The New York Times continues to provide grist for this column. For my last one, this was an opinion piece by Thomas Friedman. This time it’s a piece by Bret Stephens, a Times contributor who deserves our gratitude for regularly and intelligently defending Israel in a newspaper not noted, to put it delicately, for its pro-Israel sentiment.

Writing there on October 5 about “the year American Jews woke up,” Stephens lists some examples of anti-Semitic attitudes that have come to infect public discourse in America. Among them he mentions the case of “a student who suggested to me, during a give-and-take at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, that Israelis should heed the words of the book of Matthew and turn the other cheek. It reminded me of Eric Hoffer’s quip that ‘everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in the world.’”

The well-known passage from the New Testament referred to by Stephens can be found in Matthew 5: 38-39, which quotes Jesus as saying: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you that you resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” comes of course from the Hebrew Bible. The first of several times the phrase occurs there is in the 21st chapter of Exodus, which details the punishments meted out by Mosaic law for the infliction of various kinds of injury. In the case of physical assault, these are, Exodus says, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot. Burning for burning, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.”

We have no way of knowing whether this lex talionis, to use the Latin term for such tit-for-tat retribution, was ever practiced or meant by the Bible to be taken literally; as its rabbinic commentators pointed out, it could hardly have been enforced with any degree if precision. (Suppose, for example, that a blow to someone’s eye results in a partial loss of vision; how could the administrators of justice possibly be sure that a similar blow to the eye of the assailant would cause the same damage?) By the early rabbinic times in which Jesus lived, in any event, there was a rabbinic consensus that “an eye for an eye” meant financial compensation for the monetary value of the bodily organ in question, the criteria for which are discussed at length in the Talmud.

Although early Christian theologians were certainly aware of this rabbinic interpretation, they did not accept its validity or consider it relevant to the problem they faced—namely, how to reconcile Jesus’ statement with God’s command in Leviticus. One of the first Christian writers to address the question, the church father Tertullian, did so while attacking the heretical views, as he considered them, of the Gnostically inclined Marcion, who held that the Old Testament punishment was cruel and vengeful and that Jesus was calling for its abrogation in favor of a more compassionate approach. Invoking Deuteronomy 32:35, where Moses says in God’s name, “For vengeance and retribution are mine,” Tertullian argued that the “eye for an eye” of Leviticus referred to divine, not human, requital: God, the Bible was saying in figurative language, would see to it that the inflictor of injury received a punishment appropriate to his crime, and Jesus was not telling the injured victim to forgive his assailant. He was simply advising him to “refrain from giving blow for blow” and “patiently endure” until the day God “presents Himself as the judge.”

In one form or another, mainstream Christian thought over the centuries endorsed Tertullian’s position. Yet it was Marcion’s view of an unfeeling “eye for an eye” Judaism as opposed to a merciful “turn the other cheek” Christianity that had the greater influence on the popular Christian imagination, feeding all the tropes of Christian anti-Semitism, starting with its depiction of bloodthirsty Jews clamoring for Jesus’ crucifixion and culminating in the contemporary image of pitiless Israeli troops slaughtering helpless Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, Israel was reacting to the Hamas provocation of October 7, but couldn’t it have listened to the book of Matthew instead of adhering to Leviticus’ ruthless laws of retaliation?

New Testament forbearance vs. Old Testament hard-heartedness! It’s always made a neat contrast—and an absurd one, not least because the admonition to turn one’s cheek to one’s enemies comes itself from the Old Testament.

It’s in the book of Lamentations, the Hebrew Eikhah, Chapter 3. Here, mourning for the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE, are verses 25-30:

It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. . . . Let him sit alone and be silent, for he bears it upon him. Let him fill his mouth with dust; perhaps there is still hope. Let him turn his cheek to him who strikes him, let him take his fill of disgrace.

In the Hebrew, “Let him turn his cheek to him who strikes him” is yiten l’makehu lekhi. The advice given by Lamentations, which ends the passage with the prayer, “O Lord, render unto them a recompense according to the work of their hands, pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under the skies of the Lord,” anticipates Tertullian by nearly a millennium.

It’s hardly possible that Jesus was not thinking of yiten l’makehu lekhi when he said what Matthew attributes to him. He may have chosen to stress the point by speaking of the other cheek, the first having already taken a blow, but that makes no essential difference.

Needless to say, I’m not the first reader to have noticed that Jesus was citing Lamentations, although given the fame of his “turn the other cheek” remark, and the uses to which it has been put, surprisingly few readers have dwelt on this. Not even Tertullian bothered to point it out. Overall, the impression remains that Jesus was saying something radically new when in fact he was simply drawing on one part of the Hebrew Bible to comment on another part.

In general, although there has been an increased emphasis in recent decades on Jesus’ Jewish roots, it is still not sufficiently appreciated by either most Christians or most Jews how thoroughly Jewish he was. Adherents of both religions, each group for reasons of its own, prefer to think of him as having broken with the faith he was raised in. This is certainly not, however, how he thought of himself. Whoever expects the Jews to be the only real Christians should keep in mind that the protagonist of the book of Matthew was a real Jew, not a real Christian, himself.