
1 |
“I am the Lord” |
Other gods |
“I am the Lord”/other gods |
2 |
Other gods |
Graven images |
Lord’s name |
3 |
Lord’s name |
Lord’s name |
Sabbath |
4 |
Sabbath |
Sabbath |
Parents |
5 |
Parents |
Parents |
Killing |
6 |
Killing |
Killing |
Adultery |
7 |
Adultery |
Adultery |
Stealing |
8 |
Stealing |
Stealing |
Testifying |
9 |
Testifying |
Testifying |
Neighbor’s wife |
10 |
Neighbor’s wife/stuff |
Neighbor’s wife/stuff |
Neighbor’s stuff |
Sabbath day, while in Deuteronomy the commandment is to “keep” or “observe” it. (Because Moses says in Deuteronomy that the list there is the same as the one in Exodus, a Jewish tradition holds that God simultaneously uttered the words zachor [“remember”] and shamor [“keep”].)
Only the Catholic version contains ten actual commandments. The original Jewish list and the much-later Protestant list both contain at least one statement. Why?
Commandments
The original Hebrew word for the commandments, in Exodus itself, is davar.
Though we know better than to use etymology to figure out what a word means, it just so happens that the story behind davar is interesting in its own right. Originally, the word may have been an imitation of beelike buzzing. Indeed, the same root that gives us davar—that is, D.B.R—also gives us the Hebrew word d’vorah, “bee.” Perhaps from that original meaning, we get the verb diber, “to speak,” and the noun davar.
The noun davar means both that which is spoken (a “word”) and also that which is spoken about (a “thing”).
Exodus 20:1 tells us that God “spoke” (using the verb diber, from the root D.B.R) “all these words” (using the noun davar, also from the root D.B.R). So far, there is no specific mention of commandments. (The NAB nonetheless translates “commandments,” perhaps in keeping with the goal of translating and also explaining where necessary.)
Exodus 34:28, Deuteronomy 4:13, and Deuteronomy 10:4 all refer to “ten davars” (d’varim in Hebrew) that Moses wrote upon the tablets. (The tablets number two, but there’s no reason to think that they were arrayed in the now-familiar pattern of two columns with rounded tops, five commandments to a column. Equally likely is that all ten commandments were written twice, once on each tablet. Before the advent of carbon paper, pacts would be written in duplicate.)
The word d’varim in those three places cannot mean “words,” because certainly there are more than ten words. But, in spite of the KJV translation “commandments,” there is no reason to think that d’varim means “commandments.” Much more likely is that it means “things.” Just as in colloquial English we might say that God told us “ten things,” so too the Bible refers to the ten things that were written on the tablets. (The Talmud, which dates from the second to sixth centuries a. d. and which forms much of the foundation of Judaism as it has been practiced for most of the past two thousand years, uses a similar word, dibrot, instead of d’varim. To this day, the Ten Commandments in Hebrew are called the “ten dibrot,” not the “ten d’varim.” But dibrot also doesn’t mean “commandments.”)
Although the Bible tells us that there are ten d’varim, it doesn’t actually number them, so we have no way of knowing which numbering tradition more closely reflects the original intention. And because the original Hebrew doesn’t mean “commandments,” we don’t know if all ten aspects of the “Ten Commandments” were commandments, preambles, or whatnot.
We do know that they are unique in the history of civilization.
It’s easy to miss a subtle but very important distinction that separates the Ten Commandments from other ancient and modern legal codes.
We can use the eighth or seventh commandment (“don’t steal”) to demonstrate, because the Hebrew is particularly clear, and, unlike some of the other commandments, translators have generally tried to convey the meaning of the Hebrew, rather than turning the translation into what they want it to mean.
It will be useful to compare the commandment against stealing to the laws in the United States that, at first glance, do the same thing. So we’ll take a brief detour into American law.
Title 18 of the U.S. Codes (“18 USC”) deals with crimes and criminal procedure. The first part of 18 USC deals with the crimes themselves. Chapter 103, in that part, is about robbery and burglary, and Section 2113, which happens to be in that chapter, is about bank robbery. (Just that one section contains about three times the number of words as the entire Ten Commandments, a fact that demonstrates the vast complexity of American law compared with anything in antiquity.)
The law in the United States known as 18 USC 2113, “Bank Robbery and Incidental Crimes,” declares, among other things, that “Whoever takes . . . any property or money or any other thing of value not exceeding $1,000 belonging to . . . any bank . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” In other words, the penalty for taking up to $1,000 from a bank is a fine, up to one year in jail, or both. Similarly, the penalty according to 18 USC 2113 for taking more than $1,000 is a fine and/or up to ten years in jail. This is what is commonly known as the federal law against bank robbing. When we say that it’s illegal to rob a bank, we’re referring to 18 USC 2113, which connects the crime with a specific punishment.
Other laws against taking things work a little bit differently. For example, in New York State, Article 155.25 of the NYS Penal Law declares that “A person is guilty of petit larceny when he steals property. Petit larceny is a class A misdemeanor.” “Larceny” is what most people call “theft,” and Article 155 is what most people call New York State’s law against theft. (Later sections of Article 155 define “grand larceny” as taking more than $1,000, so petit larceny is generally considered to be taking less than $1,000.)
As it happens, New York State uses the word “theft” more generally than the way most laypeople do. The legal term includes not only larceny, but also robbery (“forcible stealing”), jostling (which nonlawyers generally call pickpocketing), fortune-telling (which has a near parallel in Leviticus 19:26), possession of stolen property, etc. All of these other laws work essentially the same way, stating the crime and category of that crime. For example, “A person is guilty of fortune telling when, for a fee or compensation . . . he claims . . . to tell fortunes. . . . Fortune telling is a class B misdemeanor.”
