Richard Beck recently highlighted this wonderful commandment/spiritual advice from the book of Exodus:
When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free.
That’s Exodus 23:4-5 and it’s really pretty terrific.
It’s also, I imagine, potentially bewildering for people who read the Bible as a collection of discreet, authoritative prooftexts without any over-arching hermeneutic to guide them. Keep reading along in the Pentateuch and you’ll come across plenty of other advice and commandments about “your enemy” that will seem impossible to reconcile with the verses above. Consider, for example, the verses we looked at here a week ago — Deuteronomy 20:10-18 — which includes a commandment to “annihilate” enemies and “not let anything that breathes remain.” Or think of that story of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still so that he and his army could have more daylight in which to dutifully obey the command to chase down and slaughter the last of the fleeing Amorites.
One might imagine that some of these Amorites fleeing Joshua’s annihilation had donkeys with them. And, being forced to flee for their lives with whatever they could carry, it seems likely that some of these donkeys would have run astray, or that others might have stumbled and fallen, lying under their burdens.
That must’ve been a real hassle for Joshua and his army — having to suddenly stop with the slaughtering periodically in order to help all those Amorite donkeys in distress. But, hey, a commandment’s a commandment, right?
This sweet little commandment about “the donkey of one who hates you” is a Mosaic precursor to Jesus’ command to love our enemies. It also recalls Proverbs 25:21, which is quoted by the Apostle Paul in his Cliff Notes version of the Sermon on the Mount in Romans 12: “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink.”
The blunt practicality of this commandment about your enemy’s donkey unpacks some of what we sometimes miss in those other passages. First, here is a thing that will happen: You will have enemies. There will be people “who hate you” — people who wish you harm and who think and act toward you or toward others with ill intent and bad motives.
And here is a second thing that will happen: Sometimes bad things, misfortune, accidents and such, will happen to these people who hate you. They’ll get hungry, they’ll need water, their donkey will run away.
And then here is a third thing that will happen: You’ll be tempted not to help them. “You would hold back.” That thought is going to occur to you, so let’s not pretend otherwise. It’s going to seem like the easiest thing in the world not to help somebody who would never, ever help you if your situations were reversed. But do it anyway.
This all seems quite lovely so long as we nerf the meaning of “enemy” down to something petty and mostly harmless. That makes it all easier to deal with. We read “enemy” as just someone we sometimes disagree or argue with, maybe someone irritable, or just a player on the opposite team in some game.
But it’s far more troubling, or even scandalous, when we let that word “enemy” carry its full weight. This is someone who means you harm and who uses whatever power they have to do you harm. This is someone who will never hesitate to exploit an advantage in power to hurt you. This is, to use a great biblical word, an oppressor. Oppressors are evil and unjust. They exploit their power over others. They are evil and unjust because they exploit their power over others.
Yet there will be times, Exodus 23:4-5 reminds us, that even oppressors will be momentarily powerless. There will be times when you will have the power to help them — or the power not to help them. And you will have to choose whether to use your power the way they would, or to use your power the way you wish they would.
That idea shows up all the time in our popular stories. The stalest cliché version involves Our Hero catching the wrist of the villain dangling from the edge of some precipice. Moments before, that same villain had tried to push the hero off of that same precipice, but now their roles are reversed and the hero is desperately trying to save the villain’s life. This is why Our Hero is a hero. This is, our stories say, the difference between good and evil.
This scenario is complicated by the fact that should Our Hero succeed in rescuing the villain from plunging to their death, the villain will likely — being a villain — go right back to trying to kill the hero by pushing them off the very same precipice. Screenwriters usually deal with this complication by having the hero’s genuine, good faith attempt to rescue the villain fail — sending them plunging to their death below. This neatly resolves the plot, but it also allows us, the audience, to have it both ways. We get to enjoy the catharsis of vengeance, watching the villain die because we “would hold back,” while still reaffirming the goodness and rightness of the hero’s attempt to save them. We get to celebrate the villain’s death while still half-telling ourselves that we would have emulated the hero’s heroism in trying to save them.
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