Judgement in courts of law is in fact - and should be, I think - somewhat concerned with matters beyond the fact that the crime has been committed, with whether it is a first offence etc.. If we are to judge ‘ancient Israel’ it may be that our overall judgement is negative but there may still be places where we can recognise something progressive. I certainly think that the attempts to recruit a-Israel to the United Nations are mistaken, disturbingly so. But I don’t see how it can be denied that in the overall argument of Lev.19 a certain principle is used to commend national solidarity (vs.18) and then that the same words, to some extent the same idea, are used to commend at very least some degree of decent treatment of those who are least somewhat outside the nation. Moreover that this extension is interestingly justified on the basis of sympathy, knowing how they feel - the first time or among the first times that sympathy had played this role in human thought about right and wrong. The Jesus school may have been wrong - after all these passages are not really highlighted within the overall structure of Leviticus - in thinking that a ‘great commandment’ was emerging here, or was being proposed by the original writers, but they had a point in suggesting that the very interesting question ‘who is my neighbour?’ is prompted logically by reflection on the words. I doubt if the Jesus school were alone in these reflections which must have arisen quite often amid Hellenistic reproaches about Jewish ‘misanthropy’.
We might think that sympathy is on too narrow a basis, that it does not tell us anything about how we should feel about those of other nations who are not strangers in our midst, that insistent reference to one’s own remembered - surely worse - suffering is a somewhat alienating aspect of sympathy. But when all is said and done Lev.19 achieves something in moral philosophy.
Judgement in courts of law is in fact - and should be, I think - somewhat concerned with matters beyond the fact that the crime has been committed, with whether it is a first offence etc.. If we are to judge ‘ancient Israel’ it may be that our overall judgement is negative but there may still be places where we can recognise something progressive. I certainly think that the attempts to recruit a-Israel to the United Nations are mistaken, disturbingly so. But I don’t see how it can be denied that in the overall argument of Lev.19 a certain principle is used to commend national solidarity (vs.18) and then that the same words, to some extent the same idea, are used to commend at very least some degree of decent treatment of those who are least somewhat outside the nation. Moreover that this extension is interestingly justified on the basis of sympathy, knowing how they feel - the first time or among the first times that sympathy had played this role in human thought about right and wrong. The Jesus school may have been wrong - after all these passages are not really highlighted within the overall structure of Leviticus - in thinking that a ‘great commandment’ was emerging here, or was being proposed by the original writers, but they had a point in suggesting that the very interesting question ‘who is my neighbour?’ is prompted logically by reflection on the words. I doubt if the Jesus school were alone in these reflections which must have arisen quite often amid Hellenistic reproaches about Jewish ‘misanthropy’.
We might think that sympathy is on too narrow a basis, that it does not tell us anything about how we should feel about those of other nations who are not strangers in our midst, that insistent reference to one’s own remembered - surely worse - suffering is a somewhat alienating aspect of sympathy. But when all is said and done Lev.19 achieves something in moral philosophy.