Assigning Biblical Lashes

Careful readers of Deuteronomy 25 will notice something rather important about the corporal punishment laws of verses 1-3: though the text outlines extremely specific guidelines for how to inflict floggings, it does not mention any particular offenses which deserve punishment via lashes.  In many cases, the Torah is very specific when it attaches a penalty to a crime, mentioning specific ratios for financial restitution, exact contexts that merit the amputation of a body part, and so on.  As for when to apply corporal punishment, it is unusually silent.

Deuteronomy 25:1-3 does say that lashes should be administered when two parties have some sort of legal dispute and one of them deserves corporal punishment.  These verses are explicitly clear that some offenders can deserve to receive the physical punishment of lashes.  They are clear about which methods of flogging are immoral, yet the situations that call for corporal punishment are left unspoken.  What might these unspecified, miscellaneous crimes be?

Attempts at various capital and non-capital offenses, including attempted kidnapping, attempted murder, and attempted rape, would qualify for punishment with lashes.  If murder is wrong, then so is attempted murder, as an attempt to carry out a sin can only be sinful itself.  The same is true of other offenses listed by the Bible.  Depending on the point at which the perpetrator is caught, the number of lashes for such attempts could range from a small handful to the full 40.

There is a reason that Deuteronomy details the manner in which corporal punishment must be conducted without prescribing lashes for any particular offenses.  This is because, unlike with executions, corporal punishment is meant to be applied--within Biblical boundaries--as needed in the context of random crimes that are not assigned specific penalties by Mosaic Law.  What these crimes are can be easily deduced from the laws that are mentioned.  For example, since the Bible condemns rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27, 1 Corinthians 7:3-5), it follows by necessity that lesser cases of sexual assault are also sinful on the Christian worldview.  As such, sexual assault short of rape would be an example of a miscellaneous crime that deserves somewhere from 1-40 lashes.

Corporal punishment, unlike prison sentences, ends quickly, with the recipient reintegrating into society without wasting years of his or her life in confinement.  If prison was just, God would have prescribed confinement for various crimes instead of lashes.  Nothing about makeshift prisons would have been impossible for the Jews to use as a punishment if God demanded it.  But God did not authorize confinement except when a person is being held for a trial [1].  Those who mistake Biblical flogging laws for a doctrine of cruelty and prison for a humane thing do not understand the nature of either.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-function-of-incarceration-in-mosaic.html