In his book The God Delusion, the evolutionary biologist and New Atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins proclaims that the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to “love your neighbor as yourself” originally meant “only ‘love another Jew.’” Not so, argues the Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, mustering significant contextual and linguistic evidence:
[First], the text already directs Jews/Israelites to love foreigners: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). What [then] would be the point of saying to love only Jews—and in the very same chapter! So who is our “neighbor”?
The Hebrew term here for “neighbor” is re’a. The first occurrence of re’a in the Torah is in the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:3), the Bible’s story of the origin of different nations and languages. The term refers to every human, without any distinctions by group. . . [T]he next occurrence of the word [is] in the story of [Jacob’s son] Judah and [his daughter-in-law] Tamar. Judah has a re’a named Hirah the Adullamite (Genesis 38:12, 20). Hirah is a Canaanite, . . . from the then-Canaanite city of Adullam. He cannot be a member of Judah’s clan because, at this point in the story, that clan, the Israelites, consists only of Jacob and his children and any grandchildren.
In the Exodus story the word appears in both the masculine and feminine, [when] Moses instructs the Israelites to ask their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold items before they leave Egypt (Exodus 11:2): “each man will ask of his neighbor and each woman of her neighbor . . .”. The word there refers precisely to non-Israelites. . . .
In short, the word re’a is used to refer to an Israelite, a Canaanite, an Egyptian, or to everyone on earth.
Read more on theTorah.com: http://thetorah.com/the-exodus-the-alien-and-the-neighbor/