Broken Speech Series

I’ve been wracking my brains trying to find a lead-in to this week’s commandment without talking about things like political correctness and hate speech, fake news and cancel culture. Things like misinformation, disinformation and media bias. But the subject keeps popping up. Things like the difference between sex and gender or equity and equality and other abuses of language. But I can’t get away from it. What we’re seeing going on - on a more than usually grand scale - is a sort of giant illustrated classic course on the Ninth Commandment:

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

And it all has to do with the relationship between justice and speech. It is all about on which side of truth God’s great gift of language is being used: to reveal truth, or to conceal truth. Is language being used to support decency and order, justice and righteousness, or to corrupt it?

Ancient Israel didn’t have tapes or videos or photocopies or email or bank records. Moses’ tent didn’t keep visitors’ logs. They didn’t have fingerprints or DNA analysis or lie detector tests. All they had was the usual circumstantial evidence - for instance, a knife with the accused initials carved on the handle - the smoking gun, as it were. And, of course, the word of eyewitnesses.

In any capital case, all it took was the word of two eyewitnesses to condemn someone. The power of life and death resided in the tongues of the accusers. We don’t know, as we do not have written records of court cases from the time, whether or not people actually stood up before the tribal elders and swore an oath on some sacred object, but it seems probable given the customs in the area that have come down to us over the millennia.

So a lot of people interpret this commandment narrowly. In a court of law, after having been sworn, you may not accuse someone of something they have not done.

That gives us a whole lot of leeway the rest of the time, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t say anything about lying under oath when it doesn’t hurt anyone else, does it? I mean, if it’s not against your neighbor, it’s not covered, right?

Wrong.

It’s wrong first of all because to swear falsely in God’s name is already a violation of the third commandment - remember, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” It is wrong to appropriate God’s reputation for truth under false pretenses; stealing God’s name, so to speak, to get ourselves privileges, trust, we don’t deserve. It is a primary sign of corruption in our relationship to God.

But lying under oath also corrupts our relationships with other people. Because our ability to live together in ordered society depends on our ability to trust the system of justice, that it will be based on truth.

You see, every time that someone gets away with wrongdoing by lying about his or her own behavior, even if they haven’t accused someone else, he or she has harmed the whole fabric of society by eroding confidence that justice will be done. And then two things happen. First, people start believing that they can get away with things if only they’re clever and ruthless enough, and second, some start feeling the need to take justice into their own hands.

So lying in a court of law, under oath, is an offense against your neighbor EVEN WHEN it does not involve a direct accusation.

So - okay - Don’t lie in a court of law (or, incidentally, to Congress) under oath about anything. Perjury is out, even if it’s relatively trivial. Got it.

Does that cover it? Are we clear as long as we haven’t placed our hand on that Bible or sworn on our sainted mother’s grave?

Well, no.

Formal oaths and court cases are really covered by the third commandment, as I’ve just illustrated. The ninth commandment focuses less on our relationship with God than on our relationships with one another. Bearing false witness is, at its most basic level, about accusing someone of something they haven’t done. It may not even be a public act. Passing on a rumor about shoddy workmanship or infidelity can be just as damaging as a public charge, if not more so, because it’s so hard to defend against. And in today’s social and other media environment it is almost impossible. One of the most common slurs nowadays is to accuse someone of sexual harassment or racism or homophobia – or any of the other “phobes” - if they don’t agree with you on policy issues. “Where do I go,” ask people who have experienced such slurs, “to get my reputation back?”

But we damage our neighbors with words in much more insidious ways than by direct attacks. Because to lie is to misrepresent reality. And we do that when reality is uncomfortable, or time-consuming, or in our way.