“Is There “a Time to Kill”?”

Sunday, November 14, 2021

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

        a time to be born, and a time to die;

                       a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

        a time to kill, and a time to heal... (Ecclesiastes 3.1-3a)

This isn’t a question we like to consider openly, mostly because people’s opinions on the matter can be so strong.  This is natural, because questions of life and death are among the most important ones we face in this world.  In fact, we use the expression, “a matter of life and death” to stress that something is of utmost importance. But importance itself doesn’t constitute an answer!  It’s up to God to provide that.

That leaves us with the burden of examining his word to find out what are his standards.  For most of us, our first encounter with this question in the Bible came in Exodus 20.13, which the King James Version renders, “Thou shalt not kill.”  Seems pretty straightforward!  Lest we shrug off this commandment as only applicable to the Jews under the Mosaic covenant, in the New Testament both the Apostle Paul and Jesus himself uphold the same commandment, in Romans 13.9, Matthew 5.21, and Matthew 19.18.  If we consult other translations, especially modern ones, we’ll find that they generally say, “You shall not murder,” which raises the question: what’s the difference between killing and murdering, and why do newer translations encourage us to do the former, but not the latter?  Of course, we only react that way because we grew so accustomed to the King James wording, and we might pause and wonder why even the KJV renders the pertinent phrase in Matthew 19.18, “Thou shalt do no murder.”  Clearly something is amiss, and bears further examination.

While a quick look at the 6^th commandment might lead us to conclude it is always and forever unacceptable to take a human life, that interpretation is simply false—it rejects God’s commandments in the very same Law of Moses to kill killers.  For example, the very next chapter says, “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death” (Ex 21.12).  The instances of capital punishment prescribed in the Law are far too many to mention.  How can this be, unless our initial gut reaction—killing is always wrong—was missing something?  While we’re at it, we might as well ask, did the 6^th commandment permit the Jews to kill animals?  Once again, the Law explicitly requires that they do so, in too many examples of compulsory sacrifices to include here—it’s generally ok to kill animals, and often necessary to do so.

This serves to highlight, if we didn’t already know it, that context matters, and when God says, “Thou shalt not kill,” the basic principle is abundantly clear, but we still ought to ask what exactly he means.  It may surprise you to learn that the Hebrew language (as is also the case for Greek) has several words that can fall under the broader definition, “kill.”  Maybe we’d think they must have been a vicious, bloodthirsty society in order to need such an extensive, morbid vocabulary, but we have an even larger one in English!  There’s the catch-all: kill, but there’s also murder, execute, euthanize, assassinate, slaughter, exterminate, lynch, hit, massacre, and many more terms.  Each of these carries its own, subtle implications and connotations, even though many of them could be used interchangeably in some contexts.  When you encounter these words in different contexts, you immediately understand all the baggage that attends each one.  The same is true of the vocabulary in the Bible.  This is why the translators who rendered the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, not long before Christ, could easily see that the commandment referred to criminal killing of a human being, and translated it accordingly: “you shall not murder.” The Greek term (φονεύω) explicitly means illegal and immoral killing, and they chose this word over less-precise synonyms.

So what does all of this mean?  If the world were ideal, there would be no killing—every person is made in the image and likeness of God (Ge 1.26), and holds a unique value to him, which he promises to honor: “for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning” (Ge 9.5).  But we brought sin into the world, and bear the consequences still.  We broke it.  We’re the reason people kill each other, and ought sometimes to be killed, themselves.  God’s covenant with Noah not only allowed, but mandated the death penalty: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Ge 9.6).  So, too, did the Law of Moses, which also permitted and mandated killing in war (e.g. De 20.10-18).  Finally, it permitted killing in the course of defending oneself or one’s home (Ex 22.2).  On top of these, God shows approval to Abraham for using lethal force to rescue Lot and others captured by Chedorlaomer’s army and destined for slavery (Ge 14), and in the New Testament we see approval for Moses’ killing of the Egyptian who was savagely beating another Hebrew (Ac 7.23-25).  The details, of course, are as finicky as they are important, but in broad terms, we could summarize these categories of moral and justified killings as follows: judicial punishment, warfare, and protecting innocent life and limb.  Each of these is “a time to kill.”

Should we go looking for opportunities to engage in violence?  Of course not.  Jesus told Peter on the night of his betrayal, “‘Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword’” (Mt 26.52).  But note also that he told Peter earlier that very same night (Lk 22.36-38), “let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one,” and allowed Peter to carry his sword with him to the garden.

Jeremy Nettles

Share