Christ on Hating the Hated and the Hating

Mat 5:43 You have heard that it said, You shall love your neighbour, and hate your enemy.

Notice that in the first part of the verse, Christ doesn't refer to the prophets, the law, or even the ancients as the authority for hating our enemies as he does for the other commandments. He says instead that this is something regular people say. Biblically, this is accurate. There is only one reference that I can find for hating enemies, Psa 139:21-22, and even that verse doesn't talk about hating personal enemies but rather hating those who hate God and it doesn't command that we do. The author only expresses his own emotional reaction.

Christ is completely accurate in describing this as a common social viewpoint how we should think about our enemies even if it isn't a Biblical teaching. However, in the original Greek, what Christ says even more interesting.

Matthew uses the word, echthros, which is translated as "enemies," but the primary meaning of the echthros is "the hated." So, what Christ is saying is that we are taught to hate those who are hated by others. The "hated" might be individuals who are social outcastes or "the hated" can be a social group, a despised minority. So the pure sense of what Christ is saying here is that we are pressured by society to hate those who others around us hate. This is a very natural human reaction.

This gets more interesting because a secondary meaning of echthros is "the hating," that is, those who hate us. This is another common human reaction to others. When someone hates us, for whatever reason (and we may not even know the reason), our natural reflex is to hate them in return. People who are professional haters, declaring their hatred for others, are also very easy to hate. Misanthropes are not the popular people, for some mysterious reason.

"Hate" is from miseô, which means "to hate," and "hated."

"Enemy" is from echthros, which means "the hated," "the hateful," and "hating."