Lex talionis – the law of the tooth – is the principle of strictly equal retribution. Its roots are in the Bible, in this text from Leviticus: “Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered” (Leviticus 24:19-20). Here’s what it means: if you cause an injury to your neighbor, blinding him in one eye – by some accidental clumsiness or by deliberately punching him in the face – the same will be done to you. On the appointed day we will bring you into the public square, and there in front of everyone we will put out your eye. Wow.
Maybe this is just barbaric: but maybe not. It addresses the human heart’s insistence on “getting even.” When it is left up to us, we seem to want to aim for a little more than that. The story of Lamech is the great example of this: he boasted how he had gotten even seventy-seven times over by killing the young man who had injured him (Genesis 4:23-24). The story of feuding peoples – the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Montagues and the Capulets – tells how each side keeps trying to get even, and it never ends because each side believes it must outdo the other side, because the harm it has suffered has not been sufficiently avenged.
How do we stop this cycle of violence? By making things even, in a clear and public way. “An eye for an eye” limits the amount of recompense that can be assessed. You don’t get to kill the person who put out your eye. If someone kills your brother, you don’t get to kill his whole family in revenge. Life for life; eye for eye; tooth for tooth; broken arm for broken arm. Equal punishment has been served: you no longer have a basis for getting a little more even, because everyone can see that the crime and its punishment have been brought into exact and scrupulous evenness.
We should notice that where it is possible, the levitical law has aimed for restorative justice “for any sin which a person may commit” (Leviticus 5:22, 6:3): the goal is to set things right by restoring what has been lost. That’s what we would all want: when your eye has been blinded, we’d like a way to fix that, to unblind that eye. But restorative justice isn’t always possible: while you can find a way to return the money, you can’t find the way to unblind the eye. And so to prevent the unending cycle of vengeance, the text establishes a precise level of retributive justice. You can demand that your enemy’s eye be put out, in payment for the loss of your eye. But that’s the limit, right there. Once we’ve fulfilled that, it’s over. There is no further “getting even” to be done.
* * * * *
O God! We get so aggrieved by the sins of others, and so confident in our self-righteous assumption of how much pain we ought to inflict in order to get just a little more than even. Change our hearts, O Lord. Limit our retribution. And teach us to find restorative justice, in every place that we can.
If you find these studies helpful, please Like, Subscribe, Comment, and Share. Thanks!
james-ayers.com 
2 responses to “An Eye for an Eye (Leviticus 23-25)”
I find these texts very hard to read. In Lev 24:10-16 tells the story of the blasphemer, who gets stoned to death. They take the one who has cursed outside; if you heard him, you are to lay hands on him. (a little scapegoat action going on or laying on the hands of the animal to be sacrificed?) Then, the congregation is to stone them. So, it would seem that there must be a witness to the sin, and you must own that this person will die by you laying your hands upon them in witness to what they have done. How many of those that layed their hands on them and themselves cursed God but were not heard? In some ways, it seems that there are some guardrails in place. Were these commands put in place to reduce what was an overaction before, as you stated, to some degree?
Yet I also look at the adulteress woman who is to be stoned, yet Jesus says in John 8:7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And all walked away, and Jesus tells her to go and sin no more. Are these comparable? Do the sins match the punishment?
I’m unsure if I have a real question; I’m just trying to comprehend. The NIB Commentary discusses how Leviticus “…puts in the concrete rather than abstract, philosophical, or theological terms” (p523).
Anyway, thanks for your commentaries. They do make me think, even if my thoughts are abstract.
LikeLike
Yeah, it’s pretty bleak. Leviticus demonstrates, over and over again, that we live in a very different culture today, where we cannot “just do what the Bible says.” We do not stone people to death. We don’t insist that everyone must keep the sabbath. We do not require everyone to eat kosher. If a mugger assaulted you and blinded you in one eye, we’ll put him in jail, but we won’t poke out his eye. We are people who believe that God speaks to us authoritatively through the Bible, even while recognizing that we must discern how to interpret and apply the text, within our own world, instead of assuming that we can simply read it and do it.
We don’t always get the interpretation right. Sometimes we don’t discover that right away. So we need to be humble enough to recognize our own limits, to acknowledge we could be wrong, and not insist that our first impression is so obviously correct that we cannot be mistaken.
LikeLike