Thou Shall Not Kill - Murder?

[Ron_Conte]

The correct translation of the commandment, in my opinion, is:
You shall not murder
The Hebrew word is specific to murder and not as general as the word ‘kill’.

So the commandment is not to murder, but the ideal that we are moving toward is not to kill at all, i.e. to have a society without war, without serious crimes that would necessitate killing in self-defense, etc.

Therefore, You shall not kill is also a correct translation.

In the Latin, the word used in the OT is more general
[Exodus]
{20:13} Non occides.
{20:13} You shall not murder.

However, when Christ is asked about the commandments, He lists them (also in the Vulgate) as:
[Matthew]
{19:18} Dicit illi: Quæ? Iesus autem dixit: Non homicidium facies: Non adulterabis: Non facies furtum: Non falsum testimonium dices:
{19:18} He said to him, “Which?” And Jesus said: “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony.

So the NT Vulgate has the word murder, rather than the more general word ‘kill’. But in other places in the NT, the more general word is used to refer to the commandment.

Therefore, both possible translations are good.

Ron

 

[Trelow]

I’ve heard it would be properly translated as “kill from the shadow,” or something to such. (Fr. Pacwa maybe?)

 

[Valke2]

Anyone,

My question or the guidance I was seeking in my original question wasn’t very specific. Would the correct translation from Hebrew to Greek or Hebrew to Latin or…. etc, be “Thou shall not commit murder.” Or is it “Thou shall not kill.”

Yes. The more accurate translation would be “Thou shall not murder.” This is how Jews have always understood it.

 

[Hastrman]

One reason for the confusion when translating from the Vulgate may be that Latin changed a lot through the centuries, and it has several very specific words for many things. For instance, it has at least two words for war, if not three: Bellum, which means war as a political event, and duellum, which means war in terms of violence on a large, societal scale. The two words are used in very limited senses in medieval Scholasticism, as well–to say nothing of the three tenses of the verb “to be” that give Aquinas’ terms for the condition of being, a being, and an essense (essenda, esse, essentia).

Where I’m heading with this is that the word that may have meant “murder” in the time of Jerome could have devolved to just mean “killing in general” by the Middle Ages or later. Reading Late Latin senses into Classical or Medieval or Ciceronian Latin can really cause confusion. Hilaire Belloc writes somewhere about the problems caused by the word “servus”, or slave, and how it changed over the centuries.