"... The rabbis of the Talmud were not the only ones to adopt “love your neighbor as yourself” as a cardinal principle and then interpret it to make it more practical. We find in Christian Scriptures (Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12) attributed to Jesus what came to be later known as the Golden Rule ... “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is clear that the source for this Rule is our verse in Leviticus (see also Matthew 22:37-40). The Christian formulation is a positive one, namely, do unto others ... while the Jewish one is a negative interpretation, don’t do unto others ... One might suggest that Hillel, who interpreted the verse in a negative manner, did so because he was dealing with a potential convert and didn’t want to alienate him from Judaism by making it appear too difficult. By rendering “love your neighbor as yourself” in the way Hillel did, the gentile, who likely came from a pagan background with little emphasis on universal ethical values, would find it easier to cleave to the Jewish religion. Hillel’s interest in promoting conversion is clearly evident from some of the other stories that appear on the same Talmudic page as the one-legged seeker story. (Shabbat 31a) But this hypothesis is negated by a verse in the apocryphal Book of Tobit (4:15-16) wherein we have again the negative formulation of “love your neighbor as yourself” standing in for the Biblical verse. Hillel’s reformulation is thus not unique to him but is rather an adoption of what appears to be an older Jewish interpretive tradition ..."