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Biblion Bible Commentary

Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary

Justice Is Not a Matter of Sides

Exodus 23:1-13

1 “You shall not spread a false report. Don’t join your hand with the wicked to be a malicious witness. · WEB

The court is protected from the crowd, from the bribe, and from sympathy for the poor, and a man's enemy is given the same care as his neighbor.

You shall not spread a false report. Don't join your hand with the wicked to be a malicious witness Exodus 23:1.

The chapter opens on the machinery of justice and works through the ways it fails. The first is rumor, and the second is a witness who has been recruited. Both happen before a case reaches a judge, which is where most miscarriages begin.

You shall not follow a crowd to do evil. You shall not testify in court to side with a multitude to pervert justice Exodus 23:2.

A majority is named as a source of injustice rather than a safeguard against it. The pressure the verse anticipates is not bribery but agreement — the pull of saying what everyone around is saying, which requires no corruption at all and produces the same verdict.

You shall not favor a poor man in his cause Exodus 23:3.

The most surprising line in the chapter, and it should not be explained away. Six verses later the same code forbids denying justice to the poor Exodus 23:6, and the pairing is the point: the court is to be blind in both directions. Sympathy for the weak is a virtue everywhere except on a judge's bench, where it produces the same result as a bribe. Impartiality is not indifference to the poor; it is the refusal to help them by taking something from someone else who is innocent.

If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. If you see the donkey of him who hates you fallen down under his burden, don't leave him. You shall surely help him with it Exodus 23:4–5.

Two verses that interrupt the legal material and belong to a different order of thing. The man is not a neighbor or a debtor. He hates you, and the text says so twice. The obligation is to return his property and help him lift his fallen animal, which cannot be done at a distance. Long before the command to love an enemy is stated as a principle Matthew 5:44, it is here as a case: your enemy's donkey is down in the road, and you are going to have to help him with it.

You shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds those who have sight and perverts the words of the righteous Exodus 23:8.

The description is of what a bribe does to the taker rather than to the case. It blinds people who can see, and twists the speech of men who are otherwise upright.

Then two rests, and both are legislated for the sake of others. The land lies fallow every seventh year that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the animal of the field shall eat Exodus 23:11. The seventh day is commanded that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant, and the alien may be refreshed Exodus 23:12. The Sabbath is grounded in creation when it is given as a commandment Exodus 20:11; here its social effect is named, and the beneficiaries listed are livestock, servants and foreigners — everyone in the household with no power to stop working on their own authority.

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