Antitheses to the Torah

Moving along with the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, we come to the group of teachings that relate to the “Law and the Prophets,” which contains a series of “antitheses,” or counterpoint statements Jesus makes to quotations of the Torah. Strikingly, Jesus presents overall a contrast from the previous legal order that harks back to his promise of “new wine” that wouldn’t fit into “old wineskins.” He’s in the business here of laying out the kingdom of the heavens, a wholly new order and covenant compared with their ancestor Israelite kingdom.

The Torah and Nevi’im

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets,” Jesus continues in the sermon. We know the reference here in his original Aramaic was not to the common nouns “law” and “prophets” but rather to the proper nouns in Hebrew Torah and Nevi’im—the five books of Moses (that now comprise the first books of the Old Testament) were simply the “Torah”/Law in Jesus’s time; and the several prophetic histories that were available to Galilean Jews were known as the “Nevi’im”/Prophets. We don’t have a definitive set of the Nevi’im when Jesus delivered the sermon, but given Jesus’s own references to prophetic writings, we know they at least had Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The third portion of today’s Old Testament/Hebrew Bible known as the Ketuvim (=“Writings”) weren’t yet grouped under a heading like Torah and Nevi’im; so while Jesus quoted from the Psalms, for example, we don’t have Jesus referring to the “Ketuvim” like he did to the Torah and Nevi’im.

All of this is to say that Jesus effectively refers here to the closest thing to a “bible” or “scripture” or “canon” of his time in saying “the Torah or the Nevi’im” in the same phrase. In context, it’s as if he’s saying, “Don’t think that I am here to destroy the scriptures” or “Don’t think that I am here to destroy the Bible.” But it is clear that he concentrates on the Torah and the Nevi’im specifically in the antitheses that follow, and so it still matters that these particular scriptural traditions of Law and Prophets carry a specific canonical status among Jesus’s audience. And it’s that status that Jesus upholds even while he transcends these traditions and points his audience toward a revolutionary new social order than what they’ve experienced or remembered.

Jesus insists “one jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the [Torah] till all be fulfilled.” The King James English relies on William Tyndale’s and Miles Coverdale’s translations of the Greek, and Tyndale and Coverdale appear to have guessed at what “iota” and “keraia” meant in saying “jot” and “tittle.” The iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet and in common handwriting of the time, could be marked with the simplest vertical line. Keraia were serifs, those even smaller typographical ornaments on the edges of letterforms that give a distinctive chiseled shape. By these metaphors, we see Jesus’s emphasis on his mode of revising the Torah and the Nevi’im—he won’t be revising by redaction (erasure, subtraction), but rather by emendation (expansion, addition). This becomes clear in his antithetical statements relative to prior law and custom: the teachings that begin with “but I say unto you” follow up with ethics that when lived, envelop what was required in the Torah and achieve even greater moral action than what the Torah had presented.

Jesus promises those who teach to “break one of these least commandments” in the Torah “shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven”—in other words, breaking Torah does not fit the program. However, the scribes and Pharisees, those at the time most well known for their insistence on following and obeying Torah with exactness, fall short—Jesus holds them up as the example of unrighteousness. “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” This mode of legal exactitude, of “straining at a gnat” as Jesus will describe it later, of demanding obedience doesn’t fit with the kingdom of heaven. As this sermon will make clear, God makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust, and this kingdom of heaven does the same. We can expect a moral order predicated on the present moment and bringing goodness, an ethical foundation based on doing good and addressing need, not measuring righteousness, delivering punishments, and judging sinners.

Luke offers a curious statement from Jesus—that the Torah/Law was fulfilled in John the Baptist, and following John, “the kingdom of God is preached.” Perhaps because the Lukan community of Jesus’s early followers directed special attention to the Gentile world and worked as missionaries more than others in that domain, Luke-Acts would draw a stronger distinction between the age of the Jews and an emerging age of the New Covenant. Regardless, we see an emphasis on the kingdom of heaven/kingdom of God superseding the Israelite kingdom. From here on out, the attention gets fixed onto the imminence and the presence of that heavenly kingdom, and on participating with Jesus in bringing it to fulfillment.

