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Back to Question of the Week Q: Can I have your views on the verse in Leviticus chapter 24. . . " an eye for an eye..." I find it difficult to deal with. Thanks. Rachel |
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A: Ah yes, the infamous "eye for an eye" verse. Actually a couple of verses, from Leviticus 24:17-22, dealing with cases of criminal injury, death, or property damage: A person who strikes mortally any man, shall surely die. A person who strikes mortally any animal shall pay life for life. A person who maims his kinsman, as he did, so it shall be done to him. A break for a break, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as he maimed the person so shall you do to him. The person who strikes an animal shall pay, and the person who strikes another person shall die. There shall be one law for the resident alien and the citizen alike, for I am Adonai Your God. (translation mine.) This isn't the only place the Torah speaks of "letting the punishment fit the crime." In Deuteronomy 19:21 and Exodus 21:22-31, similar language is used, along with similar rules for compensation and punishment in the different cases presented. If we take these verses at face value, they are indeed troubling, as they seem to lay out a vengeful, brutal system of frontier justice. Yet the rabbinic tradition has never understood these verses literally- they have always been understood as teaching a system of monetary compensation, much like today's civil laws. As laid out in the Talmud (Bava Kamma 83 and continuing for several pages), an "eye for an eye" means the monetary value of an eye in relation to the kind of work one does, among other factors. Thus, if you broke someone's arm, the amount you had to pay would depend on the actual wages they lost (a baseball pitcher with a broken arm would lose more wages than a rabbi, for example), as well as doctor's bills, future wages and opportunity lost (if they became unfit for certain kinds of work in the future), pain and suffering, and even possibly humiliation or loss of social status. It's actually a very sophisticated system of liability law, as rich and nuanced as anything modern societies have devised. The ancient rabbis didn't think they were reinterpreting these verses at all; they thought that this was the plain meaning all along. Now, one could object that the rabbis of the Talmud were indeed reinterpreting and cleaning up some pretty nasty laws. However, even if you do that, and reject the rabbinic view of the plain meaning of the text, you can still try to see these laws in their historical context. So even if we take an "eye for an eye" at face value, it turns out to be nicer system of justice than some of the ancient alternatives. There were ancient Assyrian laws that mandated the death penalty even for property crimes, or horrible tortures as punishments, or permanent enslavement for insulting the wrong person, or different punishments for different social classes. I would remind our readers that it wasn't so long ago- about 180 years- that "civilised" England was hanging people convicted only of property crimes. Furthermore, as the Biblical scholar Nachum Sarna has pointed out, many ancient cultures regarded injury as a private matter to be worked out between families, resulting in widely varying consequences for offenders and perhaps even vengeful feuds. The Bible brings offenses against persons under the jurisdiction of the state, and mandates "fair" and limited punishment, while also preventing revenge killings and other cycles of bloodshed. So even if the "eye for an eye" laws sound terrible to us now, in their own day they may have been quite progressive - if, in fact, they were ever understood as really mandating physical mutilation at all. For more on ancient systems of law, see the Jewish Publication Society commentary on Exodus, especially the notes to Chapter 21 and Excursus #6. NJL |
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