Category Archives: Early Church

Thou shalt not kill?

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Do not kill. Do no murder.

This commandment can be translated many ways. They word “kill” is often translated both ways; in other texts, when this word refers to one person, it is generally translated as “kill” but as “murder” when it refers to more than one victim.

And yet there were many commandments that come with the death penalty attached. Some infractions were punished by stoning. Others were to be punished by death but no specific method of execution was stipulated. There must have been a caste of executioners in ancient Israel, similar to the priesthood, but there is no record of them. (Just as there was a caste or guild of executioners in medieval Europe, these people would know the proper methods for killing and executing people as well as the rules governing when-where-how to execute as well as the disposal of the bodies of the executed, who were generally considered ineligible for burial in standard burial grounds.)

There were also the commands that Joshua, Saul, and other ancient leaders of Israel received to commit genocide: the complete extermination of people already living in certain areas, non-Israelites occupying territory that God was giving to Israel. Slaves could be killed by their master for almost any reason—or no reason—with no consequences for the master but if killed by someone else, the killer owed a fine to the master to sample up for his lost “property.”

“Murder” is clearly not the same as “killing.” Modern law distinguishes many kinds of homocide, including manslaughter, self-defense, various degrees of murder (involving how much planning and intention the perpetrator engaged in), and accidents.

Even killing in self-defense has been treated differently by differing Christian traditions. Latin-speaking Christians said that self-defense was justified and carried no penalty; this line of thought eventually led to the “just war” theory. Greek-speaking Christians said that even justified self-defense was a traumatic experience and a person needs to undergo a modified penance to process-deal-come to terms with the experience.

Medieval Christians also gendered killing and murder differently. Killing, a strategic behavior of soldiers, was a masculine act; murder, a spontaneous or vengeful or duplicitous act, was a feminine act. Men who murdered were considered less than “real men;” women, such as a queen, who led battles or engaged in military operations, were “manly women.”

Read more about capital punishment in the Old Testament here.

No Adultery? No Killing?

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A contemporary icon of Moses receiving the 10 Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Moses looks surprisingly spry and young, unlike the bushy-bearded, white-haired Charlton Heston in the movie depiction of this event! Moses is typically depicted as a young or middle-aged man with a very trim beard in icons, rather than as an unkempt senior citizen. This makes it easier to distinguish him from the prophets, who are usually depicted as older man with longer beards, like Elijah in the Transfiguration icon.

Don’t kill (or “murder”). Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal.


These commandments in Exodus 20 are terse. Direct. To the point.
οὐ φονεύσεις
οὐ μοιχεύσεις
οὐ κλέψεις

Aren’t these obvious? We think we know what these mean. We all know about murder from watching police shows like “Law and Order.” Adultery means an unsanctioned sexual relationship with a married person. Don’t take what belongs to someone else. But these forbidden actions are not really as straightforward as we like to think.

For instance, “adultery” ( μοιχεύσεις ) is a very complicated concept. Nowadays, we think this means an affair between married people. But in classic biblical and canon law, when a married woman has an affair with someone, it is called “adultery.” When an unmarried woman has an affair, it is called “fornication.” The marital status of the man is never considered by biblical or canon law; when a man has an affair, he is guilty of fornication–whether he is married or not. That doesn’t sound fair to our modern ears but that’s the way biblical and canon law developed.

A second marriage can also be considered “adultery”–even if the first spouse is dead. It depends on whether the marriage is considered a contract (which expires when one partner dies) or a covenant (which never expires, even if one partner dies). Canon law in the Greek and Russian churches consider marriage a covenant; western Christians have generally considered marriage a contract. But not always.

If a first marriage ends in divorce, the second marriage can also be considered adultery unless one of the former partners asks a bishop to declare the first marriage “dead”–the relationship has died–or “null.” If the first marriage is declared null, that means the proper conditions for making the contract or the covenant were never fulfilled so there was no marriage in the first place and the first marriage is deemed to have been simply “legal fornication.”

Understanding who has–or has not–committed adultery can be a long, torturous process that can cause a lot of heartache. Israel’s worship of pagan gods is always called adultery by the prophets because Israel was said to be married to God. The worship of foreign gods also caused a lot of heartache among the Chosen People and resulted in wars, civil wars, exiles, and famines when God called the people back to fidelity with him. The Church is also considered the Bride of Christ and when we turn our backs on him and worship anything else–including our own opinions!–we are also committing a kind of adultery. But how many of us admit that?

What about murder or killing? Aren’t those straightforward legal concepts? Let’s look at those next week!

Remember—Even Before it Happens!

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God rests on 7th Day of Creation/ Mosaic Monreale (Sicily), Cathedral. – Mosaic, 12th/13th century. Centre aisle, south wall.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8)

The 10 Commandments are prefaced with the proclamation that Israel ought to keep the commandments because “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” The delivery from Egypt is what obliges Israel to keep the commandments as an act of gratitude. But the Sabbath is different—Sabbath is hardwired into the DNA of creation because God rested on the Sabbath when making the world.

The command to “Remember!” the Sabbath is not the same word as in the command, “Do this in remembrance of me” at the Last Supper. Remembrance of the Sabbath is the Future Passive Indicative 2nd Singular form of the verb, meaning “you shall remember,” or “you shall recall,” “you shall think about,” “you shall be aware of.”

This form of “remember” is always looking ahead to something. The people are told to always live in expectation, in anticipation of the next Sabbath. The Sabbath is the chronological icon of the Kingdom of God: just as we are called to always live in expectation and hope for the Kingdom, the 10 Commandments tell the people to always live in expectation and hope of the next Sabbath. They-and we-are called to focus on the future, where we are going rather than being focused on the past, where we have been and what we have done. We look ahead and we hope.

Several years ago, I was on West 14 Street several times a week during the summer for various regular errands. There was a street-lady, disheveled and unkempt, who walked backward pushing the shopping cart of her possessions nearly every day. In the Old Testament, she would have been hailed as a prophet enacting a sermon everyday, a living example of how people spend more time paying attention to where they have been and despairing over or being proud of what they have done rather than paying attention to where they are going and hopeful about opportunities and challenges ahead.

In modern Greek, this form of the verb has become the word for “fiancé.” This suggests that the Sabbath is the “engagement ring” given by God to his bride, Israel. Many of the prophets refer to the forty years that Israel spent in the wilderness as their honeymoon period with God.

Sabbath has always been respected in the Christian liturgical practice even as Sunday, the weekly anniversary of the Resurrection, became the principal day of Christian worship. Of course, the Great Sabbath—the ultimate day of rest—is the blessed Sabbath that Christ spent resting in the tomb, during which he descended into Hell to harrow [demolish] it. The engagement of God to Israel is fulfilled when Death and all-that-opposes-God is destroyed and the wedding celebration described in the Apocalypse [Book of Revelation] begins.

(Readers will recall that the Greek text of the Old Testament was compiled in 300 BC while the standard Hebrew text as we now have it is only as old as the First Crusade , AD 1000. The Septuagint, 1300 years older than the Hebrew text that survives, is a more reliable witness—translated by Jewish scholars for Jewish readers—to the original text. I’m classical Christian thought, the medieval Hebrew is a commentary on the text rather than the source of the text itself.)