Professor Baruch Levine of New York University contributed a paper to the Neusner-Chilton volume titled “The Golden Rule in Ancient Israeli Scripture”.
Levine’s approach is scholarly, as opposed to religious, and he defines “ancient” as including what is typically known as the Hebrew Bible. That is: he looks to the texts of the Tanakh and not to the later rabbinic literature.
Levine makes a number of points that are important for our purposes.
1. Mankind has been given the capacity to distinguish right from wrong and they are “capable of fulfilling the Golden Rule”.
2. “Reciprocity is an active principle of biblical law, a predicate of justice and a tenet of wisdom (referring to the ‘wisdom literature’ of the Hebrew canon). The virtues of fairness pervade the biblical ethos.
3. The critical (for our purposes) verse of the Holiness Code found in Leviticus i.e. “Love your fellow (re’akha) as yourself” applies “in the present context only to Israelites” (emphasis added)
This is a very important point!
I mentioned in a prior post that my own teacher Rabbi Bernard Zlotowitz, stressed that meaning of the Hebrew in that phrase was limited and limiting. His view was that the proper translation is “friend”. Levine suggests that it is a term that has implicit reference to a “kinship group” and that “the social context of the Hebrew re’ah … is the key to understanding Lev 19:33″.
Levine demonstrates that where a law or statute applies to non-Israelites, it is made explicit in these early texts. These explicit inclusions are found in many locations in the Hebrew Bible, where the ger or stranger or resident alien is to be treated in a specific manner.
4. Levine proposes that “To love someone, in these terms, means to be kind and caring, and to be fair” and that the texts teach us “that a holy community is one in which the expectation of fairness is fulfilled”.
5. Levine looks beyond the constraints of the term “reciprocity” and includes analyses of Biblical situations that demonstrate, in his words: “symmetry”, “proportionality” and “mutuality”.
In doing so he softens the requirements of strict reciprocity and demonstrates that in the texts we find that “A quid pro quo calculation pursuant to the Golden Rule would have left us much worse off”. (By which I take him to mean that an interpretation of the Rule as requiring strict reciprocity is problematic.)
6. Covenant is a key element of the Biblical text and Levine discusses several examples but all demonstrate the finding that the key element of the Biblical covenant “is reciprocal. It is structured around the fulfillment of mutually binding obligations…”
7. In his conclusion Levine writes: “Formulations of the Golden Rule, both positive and negative, represent attempts to pinpoint what we are after in life. Most of all, we want to be treated fairly; we expect reciprocity.” But “We might as well admit the truth of what the Hebrew Bible illustrates. The Golden Rule works well for good people, but not so well for the selfish and unkind.”
The points raised by Levine that are most important for our purposes are:
a) The application of the “love your neighbor as yourself” stricture was, in its original context, limited to application in what Levine calls a kinship group. The ability of those in a kinship group to anticipate the desires and reactions of others in that group will become an important point as we pursue this study.
b) Even as the texts were examined for cases of and lessons on reciprocity, the idea of ‘strict reciprocity’ was modified to take on shadings of other characteristics that begin to sound like the consistency idea of Wattles and Gensler.
c) The Golden Rule, even when limited to application within the kinship group and softened to include mutuality, proportionality and, more generally, fairness, is “complex in its realization”.
It is interesting that, even though there are many instances in the Hebrew Bible that prescribe or promise strict reciprocity, Levine’s analysis is drawn beyond that strictness as he considers the broader message of the texts. We’ll see, I believe, that this was and is inevitable.
©Charles R. Lightner