“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”
Leviticus 24:19-21; Exodus 21:22-25; Deuteronomy 19:16-21
This is one of the most well-known
expressions from the book that is most responsible for creating Western
civilization: the Bible. After all, it was Western civilization that created
societies rooted in individual liberty, engrained in democracy, that affirmed
the equality of all people, and which gave the world the notion of universal
human rights.
Of course, these ideals were often
violated. But only the West formulated these ideals, let alone achieved them —
and then spread them around the world.
In
the last half century, however, many of the recipients of these gifts —
especially the well-educated — no longer regarded Western civilization as
morally superior to any other. And as
reverence for Western civilization fell, so did reverence for the source of
that civilization.
The
Bible has not only been neglected, but reviled — as a foolish fairy tale at
best, and as an immoral work at worst. This view springs not from intellectual
rigor, but from intellectual laziness.
People
throw out all sorts of objections to the Bible as if there are no rational and
moral responses to those objections. But the fact is there are rational and
moral responses to all those objections.
Dennis
Prager provides many rational and moral responses in his book, The Rational
Bible, but two are provided here.
In
the biblical book of Deuteronomy, it says if someone has a rebellious son who
does not obey his father and mother, his parents can take him to the elders of
the city for judgment. And if the son is found guilty, the citizens are to
stone him to death.
Sounds
pretty primitive, doesn’t it?
In
fact, however, it was an enormous moral leap forward. This law ended — forever
— parental ownership of their children, and with it the right to kill
them. The brilliance of this law was
that it seemed to preserve the absolute authority of parents, but in fact ended
it.
But,
you will respond, the citizens of the city could still kill the child.
Theoretically, that was true. But we have no instance of it ever happening in
the history of the Jews — the people who brought the book into the world and
lived by its rules.
Critics
of Western religion also often cite the famous biblical law, “an eye for an
eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,” etc. as another example of an immoral
biblical law.
But
this law — known by its Latin name, lex talionis, the law of retaliation — was
another great moral advance. It was not meant to be taken literally, and it
never was — for the simple reason that it’s impossible to exactly duplicate
bodily harm. Only “a life for a life” was meant literally and taken literally:
there is capital punishment for premeditated murder.
So,
then, what did it mean?
For
one thing, lex talionis is the ultimate statement of human equality. Every
person's eye is as precious as anyone else's. The eye of a prince is worth no
more than the eye of a peasant. This was completely new in history. The
Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, for example, legislated that the eye of a noble
was of much greater value than the eye of a commoner.
Second,
the principle of “an eye for an eye” ensured only the guilty party was punished
for his crime. In other law codes and in common practice, if you killed
someone's daughter, your daughter would be killed. That was expressly
prohibited in the Bible and by the "eye for an eye" code. Now the
killer would be punished, not the killer’s daughter.
Third,
lex talionis prohibited unjust revenge. In the ancient world, if a man gouged
out another man’s eye, the victim, if he could, would gouge out both the
attacker’s eyes, or kill him, or hurt his children, and so on. In contrast,
“eye for an eye” ensured the victim receive appropriate compensation for the
damages he suffered, but the punishment had to fit the crime.
The
next time you read or hear someone argue that the Bible is irrational or
immoral, tell them how the stone-the-rebellious-son law ended parental killing
of children and how the "eye for an eye" law struck a unique blow for
human equality and justice.
If
they're intellectually honest, they’ll admit that they have learned something
new.
Adapted
from Dennis Prager.