Enemy

An enemy, in Scripture’s usage, is a person or people in active opposition to another — a personal adversary, a hostile nation, or those who oppose God and his house — rather than merely someone disliked. The standard Hebrew and Greek terms behind the English word (oyeb and echthros) carry that sense of hostility and contention. The text says that when the psalmist faces such opposition he does not answer it himself but asks God to act: “Contend, Yahweh, with those who contend with me. Fight against those who fight against me” (Psalm 35:1). The same psalter widens the category, so that hostility aimed at God’s house lands on the worshiper: “the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me” (Psalm 69:9).

Established history and the biblical text together show that concern for the enemy is not a New Testament innovation. Proverbs already instructs, “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (Proverbs 25:21), a command the apostle Paul later takes up in Romans 12:20. Jesus states the command in its sharpest form: “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44; compare Luke 6:27). The Gospels ground the command differently in emphasis — Matthew in the Father’s indiscriminate generosity, who “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45) and who is therefore the pattern for being “perfect” (Matthew 5:48); Luke in mercy, “be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful” (Luke 6:36), with the promise that such love makes one a child “of the Most High” (Luke 6:35). Paul’s shorthand is “Bless those who persecute you; bless, and don’t curse” (Romans 12:14).

Scripture also shows the command enacted at the costliest point. The text says Jesus, while being crucified, prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), and Stephen, under a hail of stones, “cried with a loud voice, ‘Lord, don’t hold this sin against them!’” (Acts 7:60). It is honest to note that the canon holds both this and the plea for God to fight against enemies (Psalm 35:1); the Bible does not resolve the tension into a single formula, and interpreters have not agreed on how the imprecatory prayers and the command to love are to be held together.

In Christian tradition the differences are real. Some read Jesus’ command as governing personal conduct while leaving room for the coercive duties of rulers and soldiers, a distinction classically traced to Augustine; others, notably Anabaptist and Mennonite communities, read Matthew 5 and Luke 6 as binding on the disciple’s whole life and therefore as a standing critique of warfare. Traditions also differ over whether the “enemy” in view is chiefly the personal adversary or also the national one, and over whether the imprecatory psalms are to be prayed as honest human speech or read as the voice of Christ himself. Interpretive suggestion, not settled doctrine: the passages most often read together — Proverbs 25:21, Matthew 5:44, Romans 12:14 — agree in redirecting the disciple away from retaliation and toward concrete good done to the hostile person, whatever else is concluded about the conduct of states.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.