Eye For An Eye - Deuteronomy 19

TB noted that the past couple of chapters “described the 4 main types of human governmental authorities that God ordained to rule over Israel: kings, judges, prophets, and priests. As we begin chapter 19 today we enter a 3-chapter section that will deal with matters that fall under the control of these various government authorities.” If that wasn’t clear from the last few posts, then that’s my bad. Moses reminds them that this is for when they get to the promised land by saying, “When the Lord thy God hath cut off the nations, whose land the Lord the God giveth thee, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their cities, and in their houses.” TB makes a profound statement about the meaning of that verse, saying, “What this first verse is bringing to mind is that even though it is the 600,000- man army of Israel that is about the enter into battle to conquer the Land of Canaan, this is actually the Lord’s war. Therefore whereas a general of an army might promise his people that HE was going to lead the army into battle and see to it that their enemy was defeated, here Yehoveh assumes the role as the one who leads the Hebrew army into battle and states as much by saying, ‘when the Lord your God (as the leader of the army) has cut off (defeated) the nations…’ It is God who is making war, not the people of Israel.” There will be a lot more about this topic in the coming chapters so I’m not going to go into to too much here but this is the stuff that’s interesting to me.

When Israel settles into the new land, God wants 3 cities set aside for the refuge cities so that people can flee to if they accidentally kill someone. Moses even goes so far as to give an example of two men going to chop wood and if the axe head flies off the handle of the ax of one man and kills the other man, then the one who is still alive can flee to that city. Interesting to me because clearly that would be a tragic accident and it seems to me that if I found myself in that situation where a loved one was killed in that manner, I would assume that it was the will of God that my loved one died because God could have just as easily had the axe head miss that person instead of hitting him directly, so I wouldn’t try to kill the person swinging the other axe because it was clearly my loved one’s time to go. But that’s not where we’re at I guess, and maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it. Moses also continues that 3 more cities of refuge were to be built per certain area that they expanded. TB also noted that historically it seems like these cities of refuge were never actually built. Moses also notes that these cities are only for those who were involved in accidental death, not murder and that murderers should be put to death. This is all stuff we’ve previously discussed so I won’t go into it again

These are mostly litigious matters being dealt with here, how many witnesses are needed to testify against someone else, false witness, and we get at the end an “eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,” statement. TB is very clear that this is taken out of context a lot of times because mutilation as punishment for a crime was expressly forbidden. The meaning of that famous statement “an eye for an eye” is that the punishment must be just and proportionate to the crime committed. If someone killed your cow, you couldn’t just make them apologize, or if someone beat another person to death, they couldn’t just be given a fine or something like that.

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