Who Is My Neighbor? Leviticus and the Good Samaritan

“Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) is one of the Bible’s most familiar commands. Jesus places it alongside love of God when discussing the greatest commandments. Yet what does “neighbor” mean in Leviticus, and how does the Good Samaritan’s story take up that question?

The answer begins with reading more than one verse. Leviticus 19 addresses relationships within Israel and explicitly commands love for the resident alien. Its ethical world cannot be reduced to a rule that only insiders deserve care.

Reading the immediate and wider contexts

Leviticus 19:17–18 speaks of a brother, a fellow community member, and “the sons of your people” before commanding love for one’s neighbor, reaʿ (רֵעַ). Many scholars understand this sequence as primarily addressing fellow Israelites. John J. Collins defends that contextual reading; Jacob Milgrom’s commentary provides a fuller discussion of the chapter.

The word itself, however, does not mean “Israelite.” Exodus 11:2 uses it for Egyptian neighbors. Richard Elliott Friedman therefore challenges an exclusively Israelite reading of the love command, emphasizing wider usage and the chapter’s treatment of foreigners. The disagreement concerns how to weigh the contexts, not whether a Hebrew word carries an ethnic boundary in every occurrence.

Leviticus 19 Already Starts Widening It

What’s striking is that this widening doesn’t wait for the New Testament — it begins within Leviticus 19 itself. Verse 34 of the same chapter reads: “You shall treat the stranger who resides with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” Here, an almost identical love command (“love him as yourself”) is extended to the ger (גֵּר) — the resident alien living within Israel, someone outside the ethnic and covenant lineage of “the sons of your people.”

The grounding given for this extension is worth noticing. It isn’t an abstract principle but Israel’s own historical memory: “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Whatever scope one assigns to “neighbor” in verse 18, the chapter expressly requires love for the resident alien in verse 34. Israel’s remembered vulnerability gives the obligation a concrete grounding.

Jesus Reframes the Question

In Luke 10:25-37, a lawyer’s exchange with Jesus leads to the question: “And who is my neighbor?” The question asks where the obligation of neighbor-love reaches. Jesus doesn’t answer by listing who qualifies. He tells a parable: a man is beaten and left half dead; a priest and a Levite pass by without helping; a Samaritan — a figure Jesus’s Jewish audience would have regarded with contempt — stops, tends the man’s wounds, and carries him to an inn.

The ending is what matters most. Jesus asks, “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” Joel B. Green, in his commentary The Gospel of Luke (NICNT, Eerdmans, 1997), observes that this isn’t simply a wider answer to the lawyer’s question — it’s a reversal of the question’s own structure. The lawyer asked who qualifies to receive his love; Jesus answers by asking who acted in love. Klyne Snodgrass makes a similar point in his study of the parables, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2008): the parable doesn’t so much enlarge the category of “neighbor” as dissolve the attempt to define it as a category at all, replacing it with the question of who is willing to act as one.

This is a debate within Jewish scriptural interpretation, not a contrast between a loveless Judaism and a compassionate Christianity. Leviticus already commands love for the resident alien. Samaritans also claimed Israelite ancestry and revered the Torah; calling the Samaritan simply a pagan foreigner obscures the particular boundary the story crosses. The parable challenges hostility between communities with shared scriptural roots.

From identifying a neighbor to becoming one

Leviticus places love for the resident alien alongside love for the neighbor. Luke’s parable then makes a Samaritan’s merciful action the decisive example. Reading these passages together does not require a simple history in which one narrow religion gives way to a generous successor. It asks how a command already found in Israel’s Scriptures can challenge the boundaries readers take for granted.

The lawyer seeks an answer about who qualifies. Jesus’s concluding instruction, “Go and do likewise,” brings the question back to the person listening: whose need will I meet?

Rembrandt, The Good Samaritan, c. 1630 · Wallace Collection, London · Public domain. Where the priest and Levite had passed by, Rembrandt paints the despised Samaritan carrying the wounded man to the inn — a scene that gives the parable’s mercy a visible form. Image record.

For sermon preparation grounded in the original languages and context of a text like this one, Didymus Lab offers study resources.

References

• Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 3A; Doubleday, 2000)

• Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT; Eerdmans, 1997)

• Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2008)

• John J. Collins, “Love Your Neighbor: How It Became the Golden Rule” (2020).

• Richard Elliott Friedman, “The Exodus, the Alien, and the Neighbor” (2017).

• Leviticus 19:18, 33–34 and Luke 10:25–37.

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