ABSTRACT
In the Hebrew Bible, the neighbor (rēaʾ in Hebrew) is best known as the stereotypical close other, the fellow co-residing Israelite male head of a household, whose property one must leave well alone according to the Decalogue. The neighbor is defined by his wealth, his membership of the people of Israel, and his gender. He is a neighbor with whom other landowning male Israelites can safely initiate a reciprocal relationship, and presumably a mirror image of the second person singular masculine ‘you’ addressed in the text. Gudme calls this type of neighbor a ‘social’ neighbor. Another less well-known kind of neighbor is the person next door, the person, who lives close by (šākēn in Hebrew). The person next door is a ‘spatial’ neighbor, a kind of neighbor that is defined on the basis of geography and spatial proximity and not by gender, ethnicity, and social class. The purpose of this study is to conduct a survey of the two kinds of neighbors in the Hebrew Bible and to pay attention to how far these two kinds of neighbors overlap with regard to gender, ethnicity, and social status.
