As someone who was deeply repulsed by torture and the willingness of some individuals and nations to use it, when I initially began truly researching Mosaic Law several years ago I was struck by both the general absence of torture in Biblical laws and the specificity of the times it was permitted. Reading of older cultures often left me disgusted with their inhumanity and barbarism, and years ago, as a developing apologist, I wanted to secure Biblical justification for the opposition to torture I found inside my conscience. I will have the opportunity here to display the results of that search.
Now, I will importantly define the word torture. Torture is the infliction of pain, psychological or physical, on someone. The purpose might be to coerce information of some kind, to exact some sort of perceived justice, or to merely derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of others. Within the Bible one can locate passages which would address each of these three contexts of torture, and I will examine these contexts and the corresponding Biblical passages one by one.
Some Christians look to the New Testament to find moral insight into matters like torture, justice, and other matters, but they will seek in vain. If one wants to find Biblical grounds for universally condemning certain torture methods or wants to know what particular types of torture the Bible may permit, one must scour the Old Testament, where a wealth of information can be found relevant to the morality of torture. This series, Bible on Torture, will address each of the specific allowances for and restrictions on implementing torture as a criminal punishment. The first type of torture to be addressed in this series is that of lashes.
The Bible explicitly prohibits inhumane or degrading corporal punishments.
The Bible undeniably allows for limited torture to be employed in criminal punishment, but this torture is undeniably far less frequent and far less severe than the torture often used within pagan legal systems from the same era. The primary type of torture allowed is flogging, a type of corporal punishment where someone strikes a male or female criminal with a whip. Two specific passages within Mosaic Law permit this and also provide objective moral limitations on the extent and purpose of such flogging.
Exodus 21:20--"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished . . ."
Deuteronomy 25:1-3--"When men have a dispute, they are to take it to court and the judges will decide the case, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty. If the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall make him lie down and have him flogged with the number of lashes his crime deserves, but he must not give him more than forty lashes. If he is flogged more than that, your brother will be degraded in your eyes."
These two passages describe at least 9 principles for the use and regulation of physical flogging:
"1. No one can be flogged without first being rightly convicted on the honest testimony of two or three witnesses and found guilty. Not only is this emphasized elsewhere (Deuteronomy 19:15), but the criminal must be brought "to court" for the judges to appropriately sentence him or her.
2. Lashes can only be administered on the back because the recipient will "lie down" on the ground, not on the face, the genitals, or other sensitive parts of the offender's anatomy.
3. The judge must be present at all times during the infliction of the punishment, as it must occur "in his presence". This measure alone would allow the judge to detect and stop any potential abuse or deviation from his sentence, whether a smaller or larger amount of lashes.
4. The number of lashes must correspond to the severity of the crime, as the offender can only receive the number that "his crime deserves".
5. Not a single stroke over forty is allowed under any circumstances period, because otherwise the recipient will be "degraded in your eyes". Cruelty and degradation are not the objective of punishment, nor does God ever allow them to be. Since all people are made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27), most human rights extend to criminals. A common misconception teaches that use of a whip beyond forty lashes would kill the victim, but that is ridiculous. Forty sadistic lashes with a Roman cat o' nine tails might kill someone, but the Jewish methods would not. Also, since we have historical confirmation . . . that Egypt, Rome, and Assyria routinely meted out sentences of up to hundreds of lashes, we know that exceeding forty strikes obviously does not have to kill someone--it will instead inflict astonishing degrees of pain.
6. The man or woman being flogged is still considered a part of the community, as even during the punishment the government agents must still view the offender or as their "brother" or sister. The goal is to fulfill justice and then reconcile the the man or woman back to society.
7. Jewish slaves could be punished corporally with a rod by their masters if they had committed a genuine offense, but if a master accidentally killed a slave through this, "he must be punished". Flogging was not employed as a method of administering the death penalty; that could be one of the cruelest and most agonizing types of deaths imaginable. Flogging is not paired with or used prior to execution but is an entirely separate punishment.
8. There is no forced nudity or any other kind of sexual or social humiliation as part of the penalty.
9. Corporal punishment is not to be inflicted solely on males, as societies have sometimes chosen. To limit certain types of physical punishment to one gender and exempt the other is blatantly sexist and unjust. Either both men and women can deserve flogging or neither gender can deserve flogging, but let's not tolerate the nonsense cultural construct which says that men can strike men and women can hit men but a woman can't be struck [1]."
Other than limited flogging, the only physical punishment of any kind one can find in Mosaic Law is permanent loss of body parts: 1) the amputation of limbs for permanent injuries [2] to the limbs of others and 2) the removal of a woman's hand for seizing the penis of a male opponent in a fight. Even this small allowance for amputations contrasts with the astonishing frequency of such punishments in other ancient legal codes, and even the few passages prescribing mutilation in two circumstances are highly controversial, as people have debated whether or not they were translated correctly or applied literally. These mutilations will be the subject of the next post in this series.
Never did God authorize use of the rack, the cat o' nine tails, waterboarding, the heretic's fork, flaying of the skin, sexual assault, or any of the torture methods used by ancient pagan and modern societies besides a certain style of flogging and occasional amputations. All permissible physical torture was to only occur if someone had been rightfully convicted of a qualifying crime and even then only explicitly within inflexible ethical boundaries defined in places scattered throughout Mosaic Law. Flogging in and of itself, apart from use of instruments like the cat o' nine tails and the massive quantities of lashes given in some ancient countries, is perhaps already the most humane method of punitive torture, and Exodus and Deuteronomy regulate this so that it was never conducted in an inhumane manner.
Yes, the Bible allows the physical torture of flogging, but this does not mean what many may assume, as this allowance both enables a form of punishment which can effectively deter crime while legislating the Deuteronomic version of America's 8th Amendment.
[1]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/corporal-punishment-part-1.html
[2]. Non-permanent injuries were strictly punished with financial damages (Exodus 21:18-19, 21:22). Since the laws addressing minor batteries or non-permanent injuries clearly call for monetary compensation and yet other passages prescribe "eye for eye" or "hand for hand" (Exodus 21:23-25, Leviticus 24:19-21, Deuteronomy 19:21) punishment, people sometimes struggle to determine if all injuries were punished with a mandatory compensatory payment to the victim (the position of the ancient Jewish rabbis) or if there was only a specific class of injury that was punished by use of physical Lex Talionis ("eye for eye"). The clear but uncommon answer is that those who inflicted minor assaults and non-permanent injuries on others were legally required to pay sufficient damages to their victims but those who permanently injured others through mutilation were to be identically injured in a permanent way, hence why some verses prescribe the loss of a hand for the loss of a hand and others prescribe monetary damages. The permanence of the injury determined which punishment would be inflicted, either financial loss or physical mutilation, with Exodus 21:23 dividing between these two categories.
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