Working in concert with these and many similar laws in New York State are laws regarding sentences of imprisonment. For example, Article 70.15 metes out punishment of up to one year for stealing less than $1,000. The way it does that is by stating, “A sentence of imprisonment for a class A misdemeanor . . . shall not exceed one year.” According to Article 155, as we just saw, stealing up to $1,000 is a Class A misdemeanor. Taken together, Articles 70 and 155 create a punishment of up to one year for theft of up to $1,000.
Article 155.40 declares, “A person is guilty of grand larceny in the second degree when he steals property” worth more than $50,000, and “Grand larceny in the second degree is a class C felony.” Article 70 matches with: “For a class C felony, the term . . . shall not exceed fifteen years.”
So take up to $1,000 (and get caught and convicted) in New York State, and you go to jail for up to a year. Take more than $50,000, and you go to jail for up to fifteen years. Even though the laws of New York State, and most other criminal codes, list the crimes and punishments in separate places, the effect is the same. “Class C felony,” for example, becomes an abbrevation for “up to fifteen years in jail.” These laws work exactly the same way as 18 USC, which lists the punishment explicitly next to the definition of the crime, while the laws of New York State refer to the punishment indirectly. But either way, the point is to connect behavior with consequences.
It is in this context that we see the power of the Ten Commandments and why they are fundamentally different from the laws of modern countries. In the Ten Commandments, there are no consequences. There are no punishments listed for breaking the Ten Commandments. Unlike 18 USC, the Ten Commandments don’t directly list any punishment for stealing, and unlike the New York State laws that we saw, the Ten Commandments don’t indirectly list any punishment for stealing. (Technical words help distinguish the Ten Commandments from other laws. Laws that prescribe consequences are call “casuistic.” Those that simply state right from wrong are called “apodictic.” And we have two more words for cocktail parties.)
The Ten Commandments essentially state that some things are wrong, regardless of the punishment. The Ten Commandments are value judgments: Stealing is wrong. Other parts of the Bible (like Leviticus 5 for theft, Numbers 35 for murder, etc.) function more like American law, connecting behavior and consequences, but they do not refer back directly or indirectly to the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments do not refer to them. Even if there were no punishments, claim the Ten Commandments, stealing would still be wrong.
A few examples will further demonstrate the difference.
Suppose a man wants money so much that he’s willing to spend time in jail to get it. Perhaps he wants to buy a gift for someone he loves. Perhaps he thinks jail isn’t so bad. Or maybe he thinks he will get away with it, and he’s willing to take the chance. He might think he’ll only get caught one time out of twenty, so he thinks he can probably walk away with $20,000 and only spend a year a jail, a bargain in his mind.
In New York State, he reads up on the law, learns that if he steals $1,000 he will not have to spend more than one year in jail, and, for whatever reason, he decides it’s worth it. Nothing in the entire body of the New York State and federal law says that he isn’t entitled to make this calculation. Nowhere does it say that it’s wrong, immoral, or otherwise undesirable. The law has punishments for behavior, but it doesn’t take a stand on the nature of the behavior itself.
Some people attach moral judgments to legal states—looking down on felons, for example, or using the word derogatorily. But these moral judgments are not part of the law. They are part of society. Even the difference between felony and misdemeanor is just a technical distinction in the law. Qualitatively it is no different than other technical differences, like Class A versus Class B. While there is a general sense that felonies are worse than misdemeanors, there is also a general sense that Class A violations are worse than Class B violations. Some employers refuse to hire felons, and some states don’t let them vote. But again, any moral judgments involved in these practical decisions do not come from the law.
By way of a second example, we might consider a situation that arose in Boston’s Logan Airport in the 1980s. The fine for illegal parking at the airport was sometimes less than the price of legal parking. So people started leaving their cars illegally at the curb of their terminal of choice. They knew that the police would tow the car. They knew that they would have to pay a towing charge and a fine. But they also knew that the combined expense was less than legal parking fees would be, so they decided it was worth it. Massachusetts law made no judgment about their behavior, and most of these illegal parkers were proud of the inexpensive valet parking they had managed to find at the airport. (Massachusetts has since upped the fines for illegal parking and the charges for towing.)
Most modern people agree that illegal parking and theft are in different categories. They’re both illegal, but only the second one is wrong in some larger sense. There is generally no moral implication, people think, to where they park. (Of course there are exceptions, like blocking a fire hydrant.) By contrast, they think, theft is a matter of morality. In fact, most people don’t have much trouble categorizing other behaviors. Running a red light at night when there’s no other traffic on the road may be illegal, but if it’s not dangerous, they think, it’s not immoral. It’s like the parking at Logan. Killing a person for no reason is different. It’s like stealing. It’s immoral.
It is the Ten Commandments that makes the distinction overt. The Ten Commandments list the behavior that is wrong. Regardless of the punishment—or, for that matter, lack of punishment—people shouldn’t steal. Even if they are willing to pay the fine, even if they are willing to spend the time in jail, even if they don’t think they will get caught, they shouldn’t take what belongs to someone else. In light of Leviticus 5, which details the punishment for theft, the Ten Commandments might seem superfluous. Why say “Don’t steal” when another part of the Bible already has a punishment for stealing? The answer is that Leviticus 5 is a legal system, while the Ten Commandments are a moral framework. The point is that stealing is wrong. The severity of the offense has nothing to do with getting caught or punished.
