GEN696 The citation of the Ten Commandments and their authority by ancient figures with varying forms and additions also caused later rabbinic and Christian biblical commentators to find new and more extensive meanings for the Decalogue. One example of this is the “appended” interpretation of the Sixth Commandment to prohibit suicide. Suicide is an issue in the ethical thought of philosophers and theologians throughout the ages. Immanuel Kant sums up his argumentation on the subject in the following fashion: “But suicide is not inadmissible and abominable because God has forbidden it; God has forbidden it because it is abominable in that it degrades man’s inner worth below that of the animal creation. Moral philosophers must, therefore, first and foremost show that suicide is abominable.” The question is, where exactly does God forbid suicide in the Bible? The Bible records examples of “apparent” suicides of important, paradigmatic figures without explicit condemnation. [Among examples cited by author: Saul, Samson, Zimri – AJL] The distinction between suicide and martyrdom is elaborated by medieval biblical commentators and Theologians alike regarding some of the suicides but this distinction is apparently post-biblical. In Judaism: Midrash Genesis Rabbah 34:19; Midrash Lamentations Rabbati 1:53. In the law corpuses of the Pentateuch, suicide is not explicitly forbidden. It appears that the whole question of suicide was not an issue in the biblical period which required specific legislation or prohibition. While probably not normative, it certainly was not criminal. The need for the prohibition of suicide appears to be a reaction to attitudes encountered in the post-Hebrew Bible/Greco-Roman society [It may represent either an ideological or a practical polemic against suicides which occurred during the Greco-Roman period. The rabbis specifically may have been reacting to the practical circumstances of suicides which occurred during and after the Destruction of the Second Temple or the Bar Kokhba rebellion, for example. The fact that earlier suicides were not clearly condemned or specific prohibitions raised may indicate that it only became an issue as a result of the philosophical issues associated with it during the Greco-Roman period.] which in some cases encourage suicide as normative. In Plato’s Phaedo 61b-62d suicide is clearly unlawful. Unfortunately, Socrates’ own “apparent” suicide left room for later Greco-Roman speculation as to the nature of unlawful suicide. Diogenes Laertius, already in the fourth century BCE recounted some Stoic doctrines concerning the permissibility of suicide in various circumstances. Diogenes Laertius 7.130; Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. J. von Arnim III.757. Seneca, and the later Stoic thinkers took this doctrine of rational suicide and transformed it from permissibility to “near” obligation. So we find in his Epistula Morales 104:21: “If you want to get rid of vice, you must retire from places where there are examples of vice. Cross over to the better people. Live with the Catos, with Laelius and Tubero. If you like to live with Greeks, join Socrates and Zeno. Socrates will teach you to die if necessity arrives, Zeno before it arises.” The “rational” suicide and the development of the normative nature of suicide in Greco–Roman society perhaps motivated a reinvestigation of the Bible for ethical justification in condemning them. In rabbinic sources, the biblical prohibition is derived from a specific reading of the Hebrew in [this verse]: “But for your life-blood will I require a reckoning” The rabbinic interpretation of Genesis Rabbah states: “A person is not to harm himself. There is a tradition concerning the scriptural verse, “For your life-blood too (Hebrew: ach) I will require a reckoning.’ Rabbi Eleazer taught the following interpretation, ‘From you I will require a reckoning for your own life-blood.” [interpreting the Hebrew word: ach] Unfortunately, the same interpretation could not easily be used by those who based themselves upon the Greek Septuagint reading of this passage. In the Septuagint, the phrasing and syntax is read differently, giving us the following translation of [this verse]: ”For your blood of your lives will I require at the hand of all wild beasts…”. In other rabbinic and Christian sources, however, apparently a rather clever reading of the Sixth Commandment provided the authority for the ban on suicide. It appears that they may have read the words: Lo Tirtzah (“Thou shall not murder”) in the following manner: The T in Tirtzah is dotted for one or two grammatical reasons: a) T can be dotted when it is the first letter of a word or syllable—as is this case here—or b) to indicate the absence of a letter (dropped for a number of different reasons). Using the dotting as a sign of the absence of a letter, the biblical commentator argued that this word reflects the Hebrew reflexive construction of the same person and number (which required only the addition of another T or better the “missing”/”dropped” letter T). Accordingly, these biblical interpreters read the Sixth Commandment as: Lo TiT’ratzeah, “Thou shall not murder oneself.” Thus, according to the rabbis, suicide is a biblical prohibition and no less one of the Ten Commandments. [Another interpretation of this appears to be derived from the “unique” but ancient reading preserved in Onqelos Targum to Exodus 20:13. There it states: “Do not kill any person” implying that the prohibition extends to all persons (even apparently oneself. See: The Targum Onqelos to Exodus, trans. with appartus and notes by B. Grossfeld, (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988) pp. 56-57 especially note #8 on p. 57.]