Love Thy Neighbour As Thyself
Leviticus 19:18 represents but one of several versions of the Golden Rule. It is seemingly the oldest written version in a positive form.
Hillel the Elder, an elder contemporary of Jesus, formulated a negative form of the Golden Rule and when asked to sum up the entire Torah concisely to a gentile who wished to become a Jew, he answered, "What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary."
With these words Hillel recognized as the fundamental principle of the Jewish moral law the Biblical precept of brotherly love (Lev. xix. 18). Almost the same thing was taught by Paul, a pupil of Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel (Gal. v. 14; comp. Rom. xiii. 8); and more broadly by Jesus when he declared the love of one's neighbour to be the second commandment beside the love of God, the first (Matt. xxii. 39; Mark xii. 31; Luke x. 27). Akiva ben Joseph, a tanna of first and second century Judaism, called "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" the "greatest principle of Judaism".
C.S. Lewis also offers a substantial commentary on loving your neighbor. In his works, "Mere Christianity" He says “This is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.” By this, he means that loving your neighbor means that you want to be best friends with him, but it means that you wish him or her the best and not harm or evil.
In the New Testament the second commandment is referenced by and to Jesus in Matthew 7:12, 19:19, 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-28, and by the apostle Paul in Romans 13:8-10 and Galatians 5:13-15:
"For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another." —Galatians 5:13-15The Didache, an Early Christian treatise, begins with a "way of life" that quotes the Shema ("love God"), the second commandment ("love thy neighbour"), and the Golden Rule.
Read more about this topic: Great Commandment
Famous quotes containing the words love thy, love, thy, neighbour and/or thyself:
“All you people don’t know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for, and he fought for them once, for the only reason that any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain, simple rule—Love Thy Neighbor. And in this world today, full of hatred, a man who knows that one rule has a great trust.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists.... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol—
A man no mightier than thyself or me
In personal action, yet prodigious grown
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)