Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 234 · August 22
Nor Bear Any Grudge
“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.”
At Sinai, in the year after Egypt, a chapter was read to the whole congregation, and it is one of the oddest lists in the Bible. Leave the corners of the field unharvested. Pay a hired man before nightfall. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind. Use just weights. Do not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people. And in among all that, the line about the grudge.
A grudge is a file, and you know whether you are keeping one. It has a sentence in it you have rehearsed in the car. Some of us are carrying files older than our children.
The verse above it names what should have happened instead. Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart. The next clause sends you to the person to say it openly. The sequence runs: do not carry it in silence, put it to them, then do not take payment for it afterwards, then love them. A grudge grows in the gap where the second step was skipped.
The chapter widens it sixteen verses later. Verse eighteen says the children of thy people, and it means Israelites. Then: the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Same command, wider circle, with a reason that reaches into the reader's own history. Which is why it belongs on that list of field corners and honest scales.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 234 is Comfort Like a Mother (Isaiah 66:13).