The Antitheses

Jesus leads into an antithesis six times in the sermon with “ye have heard that it was said…” Each time, he quotes from the Torah and then pivots, offering a new teaching that supersedes and envelops the prior law. We can list the six antitheses:

• “Thou shalt not kill” — Exodus 20:13 / Deuteronomy 5:17
• “Thou shalt not commit adultery” — Exodus 20:14 / Deuteronomy 5:18
• “whosoever shall put away his wife…” — Deuteronomy 24:1–4
• “Thou shalt not forswear thyself” — Leviticus 19:12 / Numbers 30:2–3 / Deuteronomy 23:22
• “an eye for an eye…” — Exodus 21:23–24 / Leviticus 24:19–20 / Deuteronomy 19:21
• “Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy” — Possible quotation error by gospel writers? (Since nowhere in the Torah or Nevi’im does it say to “hate thine enemy.”)

On Murder

The first antithesis quotes the straightforward injunction in the Ten Commandments not to murder (“kill” in the King James; “murder” virtually everywhere else). “But I say unto you,” Jesus replies, “That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” There’s a lot going on here; let’s break it down.

Gehenna/Hinnom

The King James English perpetuates a medieval mistranslation of gehenna and a medieval cosmology that divided the universe into three planes: the earth (or plane of the living), the heavens/sky (plane of the angels, righteous dead), and hell (plane of the demons, wicked dead).

Jesus’s contemporaries ascribed to a different cosmology, where a neutral underworld housed the dead. Jesus doesn’t refer to this underworld (Hades in Greek; Sheol in Hebrew), but rather to Gehenna, a literal site in a valley outside Jerusalem where children were burned to death in sacrifices to Moloch, an Israelite and Sumerian deity mentioned in several passages of the Old Testament. No single Greek term in the New Testament corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon word hell; likewise, no term at all in the original texts of the New Testament corresponds to the medieval picture of infernus/hell, a kingdom ruled by Satan. Hades, Sheol, and Tartarus, terms that do appear in the New Testament, refer usually to a general place for the dead or at most, to a subterranean prison for disembodied souls. “The gehenna” appears eleven times in the synoptic gospels, and in each case, in reference to the Gehenna/Hinnom site.

Two rabbinic schools at Jesus’s time held the highest prestige of any: the tradition of Rabbi Shammai and that of Rabbi Hillel. Shammai taught that God’s justice would exact retribution on the wicked through purifying fire and used the salt metaphor to describe this purification: if salt loses its saltiness, it’s good only to be burned; wicked souls are humans devoid of their “saltiness” or humanity, and must be purified by fire. Hillel taught God’s justice would achieve a transformation of the wicked through remedial punishment, and in contrast to Shammai, described people as possessed of light, and through God’s judgment, capable of light’s purification. We see Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount combining these two prominent schools of thought using the very same popular salt and light metaphors—we are all salt and light; we are all capable of losing our saltiness and smothering our light. Purification by fire (Gehenna) happens to those who refuse purification by light (grace).

Here at this teaching on the commandment not to murder, Jesus goes one further: don’t even get angry without good reason, don’t even insult your neighbor—otherwise Gehenna awaits you. We can see how by living this way, one doesn’t even approximate murder. The kingdom of heaven envelops the Torah, the one emending and fulfilling the other.

I’d like to offer an analogy from our own era. Because Gehenna was well known to Jesus’s contemporaries as a site of inarguably atrocious evil done to innocent children in the name of sacrifice for victory on the battlefield, I’ve wondered about what resembles this in our own time—a reference that is just as well-known and just as, if not more so, atrocious. I do think the image of Auschwitz approximates Jesus’s use of Gehenna here. If we were to visit the memorial grounds and cemetery of this horrific concentration camp from the Nazi Regime’s systematic execution of Jewish people during World War II, we would find a pile of children’s and toddler’s shoes, each pair taken from a child when the staff at Auschwitz ripped babies from mothers and killed them for sport before their mothers’ very eyes and dispatched children to gas chambers.1

