“Love your neighbor as yourself”
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A famous saying that feels like the moral center of the Bible.
The cultural key
The Bible's most quoted ethical command sits, almost unremarked, in a chapter of everyday regulations about wages, courts, and farming. Its opposite is named first: not taking revenge or nursing a grudge. 'Neighbor' here means fellow Israelite, but the same chapter widens it to the resident foreigner (v.34). Jesus lifts this verse and pairs it with 'love the LORD your God' as the two commands on which all the Law and Prophets hang; the sage Hillel made it the whole Torah 'while standing on one foot.'
Recovered meaning
The summit of biblical ethics is hidden in the fine print of a farming-and-courts statute. Love that refuses revenge and seeks the neighbor's good is, in Jesus' words, half of everything the Law was ever about.