So even though the Ten Commandments at first seem like modern laws, they are in fact completely different. They are different, in fact, from every other system of law.
The Ten Commandments are frequently compared to the Code of Hammurabi. Named after the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, the code dates from the first part of the second millennium B.C.—long before the Ten Commandments were written—and details the punishments that were in force for a great variety of crimes in ancient Babylonia. (Curiously, court records of the time don’t reference the Code of Hammurabi in the way we would expect them to if they were really the law of the land. So the role of the code may not be exactly what it seems.)
Some scholars think that the Code of Hammurabi, coming as it does before the Ten Commandments, diminishes the importance of the Bible. In their minds, the Ten Commandments are merely a revision, sometimes not even a good one, of something that the Babylonians had long before. But like our modern American laws, the Code of Hammurabi merely prescribes consequences. It lacks the fundamental force of the Ten Commandments. (In technical jargon, all of the laws in the Code of Hammurabi are casuistic, not apodictic like the Ten Commandments.)
So when we study the Ten Commandments, we are studying perhaps the first and most lasting list of behavior that, regardless of other considerations, is wrong.
In this context it is particularly unfortunate that the commandments have been translated into English so poorly. The common mistranslations distort one of the foundations—perhaps the most important foundation—upon which humankind’s sense of right and wrong is built.
Before turning to what the verbs in the Ten Commandments mean, we need to look at the grammatical form of those verbs.
For example, the seventh/eighth commandment in Hebrew is lo tignov. The Hebrew lo expresses negation. The verb literally means “You will steal.” So, literally, the phrase means “You will not steal.” This is where we get the familiar KJV translation, “Thou shalt not steal.” Remember from Chapter 1 that “thou shalt” was formal but ordinary English when the KJV was written.
The word lo appears thousands of times in the Bible, in contexts that range from descriptions of the present, predictions of the future, commandments, and more. It is very clearly a general word used for all sorts of negation, just like the English “not.” Because “not” in English works (almost) exactly like lo, it’s not hard for English speakers to understand that part of the phrasing of the Ten Commandments.
The future tense here, however, is misleading. We know from Chapter 3 that we should avoid the temptation to blindly translate grammatical forms, so the future tense in Hebrew may or may not correlate with the future tense in English. In this case, it does not.
In fact, the future tense in Hebrew is used for imperatives: commandments, but more generally commands, requests, etc. The “go” in the English “Go home” is an imperative, for example. Across the world’s languages, we find that the imperative is closely related to the future, both in form (sometimes they are the same) and in meaning. That’s because one key function of the future tense is to express what has not yet happened, and one key function of the imperative, likewise, is to express what has not yet happened.
This is why, in English, only the future tense can be conjoined (connected with “and”) to the imperative. For example, if you’re planning a party with a friend, you might tell the friend: “You get the drinks and I’ll buy the food.” The imperative “you get” is conjoined with the future “I’ll buy.” By contrast, the past tense doesn’t work at all in the same situation: “You get the drinks and I bought the food.”
So based on general linguistic principles, we have reason to believe that the future-tense form might simply be the Hebrew way of expressing an imperative. And elsewhere in the Bible we see extensive support for this second role of the future-tense forms.
Because of the nature of the Bible, these imperatives are frequently used when God addresses people. It is therefore reasonable to ask if the form lo with a future-tense verb is solely for that purpose, and if so, whether we might need a special way of translating it into English. But it turns out that when people talk to each other in the Bible, they use the same form. For example, in Leviticus 10:6, Moses addresses Aaron and his sons, telling them not to bare their heads and not to tear their clothes. For “do not tear [your clothes],” we find the Hebrew phrase lo tifromu. We already know that lo means “don’t.” The verb tifromu literally means “you will tear.”
In short, when Moses tells people not to do something, he uses the construction lo with a future-tense verb. This is but one example of many. We conclude that this grammatical form is simply the imperative in Hebrew. So it should be translated as an imperative in English.
Though the KJV usually mistranslates these verb forms as the future tense in English (“thou shalt not . . . ,” “ye shall not . . . ,” etc.), sometimes it gets the translation right, as in Deuteronomy 1:42, “And the LORD said unto me, Say unto them, Go not up, neither fight.” While the KJV fails here by using “Go not up” and “neither fight”—two very different forms in English for the same form in Hebrew—in this case it does correctly render the combination of lo and a future-tense verb as an imperative.
At any rate, we are confident that the construction is imperative in nature. The obvious translation choice is “Do not . . .” “Do not steal,” for example. Some English dialects may prefer “Don’t steal.”
Another intriguing option is “No stealing.” But while that is probably the point of the commandment, it’s not what it says. So we opt for “Do not steal.”
Our next task is to figure out what else is forbidden by the Ten Commandments.
The fifth or sixth commandment—as usual, depending on who does the counting—is “Don’t r’tsach.” Two common translations for that verb are “kill” and “murder,” and they mean very different things. Other reasonable possibilites are “commit manslaughter,” “put to death,” “slay,” and so forth. Let’s find out what r’tsach really means.
As it happens, the first place we find the verb r’tsach in the Bible is in the Ten Commandments themselves, but because the context is sparse, we have almost no information about the verb. All we know from Exodus 20:13 is that r’tsach is something not to do. It could be anything.
Numbers 35, however, gives us a wealth of information. That section talks about different kinds of killing.
Numbers 35:6 sets the stage by introducing what are generally called “cities of refuge,” a name that reflects the refuge people could find in such a city in one of two circumstances, as we will see next.
