Romans 13:9-10

“ For this: Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. ”

It has been asked why the apostle only mentioned here the commandments of the second table. Simply because he does not make ethics at will, and because he keeps strictly to his subject. Duties to God do not belong to justice; the obligations which constitute the latter are therefore found solely in the second table of the law, which was, so to speak, the civil code of the Jewish people. It is this also which explains the negative form of the commandments. Justice does not require the positive doing of good, but only the abstaining from doing wrong to others. Paul begins like Jesus, Mark 10:19; Luke 18:20, and James 2:11, with the commandment forbidding adultery; Philo does the same. Hofmann thinks this order arises from the fact that the relation between man and wife is anterior to the relation which a man holds to all his neighbors. This solution is not so inadmissible as Meyer thinks. The latter believes that the apostle simply follows the order which he finds in his manuscript of the LXX.; for such inversions are observed in the MSS. of this version.

According to the most of the documents belonging to the three families, the words: “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” are unauthentic. This is possible; for Paul closes the enumeration with the general expression: “and if there by any other commandment.” The commandment which forbids covetousness is mentioned here, because it puts the finger on the secret principle of the violation of all the rest. It is really in the struggle with this internal source of all injustices that love appears as the indispensable auxiliary of justice; what other feeling than love could extinguish covetousness?

The word ἕτερον, different, is not, strictly speaking, used for ἄλλον, other; it reminds us that every article of the code protects our neighbor on a different side from the preceding.

The apposition ἐν τῷ, in the (namely), though wanting in some MSS., is certainly authentic; it might easily be forgotten after the preceding substantive (ἐν τῷ λόγῳ). Like the τὸ γάρ, for this, at the beginning of the verse, it points to the saying quoted as something familiar to all readers.

The quotation is taken from Leviticus 19:18; as true as it is that one does not wrong himself, so true is it that it contains all the duties of justice to our neighbor. ᾿Ανακεφαλαιοῦν : to gather up a plurality in a unity; Ephesians 1:10.

The Alexs. have thought right to correct the ἑαυτόν, himself, by σεαυτόν, thyself. It was not in the least necessary; comp. John 18:34.