Since I have been summoned I’ll just say a couple of things, bearing in mind that I’m not an expert on this context. That’s not going to stop me pontificating, though.
First, remember that Jesus and his associates would have spoken not Hebrew but Aramaic.
Second, remember that the setting of most incidents in the Gospels is probably fictitious, even if the sayings attributed to Jesus are authentic. The early Christians handed down oral traditions of what Jesus said and did. The authors of the Gospels took these traditions and turned them into coherent stories. This very probably involved inventing settings and characters for Jesus to respond to. A good parallel would be jokes. You might hear a joke and tell it to someone else, changing some of the details either to make it better or because you don’t remember it all, but the punchline stays the same because that’s the point of the joke. In the case of the Gospel authors, they probably often preserve what Jesus actually said, but put it in a setting that serves their own purpose.
A good example of this is the first part of the story you’re looking at, Mark 12:28-34/Luke 10:25-29/Matthew 22:34-40. If you look at the earliest version, in Mark, the question is asked by a scribe, who responds to Jesus’ answer by agreeing wholeheartedly, and Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God. But in Matthew the questioner is a lawyer of the Pharisees, whose purpose is not an innocent enquiry but an attempt to trap Jesus. In this version he gives no approving reply and Jesus says nothing positive about him. And in Luke he is again a lawyer trying to test Jesus (less explicitly, but the friendly conclusion in Mark is again removed), and the exchange leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan.
You can see here how the basic saying about the Law is preserved, but the different authors give it different settings to fit their agendas. Matthew is the most hostile to the Pharisees and makes this story reflect badly on them, although it does not do so in his source - quite the reverse, if anything. Luke turns it into the preamble for a story that he presumably has from another source that is unavailable to Mark and Matthew.
The point of all this is that you can’t necessarily interpret the saying or speech of Jesus in the light of the framing narrative, because that’s not part of the original tradition or the circumstances in which Jesus actually said it, assuming he ever did. You need to remember that when you're reading a story like this, you're hearing from at least four groups of people: (1) Jesus and his original hearers; (2) the early Christians who remembered his words and retold them; (3) the first written sources based on that tradition; and (4) the author of the text in front of you who used that written source. All four of these might have had quite different interpretations. In the case of this story we have (3) *and* (4), because you can compare Luke's version to Mark's, which was Luke's source, and you can see easily how Luke has drastically altered that material. So if you're talking about what the lawyer is trying to ask Jesus and his motivation, who are you talking about? The character in Luke's story? The character in the text he got it from? The original lawyer who actually spoke to Jesus, assuming there was one? Because it's clear from comparing Luke to Mark that Luke's portrayal of this character is his own invention, quite different from how he appears in the source, and therefore is unlikely to tell us anything about the historical person, if there was one. And what are you ultimately trying to decide? What Jesus taught? What early Christians thought he taught? What Luke taught? What post-New Testament Christianity teaches? They're not all necessarily the same.
This also has ramifications for questions about the Hebrew Bible. Jesus would presumably have heard the Bible read in Hebrew at the synagogue, and loosely translated and interpreted in Aramaic (and possibly some Greek). The Gospel authors would have known it in a Greek translation, probably mostly the Septuagint. So if you're concerned with the meaning of a word from the Hebrew Bible, as here, you again need to ask yourself what you're asking. Are you asking what the original authors of that Hebrew text meant by it? Are you asking what Jesus would have understood by it? Or are you asking what the Gospel authors would have understood by it? Because all three would have been using different languages. It's entirely possible that all three might have understood different things by the passage in question, and that makes interpreting the Gospel passage all the more complex.
The third point is that the Sunday school interpretation of the story of the Good Samaritan as teaching that “everybody” is your neighbour is completely wrong. That is not what Jesus says at the end. He asks which character acted as a neighbour, and when his hearers identify *one* character as a neighbour, tells them to do likewise. In other words, the story is told (apparently) in response to the question “Who is my neighbour?” but Jesus pointedly refuses to answer that question. He instead tells his hearers to *be* neighbours instead of worrying about who else is a neighbour. This is much more radical and ethically demanding than the bland observation that everyone is our neighbour.