The practice in antiquity was for a killing to be avenged by a family member. If a person was killed, that person’s brother or father would be expected to kill the killer. The practice is frequently called “blood vengeance,” and almost every translation calls the one who does this—the killer who kills the first killer—the “blood avenger.” The actual Hebrew suggests “blood redeemer” (go’el hadam), however, reflecting the notion that killing the killer is a step toward redemption, not vengeance.
The first function of the cities of refuge is to make sure that the blood redeemer doesn’t kill people without due process. Anyone who kills another may flee to a city of refuge, and, once there, the killer is considered beyond the reach of a blood redeemer.
The second function of the cities of refuge is to make sure that the blood redeemer only kills people who are actually guilty of capital crimes. According to Numbers 35, the penalty is death (at the hands of a blood redeemer) only for some kinds of killing. Just to take one example, a blood redeemer is required to kill a man who kills intentionally, but in the case of an accidental killing “the congregation” (also translated “assembly,” and perhaps akin to a jury) decides between the blood redeemer and the killer. The congregation has the option of deciding that the killer should die or, alternatively, that the killer should be allowed to live. If the killer is allowed to live, he is returned to the city of refuge, where he is beyond the reach of the blood redeemer.
The cities of refuge thus served both functions of modern jails (and prisons). Suspected criminals are put in jails while awaiting sentencing, and convicted criminals who are allowed to live are punished by having to stay there. Unlike modern jails, however, the cities of refuge required no bars or guards. People didn’t want to escape. For once outside the cities of refuge, they were subject to death at the hands of a blood redeemer. Also unlike modern jails, the cities of refuge seem to have been used only for killers.
Details of the cities of refuge are fascinating: Who lived in them? Were they real cities? Was the plan ever implemented? And so forth. But here we will focus on the rules about who went to these cities, using language to help us understand the different categories of killing in the Bible and the words used to denote them.
We ultimately have four words to consider: hikah, heimit, harag, and ratsach. (As we usually do, we use the past-tense forms of the verbs when we talk about what they mean. We’ve already seen the imperative of the last one: r’tsach.) What the verbs have in common is that they all represent a situation that results in death.
For example, when Cain kills Abel in Genesis 4:8, the verb is harag. When Moses kills the Egyptian taskmaster in Exodus 2:12, the verb is hikah. In Genesis 18:25, Abraham pleads with God not to kill the people of Sodom, arguing before God that God should not kill the righteous along with the wicked. There the verb is heimit. In Psalm 94:6, ratsach is parallel to harag, suggesting that they have much in common.
The verb ratsach, however, is used primarily in two places. One is the verb in the Ten Commandments. The other is in the discussions of the cities of refuge and the laws regarding the various kinds of killing that accompany them.
So we jump into the book of Numbers, looking at the various words used there as stepping-stones to understanding what ratsach means in the Ten Commandments.
Strike
Our first verb, hikah, seems to have the general meaning of “strike,” for which the KJV generally uses “smite” (or “smote,” etc.). Many people’s modern understanding of “smite” is “kill,” but both that English verb and the original Hebrew hikah appear in situations that are more general.
Just to get started, we note that the word for “plague” in Hebrew is makah, a noun clearly related to hikah. Nouns and verbs, even when they are related, need not mean the same thing, but we note the fact for two reasons. First, it at least suggests that hikah might have a broader meaning. And second, we sometimes find the verb hikah used, perhaps on purpose, in the narrative about the plagues.
In Exodus 7:17, Moses hikahs the water to create the first plague, in which the water turns to blood. In Exodus 9:25, the seventh plague of hail hikahs the plants of the field. Perhaps “kill” is the point in the seventh plague, but equally likely the hail just hits the plants. In the first plague, it’s hard to imagine Moses “killing” the water. The end result may involve death, because perhaps the now-bloody Nile can no longer support life. But even so, it’s the creatures in the Nile that are killed, not the water. And at any rate, in Exodus 8:17, the third plague is brought about when Aaron strikes (hikah) the dust of the earth, turning it into lice (or perhaps some other sort of vermin).
We might think that the text in Exodus purposely uses the verb hikah because of its relationship to the noun makah, “plague.” But we find that hikah means “hit” elsewhere, as well.
In Numbers 22:23, Balaam hits the donkey that is bringing him to King Balak. We know that the donkey doesn’t die, because it keeps walking (and, later, starts talking, joining the snake in Genesis as the only two animals in the Bible that talk). The verb there is hikah.
Similarly, after God asks Moses to speak to a rock and get water, Moses in Numbers 20:11 hikahs the rock twice instead. Moses clearly didn’t kill the rock. He hit it.
For that matter, Exodus 35:16 contains the phrase “if someone hikahs someone else and the someone else dies . . . ,” making it almost certain that a person can hikah another without killing.
On the other hand, as we just saw, Moses hikahs a taskmaster in Exodus 2:12 and then buries him. We have to assume that the taskmaster was dead. In the tenth plague in Exodus 12:29, God hikahs the firstborn of Egypt, killing them, not merely hitting them.
So it looks like hikah means “to hit,” and sometimes it means “to hit so hard as to cause death.”
Kill
The next verb is harag, and it very clearly means “to kill.” We have already seen that when Cain kills Abel, the verb is harag. It is not always easy to know entirely from context what the verb harag means. Even though there is universal agreement that Cain killed Abel and didn’t, say, merely wound him or put him into a coma, it’s hard to rule out these lesser possibilities from the text in Genesis.
