Eye For An Eye - Exodus 21:24-36

21:24-27 - I don’t know if this punishment is specifically referencing a woman who is injured and loses her baby because of a fight or just is referring to general retribution, but the law continues, “eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” I’ve heard the saying “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,” and I think that this is one of those concepts that definitely deals with the higher laws of the gospel. It’s also one of those things where sometimes someone does something so bad that they “deserve” to be punished brutally like that, but to be the one who carries out the mutilation with all the screaming and blood, that’s a lot, yeah maybe they deserve it, but I don’t want to be the one who carries it out. And I’m not squeamish about stuff like that.

There’s also the part about that statement where the whole world is blind, and why is the whole world blind? Because we are all guilty of breaking laws that would require severe punishment. So often we look at justice for other perpetrators and demand the absolute maximum, but we want mercy for ourselves. I’ve been the victim of treatment for which the perpetrator would have to be brutal punished, but have I not been the perpetrator of behavior that have injured others as well? Maybe not to the same extent, because I try to be a cycle breaker, but I’m not an innocent in this journey here, I’m definitely guilty of behavior that I’m ashamed of and that by this law would require severe punishment.

Also, I don’t know why but recently there have been multiple people bring up the conversations about capital punishment and why having the death penalty is so important. I vehemently disagree, but after like the third person brought it up to me I was like “do I have a sign around my neck saying that I want to talk about this? I don’t understand.” As far as why I disagree, there are a lot of reasons. The biggest reason is because we’ve been wrong about it so many times and the death penalty has been used in the US to control minority populations, like with George Stinney. There have been hundreds of people who have been posthumously exonerated with DNA evidence and other things that we just get it wrong too many times for execution to be used as a staple of our judicial system. Don’t get me wrong, there are instances where I think it is necessary, but they are far fewer than what we’ve been doing. Secondly, our criminal justice system has a focus on punishment not rehabilitation so I think until we fix that and treat prisoners like human beings and work to rehabilitate them, then can we know who is truly unredeemable and a danger to our society. Until our prison system works to heal the perpetrators incarcerated there, we can’t have capital punishment for use as punishment or persuasion.

But, like so often throughout human history, the extremes in punishment really matter to different social classes. The talk of “eye for an eye” only goes when it comes to two people in the same social class, because the law continues to clarify what happens when it’s a servant who loses and eye or a tooth, then they are given their freedom. It’s not equitable or fair that the perpetrator isn’t forced to lose their eye or tooth, but given the situation at the time, this was very progressive law, which just goes to show that Jesus is the ultimate champion of women and the disenfranchised.

21:28-36 – Now we get into very specific instances of what happens when someone’s animal property, specifically oxen, does something to damage another person or property. These instances are so specific that it is definitely reaffirming that these are cases that arose and these are the rules that were made based on the outcomes. Meaning that the rules weren’t made beforehand, but instead the rules were made as responses to some incident that occurred and was brought before the court.

If someone’s ox gores another person to death, then the ox shall be killed but the meat not eaten, and the owner of the ox won’t be liable. These are animals doing animal things and sometimes that causes unfortunate circumstances to occur, that’s life. The loss of the animal is enough of a hardship to the owner that that would be considered sufficient punishment. Plus, you can’t have an animal around that is violent towards people. This makes sense, accidents happen, especially when it comes to captive animals.

However, if this ox gores someone to death and there has been a history of this animal “to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner,” but the owner didn’t do anything to prevent this from happening again in the future, the ox will be killed and the owner “shall be put to death.” I’m trying to think of an instance that would be similar to this in our society. Maybe in the case of drinking and driving, or I guess the case that we just had last week where there was a kid who shot up a school and killed his classmates, but the dad had bought the son the gun as a gift even though the FBI had been to their house previously warning the parents that the kid had posted online that he intended to shoot up his school. That dad was arrested and is being charged with manslaughter or something like that as far as I know.

This could be a similar case. Knowing that there was a risk that someone could be hurt by your actions or property and not doing what was in your power to prevent that risk, makes sense. But also if the man can afford it, he can just pay a fine “the he shall give for the ransom of his life.” So there’s the class stuff again, but again, this is still progressive policy. If the ox injures a kid or a servant, then money can be paid in place of punishment and the ox still has to die.

Now if the ox is injured by someone else’s negligence, if a pit is dug, but not properly fences to make sure no person or animal falls into it and is hurt, then a fine will be paid. Or if one ox hurts another ox, then the owners will have to work out a deal where the owner of the ox that is killed will have to be paid by the owner of the ox who did the killing. All of this just suggests to me the importance of being responsible toward other people with your property. It actually reminded me of the gravel trucks that barrels down the 15 all day and night spewing gravel out the back of their trailers breaking everyone’s windshields. They have those tarp looking things that they could roll over their gravel haul that would minimize the amount of gravel that hits the cars behind them, but they hardly ever roll them down. All this means is that I have 12+ rock chips in all the windshields of my cars that cost $40 to fill every time, and that’s if I’m lucky and the windshield doesn’t crack completely, which is $500+.

Are these gravel companies being responsible with their property? They are not, but for some reason they aren’t held accountable for the damage that they cause. I know life isn’t perfect, but I’ve lived a lot of different places and I’ve never seen so many broken windshields in once place before. I’ve never experienced so many rock chips before and I haven’t even lived here that long. Anyway, this just occurred to me as being similar to these case laws regarding the oxen and what happens when people are trying to live in a community and the things that can go wrong between them.