Week 5 Exodus 21
There’s a pretty well-known rule in this chapter about punishing crimes. It’s this: an eye for an eye.
I noticed that the chapter clearly & definitely spells out an eye for an eye in a one-for-one correspondence: the offender must be punished according to the injury. Hand for hand. Foot for foot. Burn for burn. Wound for wound.
The next eleven verses give examples of the rule in action. But…the iron-clad law is modified. Here’s an example: if an owner hits a male or female slave in the eye and the eye is blinded, then the slave may go free because of the eye.
So that’s an eye-for-freedom. In a true and rigidly applied eye-for-an-eye situation you’d figure the law would say: ‘if an owner hits a male or female slave in the eye and the eye is blinded, then the owner will be blinded in one of his eyes’. So eye-for-eye isn’t actually applied. And I see a couple of verses later that if your bull gores my wife to death I don’t get to put your wife in an arena and let my bull gore her to death.
So the law says eye-for-eye but the law means something like ‘equivalent compensation’ – ‘an eye for something of approximately equal value’.
Note: quotes from Exodus 21:23-4 26 (NLT). End of January Reading report: I’ve read Genesis + Exodus + 31 psalms = 121 chapters. So I’m a little over 10% finished reading the bible in a little over 8% of the year.