The Word We’ve Been Avoiding

What the Bible actually says about how we treat the poor — and why it’s harder to hear than we think.

Justice is a reordering of priority. If our structures are weighted toward our own security, they are, by definition, weighted away from the neighbor’s need.

Most Christians would say, without hesitation, that they do not hate the poor. And they would be right. The hatred of the poor — active contempt, deliberate cruelty, the wish that the vulnerable would simply disappear — is not the condition that most of us need to examine.

But the Bible is not primarily concerned with hatred in that sense. And the word it uses is more precise than we tend to assume.

The Hebrew word typically translated as “hate” is śānēʼ. Its meaning is wider than the English word implies. Śānēʼ does not require active malice. It can mean simply to love less — to give less attention, less urgency, less of the regard and obligation that love requires.

When Genesis 29 says that Leah was hated and Rachel was loved, it does not mean Jacob despised Leah. It means he loved Rachel more — that Leah received less of what love gives. When Jesus says in Luke 14 that his followers must “hate” father and mother, he is not commanding contempt for family. He is commanding a radical reordering of priority — that everything else must receive less than the Kingdom receives.

Śānēʼ is the condition of loving something or someone less than they are owed. And it is the condition the Bible most consistently names as the problem in our relationship to the poor.

Consider what this means practically. The congregation that gives generously to its building fund and modestly to its food pantry does not hate the hungry. It loves them less — less than it loves its own institutional comfort, less than it loves the experience of worshiping in a beautiful space, less than it loves the programs that serve its own members well.

The Christian who scrolls past the appeal from the unhoused neighbor — moved, even, by what they see, clicking donate before moving on — does not hate the unhoused. They love them less. Less than they love the next thing the algorithm surfaces. Less than they love the comfort of having done something without having their life disrupted by the full weight of what the something addressed.

The church that endorses the tradition’s most demanding teachings about economic justice in its statements and its sermons, while investing its endowment in the arrangements those teachings critique, does not hate the poor. It loves them less — less than it loves its own financial security, less than it loves the goodwill of the donors whose generosity keeps the institution running.

None of these are acts of hatred. All of them are śānēʼ.

The distinction matters enormously, for one reason: hatred and śānēʼ require different responses.

Hatred can be corrected by a change of heart — by repentance, by a new disposition, by choosing differently. Śānēʼ is more structural. It is the condition produced by a long formation into patterns of attention and obligation that systematically allocate less to those the market has stopped counting. You do not correct it simply by feeling differently about the poor. You correct it by reordering — by changing what receives your full attention, your full urgency, your full sense of obligation. By allowing the neighbor’s need to become a direct claim on the structure of your life rather than one consideration among many.

The tradition has always had a word for that kind of reordering. Metanoia — repentance, in the fullest sense — is not a change of feeling. It is a change of direction. A turning of the whole self, including its habits, its attention, its institutional commitments, and its allocation of urgency, toward what it has been loving less than it owes.

The question worth sitting with is not “Do I hate the poor?” Most of us can answer that quickly and honestly with a no.

The harder question — the one the Bible is actually pressing — is: “Who am I loving less than I owe? And what would it cost me, concretely, to love them more?”

Śānēʼ is the word we have been avoiding. It is more accurate than hatred, and more demanding. It names not the enemy but the condition — the slow, structural, often invisible formation into love-less-ness that the comfortable self is very good at not noticing.

The tradition has noticed. It has a word for it. And the word, once heard clearly, does not leave room for the conclusion that better intentions will be sufficient.

—

Peter Hamm served as Chief Clerk of the Committee on Rules of the United States House of Representatives and spent twenty years in corporate leadership. He is pursuing a Master of Christian Leadership at Leland Theological Seminary, with a vocational horizon in hospice chaplaincy and care ministry. He is completing a book, The Moral Hinge, on the history of Christian economic accommodation.