Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

Ask people what 'holy' looks like and you will hear about temples, prayers, fasting, perhaps a saint with a lamp. Ask Leviticus 19 and you get a farmer leaving the edges of his field unharvested, a boss paying a day-labourer before sunset, a shopkeeper whose weights are honest, someone standing up when an old man enters the room. This is the chapter that begins 'be holy, because I am holy' and then spends most of its length on wages, gossip, justice and strangers. Buried in the middle is a sentence Jesus will call the second greatest commandment.

Where it sits in the story: Leviticus 19 is the heart of the Holiness Code. It gathers the Ten Commandments' concerns — parents, Sabbath, idols, theft, lies — and weaves them into daily farming and trade. Jesus pairs its verse 18 with the Shema of Deuteronomy 6 as the two commandments on which everything hangs, and Paul and James both quote it. Rabbi Akiva is remembered as calling it a great principle of the Torah.

What this chapter is doing: To show that holiness is lived out in how people treat the poor, the disabled, workers, the elderly and foreigners — and to sum up those duties in the command to love one's neighbour as oneself.

• 19:1–8 — 'Be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am holy.' Holiness starts with honouring mother and father, keeping Sabbath, refusing idols, and handling the fellowship offering properly.
• 19:9–18 — At harvest, leave the edges and the fallen grain for the poor and the foreigner. Don't steal, lie, defraud, hold back a worker's wages overnight, curse the deaf or trip the blind. Judge fairly, don't spread slander, don't hate or take revenge — love your neighbour as yourself.
• 19:19–25 — Rules about mixing: no mixed breeding, seed or fabric. A case of a man sleeping with an engaged slave woman is settled by an offering. Fruit from new trees is left for three years, given to God in the fourth, eaten in the fifth.
• 19:26–31 — No divination or sorcery, no mourning rites of cutting the body or marking the skin, no selling a daughter into prostitution, no consulting mediums. Keep the Sabbaths and revere the sanctuary.
• 19:32–37 — Rise before the elderly. Do not mistreat the foreigner living among you — love them as yourself, because you were foreigners in Egypt. Use honest weights and measures.

Key verse: Leviticus 19:18  ·  So what: The famous line about loving your neighbour does not float free; it sits beside unpaid wages, rigged scales and the stranger at the edge of the village. The chapter will not let holiness stay inside the place of worship. Notice too that the command is repeated for the foreigner in verse 34 — the neighbour includes the outsider. Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan presses the same point.