Gehenna (or Hinnom, same place) held similar vivid images of horror for Jesus’s audience: the place where people brought their children to be slaughtered. The prophet Jeremiah renamed Hinnom/Gehenna, saying it should never again be called “Topheth or the valley of Ben-hinnom, but rather the valley of Slaughter” (Jer. 7:31–32). I think the Auschwitz analogy is apt: whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of Auschwitz, in other words, in danger of descending into a similar dehumanizing mentality that made such a place possible. It’s dangerous to cast our fellow humans as “Raca,”2 fools, targets of ridicule. If I may comment as a historian here—it’s my observation from history that dehumanizing behavior precedes the worst atrocities. Take your pick of any genocide or violent attack on innocent people, and we can see some form of rhetorical dehumanism leading to outbursts and worse.3 Don’t even let yourself say raca of your neighbor: that’s a teaching that certainly envelops the Torah mandate not to murder.

Altar: Not Sacrifice, but Gift

Jesus offers us a better way: be reconciled before even approaching the altar to make sacrifice. He holds up reconciliation above sacrifice, something jarring for his Torah-oriented audience. They had understood sacrifice as sacrosanct, a commandment demanding observance ahead of everything else including human relationships. Abraham had demonstrated utmost fidelity to God in his willingness to sacrifice even his favored son, Isaac, a vivid and enduring tale within the ancient Galilean obedience culture. Within the context of Jesus’s reference to Gehenna, a site of child sacrifice with an actual altar upon which children were slaughtered, this is a potent rhetorical implication: don’t turn the altar into the one of Gehenna (and I dare say, Abraham’s altar). Offer your gift—not sacrifice, but gift—after settling your troubles with brothers or even adversaries. If we were to dig deeper into the setting for Moloch worship and the child sacrifices at Gehenna, we’d find more, I think, that parallels Jesus’s imagery here, ways that ancient Israelites sought out Moloch in the first place because they wished for a war-god to bless their military offensives. No wonder Jesus draws such vivid similes around anger and connects them to the sin of murder. The road to murder and mass-murder begins in anger, belittling speech, and dehumanizing mentalities.

On Adultery and Divorce

Jesus mentions the commandments surrounding adultery and divorce in the next two antitheses. These come from Deuteronomy where we can find very long procedures for a man “putting away” his wife. Historical context is absolutely essential for making sense of these sayings, so let’s take a look at what was going on at the time of Moses and then later during the time of Jesus.

Throughout all of ancient history, the law—both in Torah and in non-Israelite kingdoms of Sumeria, Mesopotamia, and the greater Mediterranean—treated women as property. I’ll not mince words on this point: the ancient documents overwhelmingly establish women’s status this way. Fathers held daughters as property until their daughters wedded a man, at which point, the woman became the property of her husband. From biblical history, just notice such women as Esther, Bathsheba, Ruth, etc. The most heroic of them (as far as the literature elevates her), Esther, still experienced a life as property of her father and then of her royal husband. As property, women appear in Torah as passive objects, not active agents. In this context, a phrase like “causeth her to commit adultery” must be understood as a description of male moral failings and the baseline expectation of the legal system surrounding marriage and property, not a universal statement about women’s value or choices. (I don’t mean to set aside the terrible effects such laws had on women and their agency, mobility, support, safety, and happiness; as we’ll see, Jesus resists these codes that subordinate women and will elevate women enough to spark, in some instances, the angst of men around him.)

So, prior to Moses, the prevailing culture of marriage held an exchange between the bride’s father and husband, the dowry. If the husband wanted to divorce, he could do so without any formalities, except for returning the dowry to the wife’s father. If the husband could give an immoral cause, such as his wife committing adultery, then he could keep the dowry. Women could not initiate divorce.

The divorce procedures in Deuteronomy safeguarded women, a little. They required the husband to provide the wife with a writ of divorce and required that divorce must follow something objectionable, in other words, the husband couldn’t just put away his wife without giving a reason. With a writ of divorce, the woman could remarry and the husband could not return and claim her back (as happened in some tumultuous fights between ancient clans; remember, they were treating women as property in these exchanges). These procedures addressed especially how women’s reputations suffered in this kind of scenario: a husband divorces his wife, she remarries, and then the husband returns and claims her as his wife, touching off a scandal. In this scenario, the community often branded the woman here as a swapped wife or an unchaste lover going around from man to man. But under the code of Deuteronomy, she could now show a certificate of divorce and remarry without the whole village getting into an uproar. And sometimes dowry controversies could be nullified by the wife carrying a formal writ of divorce.

