[These are notes from another RESOURCE we recommend as MUST OWN; this has been hailed as a great scholarly achievement by authorities of the Bible everywhere. Its translation is based on the American Jewish Version of TNK. Reformatting and slight editing ours.]
The Soncino Press
PENTATEUCH & HAFTORAHS
Hebrew Text English Translation & Commentary,Edited by Dr. H. H. Hertz
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FIFTH COMMANDMENT: HONOUR OF PARENTS
This Commandment follows the Sabbath command, because the Sabbath is the source and the guarantor of the family life; and it is among the Commandment engraved on the First Tablet, the laws of piety towards God, because parents stand in the place of God, so far as their children are concerned. Elsewhere in Scripture, the duty to one’s parents stands likewise next to the duties toward God (Lev. XIX, 3).
honour thy father and thy mother. By showing them respect, obedience and love. Each parent alike is entitled to these. For although ‘father’ is here mentioned first, in Lev. XIX, 3 we read ‘each one shall fear (i.e. reverence) his mother and his father.’ And this obligation extends beyond the grave. The child must revere the memory of the departed parent in act and feeling. Respect to parents is among the primary human duties; and no excellence can atone for the lack of such respect. Only in cases of extreme rarity (e.g. where godless parents would guide children towards crime) can disobedience be justified. Proper respect to parents may at times involve immeasurable hardship; yet the duty remains. Shem and Japheth throw the mantle of charity over their father’s shame: only an unnatural child gloats over a parents’ disgrace or dishonor. The greatest achievement open to parents is to be ever fully worthy of their children’s reverence and trust and love.
that thy days may be long. i.e. the honoring of one’s parents will be rewarded by happiness and blessing. This is not always seen in the life of the individual; but the Commandment is addressed to the individual as a member of society, as the child of a people. The home is infinitely more important to a people than the schools, the professions or its political life; and filial respect is the ground of national permanence and prosperity. If a nation thinks of its past with contempt, it may well contemplate its future with despair; it perishes through moral suicide.
SECOND TABLE: DUTIES TOWARDS FELLOWMEN
The first five Commandments have each an explanatory addition; the last five are brief and emphatic Thou shalt not’s. Our relation to our neighbors requires no elucidation; since we feel the wrongs which others do to us, we have a clear guide how we ought to act towards others. These duties have their root in the principle ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’, applied to life, house, property and honor.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT: THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE
thou shalt not murder. The infinite worth of human life is based on the fact that man is created ‘in the image of God’. God alone gives life, and He alone may take it away. The intentional killing of any human being, apart from capital punishment legally imposed by a judicial tribunal, or in a war for the defense of national and human rights, is absolutely forbidden. In Greece, weak children were exposed; that is, abandoned on a lonely mountain to perish. Jewish horror of child-murder was long looked upon as a contemptible prejudice. ‘It is a crime among the Jews to kill any child,’ sneered the Roman historian Tacitus.
Hebrew law carefully distinguishes homicide from willful murder. It saves the involuntary slayer of his fellow-man from vendetta; and does not permit composition, or money-fine, for the life of the murderer. Jewish ethics enlarges the notion of murder so as to include both the doing of anything by which the health and well-being of a fellow-man is undermined, and the omission of any act by which a fellow-man could be saved in peril, distress or despair.
For the prohibition of suicide,
- Gen. IX, 5: your blood of your lives. lit. ‘your blood, according to your own souls.’ The Rabbis understood these words literally, i.e. your life-blood, and based on them the prohibition of suicide.
- will I require, i.e. I will exact punishment for it.
- beast. If an animal killed a man, it must be put to death; see Exod. XXI,28-32 for ‘the law concerning an ox which gored a man.
- at the hand of every man’s brother.
- Better, at the hand of his brother-man (M. Friedlander). This clause emphasizes, the preceding phrase, ‘and at the hand of man.’ If God seeks the blood of a man at the hand of a beast which kills him, how much more will He exact vengeance from a human being who murders his brother-man!
SEVENTH COMMANDMENT: THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE
adultery. ‘Is an execrable and God-detested wrong-doing’ (Philo). This Commandment against infidelity warns husband and wife alike against profaning the sacred Covenant of Marriage. It involves the prohibition of immoral speech, immodest conduct, or association with persons who scoff at the sacredness of purity. Among no people has there been a purer homelife than among the Jewish people. No woman enjoyed greater respect than the Jewish woman; and she fully merited that respect.
EIGHTH COMMANDMENT: THE SANCTITY OF PROPERTY
thou shalt not steal. Property represents the fruit of industry and intelligence. Any aggression on the property of our neighbor is, therefore, an assault on his human personality. This Commandment also has a wider application than theft and robbery; and it forbids every illegal acquisition of property by cheating, by embezzlement or forgery. ‘There are transactions which are legal and do not involve any breach of law, which are yet base and disgraceful. Such are all transactions in which a person takes advantage of the ignorance or embarrassment of his neighbor for the purpose of increasing his own property’ (M. Friedlander).
NINTH COMMANDMENT: AGAINST BEARING FALSE WITNESS
The three preceding Commandments are concerned with wrongs inflicted upon our neighbor by actual deed: this Commandment is concerned with wrong inflicted by word of mouth.
thou shalt not bear false witness. The prohibition embraces all forms of slander, defamation and misrepresentation, whether of an individual, a group, a people, a race, or a Faith. None have suffered so much from slander, defamation and misrepresentation as the Jew and Judaism. Thus, modernist theologians still repeat that, according to this Commandment, the Israelite is prohibited only from slandering a fellow-Israelite; because, they allege, the Heb. word for ‘neighbor’ here, and in ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Lev. XIX, 18), does not mean fellow-man, but only fellow-Israelite. This is a glaring instance of bearing false witness against Judaism; and is proved to be so by XI, 2 (‘Let every man ask of his neighbor, jewels of silver, etc.’) where the word neighbor cannot possibly mean an Israelite, but distinctly refers to the Egyptian. In this Commandment, as in all moral precepts in the Torah, the Heb. word neighbor is equivalent to fellowman.
TENTH COMMANDMENT: AGAINST COVETOUS DESIRES
covet. i.e. to long for the possession of anything that we cannot get in an honest and legal manner. This Commandment goes to the root of all evil actions—the unholy instincts and impulses of predatory desire, which are the spring of nearly every sin against a neighbor. the man who does not covet his neighbor’s goods will not bear false witness against him; he will neither rob nor murder, nor will he commit adultery. It commands self-control; for every man has it in his power to determine whether his desires are to master him, or he is to master his desires. Without such self-control there can be no worthy human life; it alone is the measure of true manhood or womanhood. ‘Who is strong?’ ask the Rabbis. ‘He who controls his passions,” is their reply.
thy neighbor’s house. i.e his household. The examples enumerated are the objects most likely to be coveted.
This commandment is somewhat differently worded in the Decalogue which is repeated by Moses in his Farewell Addresses to Israel. That difference, together with the other slight variations in that Decalogue from the original in this chapter of Exodus, is dealt with in the Commentary on Deuteronomy.
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