Not to bear a grudge against another

Leviticus 19:18 contains two prohibitions and one positive command in rapid succession: "You shall not take vengeance (lō' tiqqōm) and you shall not bear a grudge (wĕlō' tiṭṭōr) against the members of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself (wĕ'āhabtā lĕrē'ăkā kāmōkā): I am YHWH." The verb nāṭar, rendered "bear a grudge," literally means "to keep" or "to guard" — the image is of someone warehousing resentment, preserving an injury in memory even after refraining from overt retaliation. The Talmud (Yoma 23a) draws a famous distinction between vengeance (nĕqāmāh) and grudge-bearing (nĕṭīrāh): if you ask to borrow someone's sickle and they refuse, and the next day they ask to borrow your axe, vengeance is refusing outright, while grudge-bearing is lending the axe but saying, "See, I'm not like you who refused me." The prohibition thus targets the internal posture of harbored resentment, making this one of the rare biblical laws that legislates emotional and psychological states rather than observable behavior.

This verse sits at the heart of the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26), a literary unit that many scholars attribute to the "H" source, a priestly school closely related to, but distinguishable from, the main Priestly source (P). The Holiness Code is distinctive in its insistence that ethical behavior among humans is directly connected to the holiness of YHWH — hence the recurring refrain "I am YHWH" functioning almost as a divine signature enforcing each command. Jacob Milgrom argues that H democratizes holiness, extending it from the priesthood to the entire community (Milgrom, *Leviticus 17–22*, pp. 1595–1604). The placement of the grudge prohibition alongside "love your neighbor" is not accidental: the text builds from external restraint (no vengeance) to internal restraint (no grudge-bearing) to the positive ideal (love), creating a kind of ethical crescendo.

Ancient Near Eastern law codes — Hammurabi, the Hittite Laws, the Middle Assyrian Laws — overwhelmingly concern themselves with external actions and their consequences. You will search these corpora in vain for anything resembling a prohibition on harboring resentment. The closest parallels come not from legal texts but from Egyptian wisdom literature, particularly the Instruction of Amenemope (c. 1100 BCE), which counsels against nursing anger and urges patience with adversaries: "Do not say, 'Find me a strong superior, for a man in your town has injured me'" (Amenemope ch. 22). But even Amenemope frames this as prudential advice, not divine command. The Israelite formulation is distinctive in embedding an emotional regulation within a legal code backed by YHWH's own authority.

The phrase "love your neighbor as yourself" became, of course, one of the most consequential sentences in Western ethical history. In Second Temple Judaism, it was already being elevated: the Jesus traditions in the Synoptic Gospels present it as the second-greatest commandment (Mark 12:31), and Rabbi Akiva reportedly called it "a great principle of the Torah" (Sifra Qedoshim 4:12). Hillel's earlier negative formulation — "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow" (Shabbat 31a) — may be read as a practical restatement of the grudge prohibition. Maimonides codifies the grudge-bearing prohibition in Hilkhot De'ot 7:7–8, emphasizing that a person should "erase the matter from his heart and not bear it," framing it as a discipline of character. Modern ethical philosophers have noted how unusual it is for a legal code to attempt to regulate interior emotional life — this is closer to what we might call virtue ethics than case law, and it raises enduring questions about whether law can meaningfully command an emotion.