OFFENDED: “You plucked out my eye… give me yours!” If you were hurt by someone, you could bargain until you felt like your retribution was fair. Third, lex talionis was for the purpose of protection, rather than the purpose of revenge. Moreover, when we consider the greater context of Scripture, we cannot find one example of lex talionis being literally practiced in the entire OT. In verse 26, a servant could go free, if they were injured, and in verse 30, a ransom was given for damage. Second, the context speaks against a literal interpretation.
Clearly, turning the other cheek was not a NT invention revenge was prohibited in ancient Israel. The law commanded that the Jews were not to “take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. Is this what is going on here in the OT law? Were the Jews supposed to literally pluck out another person’s eye ball or tooth for retribution?įirst, this passage was not meant to be literal. When he couldn’t pay him back, Shylock demanded that Antonio pay him what their contract demanded: a pound of his flesh! For the rest of the play, Shylock tries to pin down Antonio to cut a hunk of meat out of his side. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a Jewish moneylender named Shylock lent money to Antonio. 19:21):īut if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. Hammurabi, the expression is so familiar to us today because of its frequent use in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) where references to 'an eye for an eye' can be found in Exodus,Īnyone who kills an animal shall make restitution for it, life for life.Lex Talionis is Latin, and it means “the law of retaliation.” It comes from this passage in Exodus 21:23-25 (c.f. Known today - although the law itself is likely to date back to well before
Which of course brings us back to the reason that this expression is so well Time as Abraham, and about four hundred years before Moses. This means that that Hammurabi lived about the same
In about 1786 BC (some scholars speculate that the biblical Nimrod and HammurabiĪre one and the same).
#An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth code
Most scholars believe Hammurabi died in 1750 BC, and that his code was written Scholars believe that the earliest human legal systems were almost universallyīased on the principle of the law of retaliation (lex talionis) - that is the Still in existence of The Code of Ur-Nammu predates Hammurabi by at least 300 Laws, but it is by no means the first set of laws. The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest example of an almost complete set of ancient It is now housed in the Louvre museum in Paris. Inscribed on huge stone slabs, known as steles - one example of which wasĭiscovered in in Iran in 1901 (having been plundered from Babylon in the 12thĬentury BC). The Babylonian King Hammurabi (c.1790 BC). The earliest known example of this expression is as one of the 282 laws of The punishment should match the crime Background:
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