Fortunately, we sometimes find that harag is the opposite of “let stay alive.” For example, in Numbers 31:17– 18, every male gets haraged, but the women and children get to live. Harag is incompatible with “let live.”
Next we have heimit. The word for “die” or “dead” is met, and heimit is closely related. Its internal word structure suggests that it might mean “cause to die,” and even though we know from Chapter 2 that internal word structure does not always tell us what a word means, we also know that it can sometimes suggest useful avenues of inquiry.
Fortunately, context here is pretty clear. We’ve already seen that the word is used in connection to God’s killing the people in Sodom.
Similarly, in Genesis 37:18– 20, we see a connection between heimit and harag. Joseph’s brothers see him coming from afar, and the narrative uses the verb heimit to tell us that they conspire to kill him. Then the text puts the words “let us kill him” into the mouths of the brothers. There the verb is harag. So it looks as if harag and heimit mean the same thing.
Deuteronomy 13:10 offers instruction regarding an idolater. Specifically, “You must kill him. Your hand will be the first to kill him.” The first verb “kill” is harag, and the second is heimit. Again, harag and heimit look like at least near synonyms.
So we see that hikah means “hit,” perhaps causing death, while both harag and heimit mean “kill.”
What about ratsach?
Legal and Illegal Killing
All of this brings us back to Numbers 35.
In 35:11, we find that someone who ratsachs another “by accident” may flee to a city of refuge. The next line tells us that one point of the cities of refuge is that the ratsacher can stay there until he goes before the congregation, rather than dying at the hands of a redeemer.
Just from 35:11 we don’t know what ratsach means, but we know that it can include doing something by accident.
Numbers 35:16 gives us more direct information. “If someone hits [hikah] another with an iron tool and he [the other] dies, he [the first] is a ratsacher.” (One problem we have with the text is that it involves two people, both of whom are called “he.” In modern English, particularly in legalese, we might prefer “If the party of the first part hits the party of the second part with an iron tool and the party of the second part dies, the party of the first part is a ratsacher.” Instead what we have, literally, is, “If he hit him with an iron object and he dies, he is a ratsacher.”)
The point of Numbers 35:16 is that there are lots of kinds of hikah-ing, and only some are ratsaching. The first case is someone who hikahs another with an iron tool so that the other dies. What we have is a category of “killing” that is considered ratsaching. As is typical in the Bible, the category is defined by examples, and the first example is the case of killing by iron tool.
The next line expands the category to one who strikes another with a “stone that will kill”—that is, a “deadly stone object.” (In English, we would say “stone object that can kill” or “stone object that might kill,” not “stone object that will kill.” Hebrew typically uses fewer modals—words like “can,” “might,” etc.—than English. Additionally, the text reads “hand stone,” not just “stone.” We can ignore these minor matters for now to help us better focus on the verb ratsach.)
Numbers 35:18 adds “deadly wooden object” to the list.
So we have three actions that are considered ratsaching: killing with an iron object, killing with a deadly stone object, and killing with a deadly wooden object.
Numbers 35:19 offers a brief interlude about what to do with the ratsacher. The blood redeemer must kill him, and here the verb for “kill” is heimit. That is, what the blood redeemer does is heimit, as opposed to ratsach, which is what the guy with the iron, deadly stone, or deadly wooden object did.
The text then adds three more cases of people who are ratsachers: Someone who pushes another in hatred and the other dies, someone who purposefully throws something at another and the other dies, and someone who hits another with his fist in anger and the other dies. All three are ratsachers, and the blood redeemer must heimit them—though, as is frequently the case, the details are not clear. Some translators think that “purposefully” in the second instance refers to lying in wait.
(The “hatred” clause in the first instance is particularly intriguing, because it suggests an ancient parallel with modern hate crimes, a topic that has been hotly debated in modernity. According to the FBI, a “hate crime” is a “criminal off ense . . . which is motivated . . . by the off ender’s bias against a race, religion, disability [etc.]”—in other words, a crime whose motivation is hatred of a particular group to which the victim belongs. Proponents of augmented penalties for hate crimes point to the particularly insidious nature of attacking people for what they represent. On the other side of the debate are those who don’t think the law should legislate what a person thinks or feels. They note that it’s not illegal to hate someone in America. The Bible seems to take the position that what someone thinks or feels—specifically, hatred—can be an indication of the severity of a crime.)
In contrast to the first group, the text continues with a second category: someone who pushes another spontaneously and not in anger, or throws something inadvertently, or doesn’t see another person and throws a nondeadly stone on the other and the other dies, so long as the first person was not the other’s enemy and didn’t want to harm the other guy. In this second category, the assembly has to judge between the makeh (the first guy, or the assailant, as we might say in English) and the blood redeemer.
The punishment for this second category is that the assailant must return to the city of refuge until the death of the high priest. This contrasts with the first category, the punishment for which is death at the hands of the blood redeemer. In both cases, though, the assailant is a ratsacher.
What we have seems remarkably similar to the terms “murder” and “manslaughter” as they are frequently used in modernity. The laws of the State of New York, for example, define murder and manslaughter such that the former is a more serious offense than the latter, though the details do not match Numbers.
The laws of the State of New York also reconfirm what we already know—namely, that we cannot rely on the literal meanings of words if we want to know what they really mean. Article 125 of the New York State penal code defines “homicide” to mean illegal killing. Legal killing, in New York State, is not homicide, even though both the etymology and common use of the term suggest otherwise. In fact, Article 125 actually declares that, among other things, “homicide means . . . criminally negligent homicide,” using “homicide” to define “homicide” (and probably causing English teachers all over to cringe).
