There's More Than One Way to Kill A Man

Reflections on the 6th Commandment, Pt. 2

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Situating Murder In a World of Creatures

Much ink has been spilled in discerning the limits of what counts as murder. For death—the last enemy to be overthrown—remains with us, and thus, not everything that dies can be said to be murdered¹. As a quick and rough limit, we can say that murder pertains to the taking of human life as an act of will: if their action was such that the end of the action could reasonably be the death of another person, it’s murder. The distinction between manslaughter and first degree murder rests on this: the first is unintended and yet accomplished; the second is intended and accomplished.

Within this quick definition, there are some important limits:

1. Humans are different than other animals. There is nothing within the Scriptures which would rule out the intentional killing of a non-human animal for food², meaning that already, murder pertains to humans and not to non-humans³. Murder is connected to the specifically human, even if the intentional death of a non-human creature is counted as bad for various reasons.

2. Scripture does not count all murders the same. The death of servants, slaves, and even children, does not warrant the same punishment. I take this as an indication that, within the vision of murder, not all things are equal. Exodus 20:21 is a notorious example of interpretative license here: the NRSV translates it as “When a slave-owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished.” This is how most versions translate the verse. But the CEV take a more ham-handed approach with “Death is the punishment for beating to death any of your slaves.” The CEV’s problem is that this example doesn’t bear out narratively.

What we are to do with these stipulations is a different question: it seems common sense to me that the murder of another person is the murder of another person, slave or free. The question of whether some intentional deaths are different than others is also before us. But before isolating murder in terms of what counts as murder, I want to put murder in motion and see how murder expands and circulates.

Situating Murder in a Moving World

The commandments come, as we have seen, to a people in motion, between Egypt and the land of promise, with the idols as a lurking part of the present, and having to depend on a world which they do not control. Murder, as we named it last time, is a refusal of natality and a pinning down of the world into the only stasis there is: death.

There is an overlap, then, between murder and two other concerns we have seen already in the Decalogue: allegiance to the idols, and all of the ways in which the idols ensnare the world. The idols, we saw earlier, are neither past nor distant: they are in the minds of the people, and very recently, in gold form among them. And as such, so are the ways of the idols, in worship and in the practices of the idols.

If what the idols promise is freedom from death—safety in a wild world—then the practices of the idols are those which conform us to their image. Not surprisingly, then, cursing one’s parents and kidnapping are given the same punishment as murder: death. Denying the uncontrollable way that we enter into God’s world, and disrupting the wild ways in which families proceed in the world are treated as tantamount to murder. Murder is distinct in that it acts directly, but it is the same as other sins which seek to use death to disrupt and control the free ways in which God gives life to the world.

At this point, I want to draw two provisional conclusions about how murder seems to be in play here:

1. Murder By Other Names. It is this overlap of punishment that points us toward the ways that murder by other names appears, and what it means for us to be participants in murder, even if we have not struck someone and intended their death. There are other things which, beneath the surface, seem to have the same engine as murder. Again, not all death is murder, but all forms of murder seem to be marked by the same punishment: death.

2. Murder Has Minions. Insofar as murder is that which is consistent with what the gods promise—that there is safety on offer, even if means someone has to die—there are a nexus of practices which move us in the same direction. One might, for example, not connect the dots between cursing your parents and murder, but the Old Testament does, and Jesus certainly does⁴.

Murder in a World of Fragments

Seeing murder as having minions helps us to see some inner connections among the stories of the Pentateuch in particular, and in our world more broadly. The selling of Joseph into slavery, the cursing of Jacob by Esau, the disrespect of Noah by Ham: these are all echoes of murder according to Exodus. They are all ways of denying that we are contingent, related people, and wishing for a way in the world in which we are only ourselves. To murder, to sell into slavery, to curse or shame: these are all—in different ways—breaking the bonds by which are brought into the world, and murder just dramatizes it more viscerally.

As the world becomes less connected and more isolated, it becomes easier for these kinds of minions to be obscured. We no longer connect cursing our parents with murder, because we no longer see ourselves as dependent upon them. We no longer connect slavery to murder, because we do not see how breaking apart a family is a real loss for autonomous people. We no longer see other actions ordered toward breaking our ordinary bonds—migrant detention and family separation, euthanasia, expectations of an 80 hour work week to make a bare living—as akin to murder, because we no longer the world as an interconnected place of obligations and relations that are to be valued.

Such a world—in which there is only the individual—is a world fit for the gods. For the gods promise deliverance from a dangerous world, a world full of monsters which you need defense from. All it requires is that you never see the deeper problem: the gods’ premise about what the world is is a lie. And out of that lie are birthed a thousand other practices which not only reinforce the reign of murder, but which over time make murder both thinkable and justifiable.

For you are not really alone or disconnected. In Christ, all things hang together, and a world structured by the logic of fragments and division is an offense. To deny our connectedness, that in Christ all things hang together, is wishing that the Son not have been born, for we are doing just fine defending ourselves with the help of the gods.

1. The prevention of all possible deaths lends itself well to the very kind of world which the first four commandments rule out: a world in which we offer ourselves to various idols who promise to save us from dying. This, of course, was a free offer to the first humans, unconditioned on achieving any particular action, and on refraining from one action. In the beginning, freedom from death was the promise; now, freedom from death is the unfulfillable promise of the idols.

2. Some animals are ruled out by God as food sources, ostensibly meaning that their killing might count as murder. There is no commandment to kill nonhuman animals except for sacrifice, a topic which we will take up in another day. This is, I think, bad news for sport hunters.

3. Some animals are governed by penalties if killed, but only if they are connected to humans as livestock. It seems then that the human life creates concentric circles: a murder is counted as murder to the degree that it touches the human life. All human lives, interconnected with other human lives, count here, but the value of a bird or a deer is contingent. This is not to say that they are not valued to God, Jesus tells us—only that their death (for food or by accident or natural causes) is not counted as murder.

4. Matthew 5:21-22.