Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Greatest Commandment
Matthew 22:34-40
34 But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together. · WEB
The last test of the day gets a straight answer — two commandments, and everything else hanging from them.
But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together Matthew 22:34.
The rival party regroups when their opponents fail, and the last question of the day is put by a lawyer — a specialist in the law — testing him Matthew 22:35.
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Matthew 22:36. It was a live question among the schools, and answering it required ranking commandments that all came from God, which is a good way to be quoted against yourself later.
The answer is given without hedging, and it is in the earlier account Mark 12:28–44, where the questioner turns out to be sincere and agrees with the reply.
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" Matthew 22:37 Deuteronomy 6:5. The line is from the Shema, recited twice daily by every observant Israelite — so the greatest commandment is not an obscure ruling but the sentence they all knew by heart. The piling of terms is a way of saying all of you, not an anatomy.
"A second likewise is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself'" Matthew 22:39 Leviticus 19:18. What is new is the pairing. The second is drawn from the middle of a chapter of ordinary regulations — wages, courts, harvest edges — and set beside the Shema as its equal in kind. Likewise is doing that work.
"The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments" Matthew 22:40.
The verb is the one for a door hanging on its hinges. Not these two replace the rest, and not the rest are now optional — everything else hangs here and swings on it. The two tables of the commandments are the two loves in order, four toward God and six toward the neighbor, and the summary does not abolish what it summarizes any more than a hinge abolishes a door.
It is also the answer to the entire chapter. Three delegations have come with questions built to trap, and the reply to the last is that the law they are using as a weapon exists to produce love — which is the one use none of them has made of it today.
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