Leviticus 19:16 · World English Bible
Leviticus 19:16 Meaning You Shall Not Go Around
‘You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people. “ ‘You shall not endanger the life of your neighbor. I am Yahweh.
What does Leviticus 19:16 mean?
A tongue that carries a rumor from house to house is a heart entertaining itself at another's expense. Slander feels like small talk, yet it wounds, and often the wound is intended.
From the Sufism reading below.
Leviticus 19:16 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Sufism
SUFISM
Sufism
A tongue that carries a rumor from house to house is a heart entertaining itself at another's expense. Slander feels like small talk, yet it wounds, and often the wound is intended. Underneath the chatter sits the quiet pleasure of feeling taller by making someone else smaller.
That is envy wearing the mask of conversation, and it costs a neighbor something real. Guarding the mouth on purpose, refusing the harmful story even when it is true, asking whether a word protects a person or endangers him, is the daily work here. And the short signature is the reason: the One who made that neighbor hears every word said about him.
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Live Leviticus 19:16 today
- Watch for the little lift you get from telling an unflattering story about someone. When you feel it today, that is your signal to stop mid-sentence.
- In the group chat where the pile-on happens, be the one who says nothing, or the one who says something fair about the person who is not there.
- At work, when sharing a true thing about a colleague would make you look better and them look worse, keep it. Ask whether your words protect them or expose them.
Whose reputation is a little smaller today because of something you said?
The same truth in other traditions
Judaism · the teaching on lashon hara, the evil tongue
The rabbis treated harmful speech as a serious wrong even when the words are perfectly true. The test is not accuracy; it is whether the telling damages the person.
Buddhism · right speech in the Eightfold Path
The Buddha asked whether a thing is true, kind, and useful before it is said. Speech that fails the second two is not rescued by passing the first.
Stoicism · Epictetus, Enchiridion
Epictetus told his students not to talk about absent people at all, and if talk turns that way, to stay quiet or leave. He knew how much of it runs on a quiet pleasure in someone else's fall.
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