6th Commandment: Do Not Kill

All of our contemporary English translations render this sixth command as, you shall not murder. Two words in Hebrew. Lo is the Hebrew word for not or no. And then it's just the single verb. Ratzach. So the word ratzach is used in 1 Kings chapter 21 to describe when Ahab took the life of this guy Naboth to get his land. So ratzach can describe premeditated murder. But almost half of the times that ratzach appears occurs talking about the cities of refuge. So these are six cities in ancient Israel that were set apart as like an asylum so that a rotzeach, the killer, who has struck a person unintentionally can flee there. We wouldn't call that murder. No. We'd call that manslaughter. Exactly. So I think our English word kill can refer to intentional or unintentional. So don't kill. Yeah. Because that is what ratzach means. Just ending a life unrelated to purpose or premeditation. Yeah. Apparently a human life is so valuable that it's worth this kind of blanket prohibition. Don't end a life. Don't do it. There's something so foundational and important and valuable about life. Yeah. That the baseline is you do not take it.

Do not do it. Yeah. However, after the Ten Commandments, we also get another collection of commands to ancient Israel. This is in Exodus chapters 21 to 23. And these fill out and expand the ten words. And there we find more laws about killing that qualify the sixth command. So what if you accidentally kill someone? What if you're defending yourself or your home? These commands get into all these complexities. Okay. But the first time the topic of killing comes up, it's a simple two word prohibition. Yeah. Don't kill. Don't do it. Right. So there's something about the value of human life that should always make us slow down. Just stop and make sure that the first priority that we have is protecting life. It's like the baseline. And so maybe, you know, it's just good to say you and I are not in this moment trying to make official declarations about legitimacy of capital punishment. Yeah. Or when you can defend your family or what does it mean to be a soldier and all that stuff. Yeah. That's downstream. And you've got to think that through. Like we all have to think those questions through in our communities, in our context. In other words, the sixth command is a form of wisdom literature. Okay. So flip this command around and it's a charge to protect life.

Yeah. The purpose of God's commands is for life. And the sixth command here of the ten just makes that perfectly clear. It's meant to direct that the best of our thinking, the best of our energies, our greatest wisdom and moral conviction is most aligned with God when we aim all of that at the preservation and the flourishing of life.