We should not be misled by similar ties between Biblical law and modern law. In modernity, accidental killing is neither murder nor manslaughter. It is not a crime. In this country, if a person accidentally kills another through no fault of his own—if, say, following the example in Numbers, someone throws a nondeadly object by accident and it just happens to kill another—the thrower is generally not guilty of a crime at all. By contrast, in the Bible the thrower is guilty and sentenced to a city of refuge until the death of the high priest. (Priests in ancient Israel were the guardians of the religion and the ones tasked with performing sacred rites such as sacrifice. The leader of the priests was designated the “high priest.” It is not clear why the death of the high priest was connected to letting people out of a city of refuge. Apparently, though perhaps surprisingly, this connection doesn’t seem to have created any significant incentive to kill the high priest.)
In short, unforeseeability is no defense in the Bible. (This difference is worthy of a book in itself. Guilt in America has to do with intent. Guilt in the Bible, at least here, has to do with the result.)
In other words, Numbers 35 is about two different kinds of illegal killing. It seems that Biblical law, like our modern law, recognized two different degrees of illegal killing. In some regards, modern codes agree with the Bible: Premeditated killing in both legal systems falls into the more severe category. Both systems also require the handler of a deadly object to exercise care. And both systems take hatred into account as a complicating factor. (At least, some modern systems do this—as we noted earlier, debate continues about hate crimes.)
In addition to the two levels of illegal killing in the Bible, there’s a third, legal sort. The blood redeemer who kills a killer is not committing a crime. (Also one interesting point of view lets Cain off the hook. He didn’t break any laws because there weren’t yet any laws to break.) Killing an idolater, as we saw in Deuteronomy 13:10, is not only legal but required.
Most of the uses of ratsach are in connection to the cities of refuge, the laws of which are repeated in Deuteronomy and then again in the Book of Joshua.
We also find the verb in I Kings, where Elijah uses it, quoting God, to rebuke King Ahab for wrongly killing Naboth. The Book of Job (in 24:14), as part of a litany of evils in the world, notes the existence of “ratsachers” who kill the poor and needy, like thieves at night. (As it happens, we have yet another word for “kill” here: katal. It’s a rare word that means the same thing as harag.) Proverbs 22:13 warns that a lazy man worries that there might be a lion outside, and if he goes outside he might be killed—that is, ratsached. Jeremiah and Hosea both use the verb, but clearly to quote the Ten Commandments. And that’s it.
We are finally in a position to understand what ratsach means, because in all of these instances (save perhaps the case with the lion, where we assume poetic license), ratsach is used for illegal killing. The most general word is hikah. It means “to hit.” Frequently, such hitting will result in death. If so, the words harag (“kill”) and heimit (also, “kill”) apply. Those are less general than hikah. But they are still more general than ratsach, which only applies to illegal killing.
So the Ten Commandments do not forbid all acts of killing, and the KJV translation (“Thou shalt not kill”) is wrong because it overreaches. According to the Bible—and, in particular, to the Ten Commandments, certain kinds of killing are OK.
Because of this glaring error in the KJV, the NRSV changed the translation to “You shall not murder.” (But the translators hedged, adding a footnote: “or kill.”) The NRSV translation is better, because it doesn’t leave the reader with the mistaken notion that any killing is forbidden. But it still misses the mark, because it’s not strong enough. The Ten Commandments forbid murder, but also what we call manslaughter in this country. So perhaps the less concise “Don’t commit homicide” would be better. But, in fact, because the details of the two illegal categories of killing in the Bible differ from modern notions, even “Don’t commit homicide” is too weak.
The concept is really, “Don’t break the law and kill,” a translation that brings us back to the point of the Ten Commandments. If the Ten Commandments were part of a legal code, there would be no point in saying “Don’t kill illegally.” But the Ten Commandments highlight the fact that some laws (such as the laws against killing) are more important than others (tithing, for example). Even if you’d be happy to live in a city of refuge, and even if you can contrive to make your murder look like an accident, you don’t get to kill whomever you want.
We don’t have a perfect translation for this in English. But surely “Don’t kill” is wrong. In the end, “Don’t murder” is the best we have.
We also learn a more general lesson. While “Don’t murder” is closer than “Don’t kill,” it still misses much of the original point, particularly because the Hebrew prohibition includes manslaughter, while “murder” in English sometimes specifically excludes lesser forms of illegal killing. The more general point is that, in isolation and without context, some passages of the Bible don’t have any perfect translation. Or, to look at the matter from the other direction, no English translation perfectly conveys the Hebrew.
Sometimes a translation that’s almost right is good enough. If we misrepresent the shade of a color (as with the “red heifer” from Numbers 19:2 that we used as an example of Hebrew word order in Chapter 3), it probably doesn’t matter too much. Or if we misrepresent a variety of tree in a story, we can probably still understand the story’s point. But other times—as here, where we’re talking about a fundamental moral framework—almost correct is not “good enough” but “wrong.”
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find the best translation we can. But we should recognize that sometimes translation can only go so far.
So we’ve seen that one of the most important commandments is often seriously misquoted. The commandment against murder is interesting because it is among the most universal. Most well-meaning people never murder, yet legal killing is more widespread—among soldiers, in self-defense, etc. In other words, while many people violate the common but wrong mistranslation of the commandment, most people follow what it really means.
