For
Judaism, everyone must be treated as a neighbor. It is necessary to read Lev
19.18 in the context of the statement further in the same chapter. For Lev 19.33–34,
the neighbor whom one is to love is the ger, the “stranger” whom “you shall love . . . as
yourself.” The LXX translates ger as prosēlytos, “one who has come,” i.e., “stranger,” but also
“proselyte”; viewing the “stranger” as a “proselyte” is a tradition also found
in rabbinic literature. In Lev 25.47 the ger is also the toshav, the “sojourner,” the resident alien (the LXX
reads respectively proselytos, stranger, proselyte, and paroikos, which can mean “neighbor” but also
“alien”). More striking, in Hebrew the words “neighbor” (re‘a, “one who dwells nearby, fellow-citizen,” as
in Lev 19.18) and “enemy/evil [one]” (ra‘, as in 1 Sam 30.22, ’ish-ra‘, “evil person”) share the same consonants (resh and ayin); they differ only in the vowels, which are not
included in the text. When Jesus asks the lawyer, “What do you read there?” he is asking, “Are you able to see,
in Torah’s words, the command to love both neighbor (narrowly defined) and
those you would see as enemies?” . . . Regarding the robbers, some commentators
depict them as Jewish Robin Hoods displaced from their land by over-taxation
and urbanization, and who protest their socio-economic disenfranchisement by
taking from the rich and giving to the poor. The text does not suggest this,
and the word for “robber,” lēstēs (compare
rabbinic Hebrew listim), connotes violent criminal.
Nor,
contrary to one popular view, do the priest and the Levite bypass the injured
man because of ritual purity concerns. Numbers 19.10b–13 prescribes ritual
ablutions after contacting a corpse, but this law does not prohibit saving a life
or burying a corpse. Tobit (1.16–20) and Josephus (Ag. Ap. 2.30.211) demonstrate the strong Jewish
concern for the respectful treatment of the dead. While Lev 21 forbids priests,
but
not Levites, from
touching corpses, m.
Naz. 7.1,
insists even “A high priest or a Nazirite [a person under utmost purity] . . .
may contract uncleanness because of a neglected corpse” (see also b. Naz. 43b; y. Naz. 56a). Levites are not forbidden from contact with corpses,
and the priest is not going up to Jerusalem, where his impurity would have
prevented him from participating in the Temple service, but “down from” (Gk katabainō; 10.31) the city. To import questions of purity
into the parable is to misread it.
Priest
and Levite indicate not an interest in purity but a point about community. Jews
generally then, and now, fit into one of three groups: priests (kohanim) descended from Aaron; Levites (levi’im) descended from other children of Levi, and
Israelites, descended from children of Jacob other than Levi. The citation of
the first two anticipates the mention of the third. The parable shocks by
making the third person not the expected Israelite but the unexpected Samaritan,
the enemy of the Jews. It thus evokes 2 Chr 28.8–15, wherein enemy Samaritans
care for Jewish victims, even as it reframes the lawyer’s question. The issue
is not “who is my neighbor?” but “can we recognize that the enemy might be our neighbour
and can we accept this disruption of our stereotypes? (Amy-Jill Levine and Marc
Zvi Brettler, eds. The Jewish Annotated
New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], 123)
