By the time of Christ, the religious leaders of Israel had instituted through centuries of tradition a system of extra-biblical laws that, among other things, excused and even validated their hateful attitude toward the Gentiles. We would rightly recoil at the idea of God instructing His people to hate their enemies, but that very notion was accepted as fact in first-century Judaism.

One could argue that Israel’s relationship to the neighboring nations had been adversarial from the start, that their animosity was divinely decreed. When the Jews first entered the land of Canaan, they were commanded to exterminate the Canaanites:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. (Deuteronomy 7:1–2)

Centuries later, did those instructions legitimize the seething animosity Israel held for its neighboring nations in the time of Christ? Did God originally institute the hatred they harbored for the gentiles? And if so, is there a conflict between Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount and God’s instructions in the Old Testament? Dietrich Bonhoeffer shed some helpful light on this seeming contradiction. He wrote: “The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history, for they were the wars of God against the world of idols. It is not this enmity which Jesus condemns, for then he would have condemned the whole history of God’s dealing with his people. On the contrary, He affirms the Old Covenant.”^[1] Dietrich Bonhoffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R.H. Fuller, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 163.

The Lord’s commandments to wipe out the idolatrous inhabitants of Canaan weren’t the instructions of some bloodthirsty deity. God instructed Israel to destroy those idolatrous nations for the express purpose of preserving the purity of His covenant people.

Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you. But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. (Deuteronomy 7:3–6)

God commanded His people to drive out and destroy those wicked nations in order to defend Israel from their idolatrous influence. This was no mere feud—God was purging the land of corrupting influences. He was protecting His people, not establishing a permanent pattern for personal, ethnocentric animosity.

Moreover, the Old Testament law included specific provisions for how the Israelites were to engage with others—even with their enemies. “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his donkey wandering away, you shall surely return it to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying helpless under its load, you shall refrain from leaving it to him, you shall surely release it with him” (Exodus 23:4–5). In addition, Proverbs 25:21–22 says, “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” Job summed up how God’s people were to view their enemies: “Have I rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy, or exulted when evil befell him? No, I have not allowed my mouth to sin by asking for his life in a curse” (Job 31:29–30).

So, while the Old Testament does include holy wars and pronounces judgment on nations that are the permanent, unrepentant enemies of God, there is no room for personal rancor, vengeance, or hostility. Put simply, the scribes and rabbis could not point back in Israel’s history to legitimize or excuse their hatred for the gentiles.

Nor could they point to the imprecatory psalms and the severe curses passed down on people outside of God’s covenant. The Psalms contain some scathing rebukes and vicious condemnations for those who oppose the Lord. For example:

May their table before them become a snare;
And when they are in peace, may it become a trap.
May their eyes grow dim so that they cannot see,
And make their loins shake continually.
Pour out Your indignation on them,
And may Your burning anger overtake them.
May their camp be desolate;
May none dwell in their tents.
For they have persecuted him whom You yourself have smitten,
And they tell of the pain of those whom You have wounded.
Add iniquity to their iniquity,
And may they not come into Your righteousness.
May they be blotted out of the book of life
And may they not be recorded with the righteous.
(Psalm 69:22–28)

However, this is not an expression of mere personal animosity. David explained earlier in that same psalm, “Zeal for Your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me” (v. 9). It’s the same kind of godly, righteous anger he expressed in Psalm 139:21–22: “Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; they have become my enemies.” He was not venting his own anger; he was taking up the cause of God against the idolatrous nations that had risen up against His people. He regarded the wicked as enemies of God and the covenant people. The conflicts in view here for David were national, not personal.

It is at that point precisely that the scribes and rabbis never made a distinction. They never distinguished between what was divinely judicial and what was personal. They took the prerogatives that belonged to God in the unfolding of His covenant purpose and they personalized them into their own private relationships. Thus, they perverted God’s law of love for neighbors and inhibited the possibility of evangelistic outreach to the idolatrous nations. To love their neighbors would be to ardently desire that they would repent, believe, and enter into a right relationship with God. To hate them would be to desire, with equal ardor, that they would perish in hell. That was the attitude of the Jews in Christ’s time, as it had been for centuries.

The prophet Jonah is a prime example of this stance. God called Jonah to preach to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, and Jonah fled in the opposite direction. The Assyrians were notorious for their bloodthirsty violence and particularly for the cruelty they showed to Israel. Jonah wanted nothing good for them, and he had no intention of leading them to repentance and faith. And when the people of Nineveh dramatically repented and turned to God, Jonah responded with a fit of rage and frustration:

But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate god, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.” (Jonah 4:1–3)

Jonah didn’t praise God for the miraculous repentance of the Ninevites. Instead, he begged the Lord to take his life so he wouldn’t have to witness his enemies entering into a right relationship with God. That’s how deeply the Jews hated those they considered their enemies—death itself was preferable to seeing them rescued from hell by divine grace and forgiveness.

This is the context in which Jesus commanded Israel to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). With these words, Jesus turned the Jewish worldview of the first century on its head. But that’s not all He did. In a sense, He expounded the entire Old Testament law with this one phrase. And that’s exactly what we’ll explore next time.

(Adapted from Stand Firm)