Another commandment, the tenth or both the ninth and tenth, follows the same pattern. The summary in Table 2 of the tenth commandment (or the ninth and tenth commandments) is purposely vague so as not to prejudice the issue. The commandment is about one’s neighbor’s wife and property and so forth. What isn’t one supposed to do to them?
The familiar answer from the KJV version is “Thou shalt not covet.” But what exactly is “coveting”? Unlike “stealing,” “killing,” “murdering,” etc.—which are all common verbs—“coveting” in English is hardly ever used outside of the context of the Ten Commandments themselves.
For example, the U.S. Code—the sum total of the set of federal laws—doesn’t contain the word “covet.” That extensive legal system uses other words—“steal,” “kill,” “take,” “murder,” and so forth—dozens or sometimes hundreds of times. But “covet” doesn’t appear.
Most people have only one reference point for “covet,” and that’s the Ten Commandments. People know what, say, “stealing” is. So when they read “Don’t steal” (or “Thou shalt not steal”), the Ten Commandments form a bridge between an ancient commandment and something they already understand. They know that the Ten Commandments forbid something that exists elsewhere in their lives. “Covet” is different. Because people don’t use the word elsewhere, when they read that word in the Ten Commandments, they just know that the Ten Commandments forbid something that is forbidden by the Ten Commandments. It takes an additional step to fill in the gaps of what is otherwise nearly circular.
Yet because the Ten Commandments are so widespread, that one appearance of the word is enough to make “covet” much more common than it otherwise might be, and most people have a sense that it means “desire,” “want,” “crave,” “lust,” etc.
The English word “covet” does mean that, but the original Hebrew does not.
The Hebrew verb is chamad, and we know by now how to figure out what it means. We look at how it is used.
The root Ch.M.D is a fairly common one in Hebrew, and, in addition to the simple verb form we see in the Ten Commandments, the root appears in a variety of other words. But we know from Chapter 2 that using related words might lead us astray.
The first time the verb chamad appears in the Bible is in the Ten Commandments themselves. All we know from there is that chamad is something not to be done. It could be anything.
The next time we see the verb is in Exodus 34:24, and here we get a very clear sense of what the word means—or at least, what it does not mean. Exodus 34:23 sets the stage by referring to the pilgrimage holidays (the Feast of Matzot, Feast of Weeks, and Feast of Booths) during each of which Jews—or, in Exodus 34:23, just the men—were to leave their homes and ascend to Jerusalem. In that context, Exodus 34:24 promises that “. . . no one will chamad your land when you go up [to Jerusalem] three times a year.”
Clearly, the verse is meant to tell people that it’s OK to leave their land, that nothing bad will happen while they are gone. A variety of meanings seem reasonable, but “covet” is not among them. Surely, when the people left their land untended, they were not afraid that other people would simply desire it. Other people could desire the land whether the landowners were around or not. There is nothing about the temporary absence of the men that would make the land more desirable from afar.
On the other hand, the landowners might reasonably have feared that during their pilgrimage other people would take their land. Perhaps chamad means “take”?
This verse doesn’t do much to narrow down the meaning, unfortunately. Perhaps chamad means “destroy,” for all we know from just this one verse. So we keep looking.
We see the verb again in Deuteronomy 5, of course, in the repetition of the Ten Commandments.
Then we see it yet again in Deuteronomy 7:25: “Burn their god statues in fire; do not chamad the silver and gold on them and take it. . . .” Surprisingly, the KJV has “desire” here, not “covet,” even though it’s the same verb that the KJV translates as “covet” elsewhere.
The line is tantalizing, because it makes it clear that there’s a connection between chamad and taking, but we don’t immediately know what the connection is.
One reasonable possibility is that chamad means the same thing as “take.” We frequently find information repeated for clarity or for emphasis. The first part of the line instructs the Israelites to “burn” them “in fire.” What else could burning involve but fire? Similarly, chamad may be included next to “taking,” as if to indicate “chamad, by taking,” just like “burn, in fire.” This would accord perfectly with Exodus 34, where it looked like the word meant “take.”
Unfortunately, the other possibility, still based on Deuteronomy 7:25, is that chamad is a precursor to taking or is related to taking in some other way. If so, the line would mean something like, “Don’t prepare to take the silver and gold, and certainly don’t actually take it.”
We don’t have a verb in English for “prepare to take” or “prepare to acquire,” but that doesn’t mean that there is no such process. People who are planning to buy a new car will frequently imagine what it would be like to have the car. They might keep a brochure at home. They might talk about it with their friends. Or they might make a project out of buying the car, enjoying the process of looking at colors, optional equipment, etc. Maybe this is what chamad means? From Deuteromy 7:25, it’s possible. That verse might mean “Don’t imagine your life with the silver and gold, because then you’ll be tempted to take it.”
But does that meaning work in Exodus 34? Not quite. Exodus 34 is so helpful because it tells us that people are more likely to chamad someone’s land when the landowner is not around. It doesn’t seem reasonable that people would be more apt to imagine owning someone’s unoccupied land than occupied land. It’s unlikely that the people leaving for Jerusalem on their pilgrimage would worry, “I hope no one imagines what it’s like to have my land while I’m gone.”
A third possibility lies in the middle. Perhaps chamad means “take temporarily.” The Hebrew verb we just translated as “take” in Deuteronomy 7:25 is lakach. Perhaps Hebrew had two kinds of taking, temporary and permanent, and perhaps lakach was the latter while chamad was the former. In English, “take” normally means “take permanently,” but it can, in fact, be either one. “I only took it for an hour and I gave it back” is a perfectly reasonable English sentence. If Hebrew had verbs for both kinds of taking, it would make sense that chamading could lead to lakaching. “Don’t take it home and enjoy having it” could be the point of Deuteromony 7:25, “because then you’ll be tempted to take it permanently.”
