How should we treat our enemies?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Exodus 23:4 legislates active kindness toward an enemy: if you come upon your enemy's stray ox or donkey, you must return it (and v. 5 adds the duty to help raise his fallen animal). Psalm 35:6-8 prays that the enemy's path be 'dark and slippery,' that the angel of the LORD pursue him, and that destruction overtake him unawares. On the surface one text commands benevolence and the other invokes ruin.

The strongest harmonization turns on genre and illocutionary force. Exodus 23 is casuistic law — a binding prescription for the Israelite's own conduct in a concrete property dispute. Psalm 35 is an individual lament in the imprecatory subgenre, in which a sufferer under unjust attack appeals to God for vindication. Erich Zenger's study of the psalms of divine wrath argues that this is theologically significant rather than embarrassing: the imprecation hands vengeance over to YHWH precisely so the petitioner does not take it himself, consonant with the principle 'vengeance is mine, says the LORD' (Deut 32:35, echoed in Rom 12:19). David Firth's monograph on surrendering retribution makes the same structural point: the psalmist relinquishes personal violence by transferring the matter to the divine court. On this reading the two texts address different acts — what the Israelite does with his hands versus what he asks God to do — and so are not strict legal contradictions. That distinction is real and it does substantial work.

But it harmonizes only partially, for several reasons. First, the imprecatory tradition is broad and severe — Psalms 58, 69, 109, and 137 ask God to break teeth, blot names from the book of life, orphan children, and dash infants against the rocks. The New Testament does not quarantine these as sub-Christian: Paul cites the imprecation of Psalm 69:22-23 with apparent approval in Romans 11:9-10, and Revelation's martyrs cry 'how long?' for vindication (Rev 6:10). The canon treats imprecation as legitimate scriptural speech, which is harder to reconcile with the benevolence ethic than the simple genre-distinction suggests. Second, the Pentateuch itself is not univocal on enemies. Exodus 23:4-5 enjoins kindness toward a personal enemy-neighbor in a restitution setting, and Leviticus 19:18, 34 extend love to the neighbor and even the resident alien — but Deuteronomy 23:3-6 permanently excludes Ammonites and Moabites from the assembly and forbids ever seeking their welfare, while the herem texts mandate extermination. The Torah's enemy-ethic is a spectrum, not a single rule.

Third, the reception history is telling. Jesus' antithesis in Matthew 5:43-48 — 'you have heard it said, hate your enemy ... but I say, love your enemies' — presents itself as a corrective intensification, not a neutral summary of a unified Old Testament teaching. Craig Keener notes that the cited maxim ('hate your enemy') is not a direct Torah quotation but reflects a current interpretive trajectory that the imprecatory and exclusionary texts could plausibly support; Jesus' formulation gains rhetorical force precisely because the prior tradition was mixed. The honest conclusion is that the contradiction is softer than a flat reading implies, because law and lament differ in what they enjoin, but it is not dissolved: the canon preserves both an ethic of concrete enemy-kindness and a robust, scripturally sanctioned tradition of cursing one's enemies.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable by genre, but the imprecatory tradition's canonical authority leaves a real ethical tension.