By Jesus’s time, many men had gamed the system and further injured women with these writs of divorce. Let’s return to those two major rabbinical schools of thought, that of Shammai and the other of Hillel. Shammai insisted that the qualifier “objectionable” in the Torah limited husbands only to their wives deserving divorce for having committed immoral acts. Hillel maintained that really anything the husband considered objectionable, like the wife refusing to work in the house or scratch his back, was sufficient grounds for a writ of divorce. A man only had to say “you are no longer my wife” and she would have to leave the house and take only what she had on her person (which was how women’s styles of wearing more jewelry than men got started). The prevalence of Hillel’s standards of divorce had led to men making quick divorces, tossing out, as it were, a writ of divorce in the morning and shacking up with someone else by the evening. And such men justified their treatment, offering flimsy excuses for divorce and calling it good by God’s law.

So here Jesus contends against this tradition and practice. He accepts divorce as something in the Torah (certainly not ideal but stipulated with procedure nonetheless), and doesn’t cut it entirely from the order of the kingdom of heaven. But he makes clear that men do not have carte blanche on putting women out of doors and husbands divorcing their wives to suit their own whims.

The Greek text uses the word skandalizei, what appears in the King James as “adultery.” And in the context of Deuteronomy and its procedures surrounding divorce and possible immoral conduct in marriage, adultery isn’t an inappropriate translation. But there is a literal quality to the phrasing in the text that gets lost in our assumptions based on present-day marriage and legal systems. If we go with the most literal rendering of the passage, it’s like saying this: “You have heard it said by those anciently, You shall not seduce another man’s woman. But I say unto you that whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has scandalized her already in his heart.” The scandal embedded in the word skandalizei is so arresting to me: Jesus condemns the whole manner of turning women into scandals and urges us toward keeping our hearts far away from such behavior.

It’s striking how Jesus moves immediately to the metaphors of the eye and the hand, instruments of lust and also of affection. If your right eye offends you, “pluck it out,” he says. It’s better for you to go missing your eye than for your whole soul to be thrown to Gehenna. If your right hand offends you, “cut it off,” he continues. It’s better to lose your hand than your whole body to be thrown to Gehenna. Don’t even look or reach for seducing another. Use your eyes and hands not for lust or offense. Those who play this game of writs of divorcement to chase after someone whom they lust, they haven’t dodged God’s law, Jesus affirms. Adultery, what they thought they had successfully avoided, they’ve still committed. Marriage is solemn before God and in the kingdom of heaven, and isn’t nullified on a whim.

(Sidenote: I’ve seen the teaching of eye and hand being plucked out and cut off often taken out of this vital context and isolated apart from its surrounding passages in the Sermon. People will arrive at rather radical notions of self-loathing, in my view, as they take Jesus to be saying about anything potentially sinful that it’s better for us to maim ourselves to remain obedient to God’s law than to transgress or even think about transgressing the law. I’ve witnessed people get worked into a rather intense fear of temptation and Satan over this, and I earnestly wish we could drop this malformed interpretation. Jesus simply did not say looking to sin was worse than plucking your own eye out; to his immediate audience, he spoke forcefully about lusting and one’s gaze in that context of lust and sexual objectification, and that moreover within the context of a warped divorcement system that privileged men over women and led to manipulations of that system to suit their own lusts. Let’s keep these specifics in focus whenever we read these lines about maimed bodies and Gehenna.)

In these first antitheses, Jesus envelops the Torah and Nevi’im with his new moral order. If we watch our anger, watch our words, watch our relationships, watch our lusts, we’ll not commit murder or adultery. And what’s more—we will have drawn ourselves and each other closer to the heavenly society on earth.

Sources

• Alan E. Bernstein, Hell and Its Rivals: Death and Retribution among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).
• David L. Lieber and Moshe Drori, “Divorce,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., edited by Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum, 22 vols. (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007), 5:710–719.
• David Bentley Hart, “Postscript,” in The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).