This meaning also meshes with Exodus 34:24. The landowners might have feared that another person would try out their homes while they were away.
Other passages in the Bible reinforce a close connection between chamad and lakach. Joshua 7:21 and Proverbs 6:25 both juxtapose chamad and lakach, either one after the other (as in Deuteronomy) or in parallel.
Proverbs 6:25 is particularly interesting, because it starts off with “Don’t chamad a beauty in your levav,” which might make it seem as though chamad is something that happens as part of the intangible internal process of being human. After all, we saw in Chapter 4 that levav represents the aspects of life like thoughts, emotions, etc. But the next half of Proverbs 6:25, parallel to the first, reads, “Do not be taken by her eyelids.” Both halves of the line are poetic, and both in the same way. They put overt actions into metaphoric parts of the body. The levav (“heart,” but not really) is an organ with poetic impact, as we saw in detail in Chapter 4. And the eyelids are used poetically to represent beauty. (We don’t know for sure if the Hebrew word means “eyelashes,” “eyelids,” or some other eyelike body part.)
Proverbs 12:12 lends further support to the idea that chamad has something to do with taking, through the use of parallel opposites. The first part of the line has “wicked/chamad,” and the second part, “righteous/give.” The details of the line are a little more difficult to get right, so we’ll leave it untranslated, but pretty clearly, chamad is the opposite of “give.”
In Psalm 68:17, it is God who chamads a mountain. Surely the mountain stays where it is, so this doesn’t look like physical taking. It could be that God loves the mountain or that God has taken the mountain in some figurative sense, along the lines of “choose.”
Finally, we have Proverbs 1:22: “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And the scorners chamad in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?” (KJV). We have three verbs—“love,” “hate,” and, between those two, chamad. So it might seem that chamad, like the other two, is a verb of intention, not of action. That’s why the KJV translates it as “delight” here (not “covet”).
But the entire line is poetic, with two parallel phrases followed by a third one that contrasts with the first two, conveying the same meaning but breaking the pattern: “simple ones love simplicity”/“scorners chamad in scorn”/“fools hate knowledge” (KJV). Though disagreement abounds about the exact meanings of the words translated as “simplicity” and “scorn,” we can use those translations to look at the rhetorical style of the passage.
The line has three parts. The first two are of the form “X verb X.” “Scorn” appears twice. Then “simple” appears twice. It’s the third part that breaks this pattern, with “fools” and “knowledge,” using opposites instead of nearly identical words. In this regard the first two parts are the same and the third one different.
But in another regard, it’s the middle part that’s different. The first and last parts use the words “love” and “hate,” which form a familiar pair of opposites. From this point of view, chamad is the odd one out. We can’t conclude from this fact that chamad isn’t a verb of intention, but neither can we conclude from the line that chamad is a verb of intention. The threefold structure in which chamad differs from the other two verbs makes it hard to draw any conclusions at all. So Proverbs 1:22 is interesting in its own right and a useful example of Biblical poetry, but it doesn’t help us much with chamad.
Fortunately, we don’t need Proverbs 1:22 to figure out what chamad means. We already have a pretty good idea. Everywhere we have seen it, the verb is either clearly or potentially “take.” That is, in some passages hardly any other meaning seems reasonable, while in other passages, even though some other meanings seem possible, “take” is possible, too. So the only question is how the verb chamad relates to lakach. Are they two kinds of taking? Or are they essentially synonyms?
Unfortunately, these nuances are beyond our reach. As a reasonable guess, chamading is a precursor to lakaching—that is, a person who wants to lakach might first chamad. But we have only weak evidence to support that guess. Another possibility is that chamad and lakach differ in technical legal ways. Perhaps it is not always illegal to lakach, but chamading is always forbidden (though this possibility would need to be refined to account for Psalm 68:17, in which God is the chamader). Or maybe the two verbs tend to accompany different methods of taking. Maybe the two are even near synonyms, like “sofa” and “couch” in English. We have no way of knowing.
But we do know that chamad basically means “take.”
The last commandment, therefore, should read, “Do not take your neighbor’s wife.” We don’t know if the point is “take with the intent to return” or “take and not plan to give back,” but either way the commandment is surely about taking, not about wanting. Wanting may or may not be OK, but the Ten Commandments don’t address the issue.
This also solves another potential problem in the Ten Commandments and the way they are usually translated. The Ten Commandments seem to define which actions are right and wrong. Keeping the Sabbath is right. Using the Lord’s name in vain is wrong. Honoring parents is right. Murdering, stealing, and falsely testifying are wrong. Finally, taking your neighbor’s wife or his stuff is wrong. With the usual translation, the Ten Commandments end with a quite clearly out-of-place prohibition against feeling a certain way. We now know that the Ten Commandments take no position on how you feel, only on what you do.
In particular, the Ten Commandments tell us that some actions are wrong. They may also have consequences, they may also be illegal, but even if they didn’t they would still be wrong. Modern Western society has steadily developed a more refined sense of the legal aspects of behavior and of the consequences that accompany undesired behavior. But the reasons for doing these things have not received similar attention. If anything, the underlying wrongness of illegal behavior has become less and less of a focus in modern society. Perhaps this is why so many people cling to the Ten Commandments.
Whatever the reasons, the Ten Commandments may be the most widespread statement that some things are wrong. And we now have a clearer understanding of what those wrong things are.