The command of neighbor love is explicitly stated in an unobtrusive passage of the Old Testament. Leviticus 19:18 directs God's people not to take revenge or to hold a grudge—not carry an evil intent—against their fellow Jews, "their people": "but you shall love your neighbor as yourself." This is the exact language Jesus uses in Mark 12:31 to reply to the scholar testing him. But then the same chapter in Leviticus proceeds to recognize a problem. The people addressed would have "neighbors" other than their fellow Jews. In one of the most profound and startling statements in all of the Bible, God's chosen people are told: "The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you, and you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" (19:34). That is, they knew the painful existence of those who are excluded from the "power people," and love toward others who were excluded in the same situation was the reasonable moral response—no doubt a love intended to bring justice with it. The fact that aliens were "other" did not change the moral obligation.
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