Is a Lie Ever Right?

Augustine wrote On Lying in about 395 and came back to the subject many years later in Against Lying. There he held that God's kindness to the midwives and to Rahab was given for their mercy toward His people, and that their deceit earned none of it. He held too that the midwives would have done better to refuse both the lie and the killing, even if they died for it.

Thomas Aquinas gave the reason from the nature of speech. Words are natural signs of what is in the mind, so to signify by words what is not in the mind is a wrong in its kind, and every lie is a sin. He counted a lie told to help another a venial sin.

John Calvin, commenting on Exodus 1:19, held that the two women lied and that, since lying displeases God, they sinned. He held as well that God, in His fatherly indulgence, still valued their good work as if it were pure. He gave the ground in these words: "whatever is opposed to the nature of God is sinful; and on this ground all dissimulation, whether in word or deed, is condemned".

Hugo Grotius, in The Rights of War and Peace, defined a lie in the strict sense as a violation of the existing right of the person addressed. That right is the liberty of judgment that people owe one another when they speak, and it may be lost. Grotius allowed a false word where it is the only means of saving the life of an innocent person.

Grotius set this reading beside the false witness to or against a neighbor that Scripture so often forbids.

Thomas Aquinas read these verses as the never reading does. He placed the reward of the midwives in their fear of God and their good will, and he held that the lie itself could merit nothing eternal. Augustine, in On Lying, held that the midwives are spoken of with approval for the promise of growth they showed. Mercy that saves a mortal life, he wrote, is a step toward loving the eternal saving of the soul.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown and Albert Barnes read the houses God made as families and offspring, so that the midwives married and became mothers in Israel, and the Berean text renders the verse that way. John Calvin read the pronoun as masculine and held that God made houses for the Israelites through the piety of these women.

Rashi read the word the Berean renders vigorous as a word for midwives, so that the Hebrew women were as skilled as midwives themselves. The rabbis of the Talmud, in Sotah 11b, read it as a comparison to the beasts of the field, which give birth without help.

Adam Clarke held that the answer stated what experience shows. Women who labor in the open air through their pregnancy give birth quickly, he wrote, and Exodus 1:14 records the work of the Hebrews in the fields. The note of the Calvin Translation Society on Exodus 1:18 reports that John Lightfoot wrote of the midwives' words as no lie and as a confession of their faith.

John Calvin rejected the rabbis' account that the midwives had warned the women of the king's design and so came too late.

Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible, held that Samuel's word was strictly true, since Samuel did offer the sacrifice and could not have gathered the sons of Jesse without it. Gregory the Great, in his Commentary on 1 Kings, read the verse as a pattern for eluding tyrants by a pious deception, in such a way that the guilt of lying is avoided.

John Calvin held that Rahab's falsehood was done for a good purpose and was not free from fault, and that God willed the spies to be delivered without approving the falsehood that saved them.

Read Rahab and the Scarlet Cord →