Five-minute study · Day 133 · Leviticus 19
Leviticus 19:18
A word worth stopping on: neighbor רֵעַ rea
'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.' Jesus called this the second greatest commandment. Paul said it summarizes the entire law. James called it the royal law. The verse has been quoted so often that it floats free of its original context. Go back to Leviticus 19 and read what surrounds it: instructions about leaving grain in the field for the poor, paying wages on time, treating the deaf and blind with dignity. The command to love your neighbor lands in the middle of fiercely specific, practical legislation. And the word for neighbor, rea, tells you who you are commanded to love.
Word study: neighbor
- Hebrew
- רֵעַ
- Pronounced
- rea
- Strong's
- H7453
- Definition
- A companion, a fellow, an associate, a neighbor. One who is in proximity or relationship, a member of the same community.
Rea appears 187 times in the Hebrew Bible. Its semantic range covers companion (Exodus 33:11, where Moses speaks to God 'as a man speaks to his rea'), neighbor in the geographic sense (Exodus 12:4, borrowing from a neighbor for the Passover), fellow Israelite (Leviticus 19:18), and even the 'other' in a pair (Genesis 11:3, 'they said to one another,' literally 'a man to his rea').
In Leviticus 19:18, rea originally designated a fellow member of the Israelite community. The verse occurs within the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26), a collection of laws governing Israel's distinctiveness as God's people. The immediate context limits rea to the covenant community: 'Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy rea as thyself.'
Sixteen verses later, Leviticus 19:34 extends the same verb, ahav (love), to the foreigner: '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.' The verb is identical. The standard is identical. The object has expanded. Wenham's NICOT commentary notes that the Torah itself widens the definition of who qualifies for this love before the chapter ends.
Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) pushed rea to its maximum extension. A lawyer asked, 'Who is my rea?' Jesus answered with a story where the rea turned out to be a Samaritan, the ethnic and religious other, the last person a first-century Jewish lawyer would have included in the category. Jesus did not answer the question 'Who is my neighbor?' He inverted it: 'Which of these three was a rea to the man who fell among thieves?' The question became about who acts as a neighbor, not who qualifies to receive neighborly love.
Historical context · Mosaic period through first century AD
The Law That Expanded Its Own Borders
Leviticus 19 is sometimes called the ethical heart of the Torah. The chapter opens with God telling Moses, 'Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy' (19:2). What follows is a concentrated collection of ethical, ritual, and social laws that define holiness in concrete, daily terms.
The laws in Leviticus 19 move between categories modern readers would separate. Ritual instructions (do not eat meat with blood, do not practice divination) sit beside social ethics (do not steal, do not lie) and economic justice (do not hold a laborer's wages overnight, leave the edges of your field unharvested for the poor). The arrangement is deliberate. Holiness is concrete and embodied: a way of handling money, treating employees, harvesting crops, and speaking to people.
The command to love the ger (resident alien, foreigner) in verse 34 using the same verb as verse 18 was unusual in the ancient Near East. The Code of Hammurabi distinguished sharply between social classes: free citizens (awilum), commoners (mushkenum), and slaves (wardum) received different legal protections and different penalties. Egyptian law similarly stratified rights by citizenship and ethnicity. Israel's law moved in a different direction. The foreigner living among you receives the same love-command as the native Israelite.
The rabbis spent centuries debating the scope of rea. Rabbi Akiva (second century AD) called Leviticus 19:18 the 'great principle' (klal gadol) of the Torah. Ben Azzai countered that Genesis 5:1, 'This is the book of the generations of Adam,' was a greater principle because it grounded human dignity in creation itself, extending the claim beyond the covenant community to all humanity. The debate was never settled. It lives on in every generation that reads this verse and asks the same question the lawyer asked Jesus: who counts as my neighbor?
For reflection
Leviticus 19 surrounds the love command with ruthlessly practical instructions: pay wages on time, leave grain for the poor, do not curse the deaf. Love here is a set of specific economic and social behaviors. Who is one rea in your life right now, and what would the Leviticus 19 version of love look like for them this week? Be specific.
The verse ends with three Hebrew words: ani YHWH, I am the LORD. The motivation clause is God's own identity. You love your rea because of who God is.
Sources: BDB Lexicon; Wenham, 'Leviticus' (NICOT); Milgrom, 'Leviticus 17-22' (AB)