Eye For An Eye - Leviticus 24

24:1-9 - There are two main concepts addressed in chapter 24, the first in verses 1-9 were a description of “a perpetual fire is to burn outside the veil in the tabernacle,” according to the header of this chapter. God wanted “pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamps to burn continually.” TB notes that “continually” is a mistranslation and is more accurately “regularly” so it doesn’t meant that there has to be a light burning all day, everyday, but instead at some times but on a regular basis. But the most significant part is the way the oil is to be extracted from the olives for the lamp light. TB says that most olive oil was pressed out at the time and that was the most efficient method to extracting that oil.

However, this requirement for the oil to be beaten out of the olives increased the difficulty factor significantly. I imagined the people taking branches with olives in them and hitting them onto the ground to “beat” the oil out of them but from the various sources that I’ve read, it seems that the most common way to get oil was through pressing, but the “beaten” part means more of a physical crushing first, by hand it seems. BibleHub’s quotes Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible as teaching about the oil “it seems there were three sorts, the first of which was pure, and this beaten in a mortar, and not ground in a mill.” It seems like the hand effort was important here. Here's another source that gives some interesting information about olive trees. TB doesn’t describe a method but suggests that the beating part was to symbolize Christ being physically beaten before going to the cross. They also had to make twelve loaves of bread made with fine flour, set “in two rows, six in a row, upon the pure table before the Lord.” Frankincense was to be put on each row, and then after a while the priests could eat the bread.

24:10-23 – this is an interesting event that is put into this chapter. There was a man who was the son of a Israeliteish woman but an Egyptian father. TB suggests that there were probably thousands of these mixed race/faith families that had come out of Egypt into the desert with the Hebrews. But the chapter notes specifically that this man was only half Hebrew. He was fighting with a full Hebrew man and during the fight the half-Hebrew man “blasphemed the name of the Lord, and cursed.” Now to be honest, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me because I swear… a lot. Like It’s really bad, I need to work on it because I think I’m a bad influence on others, like It’s almost as bad as when I was in the army. I went like 15 years and didn’t swear at all, but now it’s like all the time. I’m going to blame it on perimenopause, but I’m going to work on it because it’s not good. So needless to say, I’m a little nervous about the outcome here.

The people take this man who swore to Moses and Moses asked God what to do, and the Lord said, “Bring forth him that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.” Wow, that escalated quickly, not a good sign for me. They were to take (and they did) the man outside of the city, lay their hands on him, which TB says was like when the priests laid their hands on the animal and transferred all the people’s sins onto that animal, but in this case they are transferring this man’s own sin on to himself meaning that he can’t be redeemed for this sin and must suffer death. After laying their hands on him the people are to stone him to death which means throwing big frickin rocks at him until he dies which seems a little brutal to me.

The rest of the chapter are commands from God on how to mete out punishment for breaking the law. Blasphemy is punishable by death. This is why it was such a big deal when Jesus proclaimed himself to be God so many times, because every time was punishable by death and clearly people had been put to death in horrific ways for doing much less. This seems like a pretty disproportionate punishment but God was trying to keep all Israelites faithful and focused on Him and we can see throughout all scriptures that people are very easily led astray even when blasphemy was punishable by death, imagine if they adopted a “believe in what you want” attitude, they would have NEVER made it far enough for Christ to be born into a Jewish society, because there wouldn’t have been one. We can see that in the Book of Mormon because they had a policy of “people can’t be punished for not believing in the gospel” and they were eventually destroyed because it is just too easy to keep straying away. And I mean it is SO easy to break covenants and commandments. It takes an all concerted effort to stay on the strait and narrow pathway, so sowing any seeds of dissent within this community who is very prone to dissent anyway was a disaster in the making. So was it horrific and disproportionate? I think so. But if we accept that God has an eternal plan to save everyone and all will be compensated and happy and all that, then I can see the reasoning. But I’m glad we don’t do that anymore.

Murder is punishable by death, but killing an animal means the person who killed it has to replace it, “beast for beast.” TB notes that in the anciently middle east, killing and animal was often punishable by death. In fact, I was watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (maybe I’m dating myself here) and there was an episode where two starving teenagers killed and ate a cow and the towns people wanted to hang them, it was crazy but it seems like that was a pretty common punishment throughout human history. But the significance is that the Hebrews didn’t practice that, which was unusual at the time. Anyone who maims a neighbor has to have the same thing done to them. TB brought up an example somewhere in scripture or tradition where a man gouged out the eye of another man and when they went to gouge out the guys’ eye in return saw that he only had one eye to begin with so they decided that taking his remaining eye and making him completely blind would not be a proportionate punishment so they let him go. I had to ask myself after hearing that, what is really going on here? The commands continue, “breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” This is where this saying comes from and 4,000 years later has basically come to embody the entirety of the law of Moses.

The IM comments on this being the most popular understanding from the law, saying, “This misunderstanding is unfortunate because it makes the law appear cold, unbending, and revengeful. This misconception has resulted from a failure to distinguish between the social law and the criminal law. The social law was based on love and concern for one’s nieghbor. The criminal law was not outside that love, but was made to stress absolute justice… The same law that required just retribution and payment also required a farmer to leave portions of his field unharvested so the poor could glean therein, demanded that the employer pay his hired labor at nightfall rather than wait even until the next day (19:13), commanded men, ‘Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart’ (19:17), and summarized the ideal by saying, ‘Be ye holy’ (20:7).”

I would agree that the sentiment now of the law of Moses was that it was brutal, vengeful, and cruel, but this explanation also makes sense. The balance between justice and mercy is so fine that it’s hard to know what to do so much of the time. Interestingly, I think that it was explained that the man was of mixed heritage because God wanted to show that the law was to be applied equally between all people regardless of their national origin, heritage, religious, etc because the chapter ends around verse 22 saying, “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the Lord your God.” There were no special rules for certain people, it was all to be applied equally to all people. This is also a precursor to when the gospel goes to both Jew and Gentile after the crucifixion.