Where does the Golden Rule come from?

In the Sermon on the Mount

Therefore, whatever you desire for men to do to you, you shall also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

Matthew places it near the end of the sermon as a summary: this one sentence is “the law and the prophets,” the whole of Scripture. Luke puts it inside the command to love enemies (Luke 6:31). Behind both stands a line from the law of Moses, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which Jesus elsewhere calls the second great commandment (Matthew 22:39). A few verses later, Leviticus extends the same love to the foreigner living in Israel: “you shall love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34).

Hillel on one foot

Jewish teachers knew the rule before Jesus, usually in a negative form. The Babylonian Talmud tells a story about Hillel, the great sage of Herod the Great’s time. A Gentile asks to be taught the whole Torah while he stands on one foot. Another famous teacher, Shammai, has already driven the man off with a builder’s measuring rod. Hillel takes him in and answers in one breath: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, he says; the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it (Shabbat 31a).

The Talmud was put together centuries later, so the story shows how the rabbis remembered Hillel. An older Jewish book has the same rule. In Tobit, written perhaps two centuries before Jesus, a father sending his son on a journey gives him his parting advice.

And what you yourself hate, do to no man.

Tobit belongs to the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament and is counted among the Apocrypha by Protestants. A century after Hillel, Rabbi Akiva called “love your neighbor as yourself” the great principle of the Torah (Sifra on Leviticus 19:18).

Do, or don’t?

Hillel and Tobit say what not to do; Jesus says what to do. Christian preachers once made much of the difference, and some still call the negative form the silver rule. Many scholars think the gap is small, since both start from the same place: imagine yourself on the receiving end. The first Christians used both forms. The Didache, a church manual from around AD 100, gives the negative one (Didache 1.2), and some ancient copies of Acts, led by Codex Bezae, add it to the apostles’ letter to Gentile believers (Acts 15:20, 29).

Older than all of them

The idea is far older than Hillel and far wider than Israel. In China, around 500 BC, Confucius was asked for one word to live by and chose shu, reciprocity: do not impose on others what you would not want for yourself (Analects 15.24). In Greece, the orator Isocrates had a king tell his subjects not to do to others what would anger them if done to themselves (Nicocles 61). Versions turn up in Hindu and Buddhist texts too. In 1993 the Parliament of the World’s Religions, meeting in Chicago, put it at the heart of its Declaration Toward a Global Ethic.

Why “golden”

The name is English. Preachers began calling it the golden rule in the early 1600s, and the label stuck. It has had critics. In 1785 Immanuel Kant dismissed it as trivial: it names no duties to oneself, he said, and would let a criminal argue against the judge who sentences him (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). George Bernard Shaw turned it into a joke in 1903: “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”