the other person you are associated with: a friend, a fellow member of your community, or simply the other party, with the closeness left to the setting.
This word names a person by nothing more than the fact that you and they are connected. It fixes no degree of closeness, and the sentence around it supplies that. At its warmest it is the friend who is expected to stand by you when trouble comes. At its coolest it has drained of feeling almost entirely and means no more than the other one, as in "each said to the other". Most of its uses sit in between: the fellow member of your community whose life, honour and property the law protects, or the man on the far side of a loan, a deposit, or a fistfight.
One word covers all of these:
- the trusted confidant a king's son takes his scheming to,
- the fellow member of the community whom the commandments protect,
- the anonymous other party in a dispute over a lost ox,
- the woman a man calls his beloved in a love poem.
Because the warmth is not built into the word, the same three letters do very different work on facing pages. A chapter of case law uses it for whoever left an ox in your care; a psalm uses it for the friend who stood back from the writer's sickbed; the Song of Songs uses it for a lover. Hebrew is content to leave the temperature of a relationship unstated in a way English is not, and a translator has to pick a word that commits.
Its neighbours in the language are all more fixed than it is. Brother (אָח) names shared descent, the resident next door (שָׁכֵן) is defined by where he lives, and the fellow of the priestly laws (עָמִית) is a near legal term for a member of the covenant people. This is the loose, all purpose word, and it takes its weight from whatever stands around it.
Nuances
The social extension of רֵעַ in Lev 19:18: whether the noun there denotes the fellow Israelite, the Israelite together with the resident alien, any human being, or specifically the fellow Israelite with whom one has a grievance.
- majorityIn the Holiness Code רֵעַ denotes the fellow Israelite. The structural argument is decisive: because H systematically distinguishes the אֶזְרָח from the גֵּר, and because Lev 19:33-34 must extend the same love command to the גֵּר, רֵעַ in v. 18 cannot already include the resident alien, or vv. 33-34 would be redundant.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, Anchor Bible 3A (2000), 1652-1656; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (1989), 129-130; Jan Joosten, People and Land in the Holiness Code, VTSup 67 (1996), 54-86; Hans-Peter Mathys, Liebe deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst, OBO 71 (1986), 29-83; Christophe Nihan, From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch, FAT II/25 (2007), 460-475; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 4 (2009), 492-494, 500-504; Harry M. Orlinsky, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (1969), 38-39
- minorityRead canonically, vv. 18 and 33-34 form a single unit, so the neighbour commanded to be loved covers both the native Israelite and the resident alien living among them.; Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, NICOT (1979), 268-273; Hendrik Bosman, Old Testament Essays 31/3 (2018): 571-590
- minorityThe lexeme itself carries no in-group restriction, since elsewhere רֵעַ covers a Canaanite (Gen 38:12, 20), Egyptian women (Ex 11:2), and simply each man of the human race at Babel (Gen 11:3); the in-group reading therefore imposes a limit the word does not carry.; Richard Elliott Friedman, "Love Your Neighbor: Only Israelites or Everyone?" Biblical Archaeology Review 40/5 (2014): 48-52; Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah (2001)
- minorityWithin the five-clause unit of vv. 17-18 (do not hate, openly rebuke, do not bear a grudge, do not take vengeance, love), the רֵעַ in view is specifically the fellow Israelite with whom one has a grievance, so the command governs the handling of conflict rather than a general benevolence.; Thomas Kazen, Emotions in Biblical Law, HBM 36 (2011); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, Anchor Bible 3A (2000), 1653-1654; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 4 (2009), 492-494