"Turn the other cheek" means don't resist evil, be a doormat

Jesus specifies the right cheek: "if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39). Striking someone's right cheek with your own right hand (the only hand used for this in the culture) requires a backhand, and a backhand was specifically the blow a superior used on an inferior: a master on a slave, a husband on a wife, a Roman on a Jew. It was never exchanged between equals. The Mishnah (Bava Kamma 8:6), the codified Jewish legal tradition, actually prices this out: a backhanded slap carried double the fine of an open-handed one, precisely because Jewish law itself recognized it as the more degrading blow.

Turning the other cheek (the left) removes the backhand option. To strike the newly-offered left cheek, the aggressor now has to use an open palm or a fist, both of which the culture treated as blows exchanged between social equals. The gesture doesn't invite a second hit; it makes a second backhand physically impossible and forces the striker to either stop or implicitly concede the target's equal standing. Read this way, it sits alongside the other examples in the same passage (going the second mile, giving the shirt as well as the cloak) as a set of concrete, non-violent acts that expose an oppressive system's cruelty rather than comply with it, which is closer to what scholars like Walter Wink and, in his own cultural-anthropology reading, Kenneth Bailey both argue the passage is doing.

This social-history reading is influential, not unanimous. It leans on how Jesus's first hearers would have read a right-hand backhand, a case built from Mishnaic law codified generations after the Gospels and from cultural inference, not a manuscript note explaining the gesture. Other serious readers take the plain sense closer to face value, non-retaliation as the point on its own, without the honor-shame mechanics attached. Wink's argument is well-supported and widely taught, but it's one interpretive line among several, not a certainty the text itself states.