By Dan Tomlinson, Hamilton
This in reply to Mary Fahnestock-Thomas’ letter of February 27 in which she gives an all-too-familiar spin on the Sixth Commandment. She notes God’s command “not to kill,” and then argues that we apply it inconsistently. Her argument fails on two counts. First, she does not adequately account for the complexity of language. Second, she betrays a type of bigotry surprisingly common for modern people.
To the first point, translating from ancient Hebrew to modern English is no small feat. Hebrew was wonderfully adapted to poetic expression, and yet was rather primitive. With relatively few words in the lexicon, a single root word often carried a wide range of meaning. For instance, the verb in Exodus 20:13 may be rendered to kill, to murder, or to slay (as in manslaughter). Translators usually render the verse, “Thou shalt not kill” (King James Version), or “You shall not murder” (English Standard Version). Perhaps the most accurate translation would be something like, “You shall not murder, commit manslaughter against, or otherwise wrongfully cause the death of another human.” Of course, in trying to cover every conceivable shade of meaning we lose the simplicity of the Hebrew form. But because MFT fails to account for the complexity of language, her argument falters.
To the second point, modern people fall rather easily into bigotry in looking down the halls of history. In what I would label generational bigotry, we demean the intellectual faculties of people from the past. We justify this in the way of all bigots, on basis of the fact that they are not us. MFT betrays this type of bigotry when she implicitly assumes that the author of Exodus could not hold a complex understanding about the meaning of the word “kill.”
I am sure she finds no difficulty in differentiating any number of ways in which we moderns might use the word. For instance, one might kill a deer in season with a license. One might also kill a deer out of season, or without a license. Those are distinct kinds of killing. Furthermore, one might kill a person engaged in raping a beloved family member. Or one might accidentally kill a person while shooting targets. Or yet again, one might walk up to a person on the street and shoot them in the chest. All those acts constitute killing, yet we readily understand that they represent differing motivations and levels of culpability.
By the same token, we should credit Moses and God with a faculty for holding multiple understandings about the concept of killing. We certainly find evidence for these multiple understandings throughout the Bible. But given her failure to make such an allowance, MFT’s argument falls flat.