Luke 14:26 → Deuteronomy 21:15

"If anyone comes to Me and does not hate (μισεῖ) his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life - he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26). Deuteronomy 21:15-17 is the text that shows how that verb works in biblical legal usage and in its Greek. The law concerns a man with two wives, "one beloved (ἠγαπημένη) and the other unloved" - literally hated, μισουμένη in the Septuagint, three times in three verses - and it protects the firstborn son of the hated wife from being disinherited in favour of the beloved wife's son. The decisive point is that the "hated" wife is not despised. She is the less-loved of two, and the whole legislation exists because she is still a wife with a real son and enforceable rights. The same idiom governs Genesis 29:30-33, where Jacob "loved Rachel more than Leah" and the narrator then simply calls Leah hated, and Malachi 1:2-3, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." Comparative preference is being stated in absolute terms. Matthew preserves the identical saying of Jesus in the unidiomatic form: "anyone who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me" (Matthew 10:37). So Luke 14:26 is not a summons to contempt for one's family - the same Jesus enforces the fifth commandment against those who evade it (Mark 7:9-13) and provides for His mother from the cross. It is a summons to a preference so decisive that every other love looks, beside it, like hatred. Deuteronomy also shows why the demand is not cruel: the law's entire concern is that a man's preference must not be allowed to rewrite what is owed. Jesus reverses the direction and makes the preference itself the substance of the covenant - because the claim here is not one husband's affection distributed between two wives but the Creator's claim on a whole life, which is why the second clause puts the self on the same list as the family. (Deuteronomy 21:18-21, the rebellious son, is a neighbouring law in the same chapter but carries no part of this argument.) This preaches as gospel only if He is worth it - which is exactly the argument of the two parables that follow (14:28-33). Count the cost, because the cost is everything and the treasure is Christ. To love Him more than father and mother is not a loss inflicted but a rival delight overcome by a greater one.