Like other punishments prescribed in Mosaic Law, the physical mutilations associated with Lex Talionis, the set of "eye for eye" laws, are only called for in very particular scenarios. They cannot be legitimately said to summarize the Torah's criminal justice laws. While Lex Talionis is often not even referenced due to a popular misunderstanding of the words of Jesus in Matthew 5 (since Jesus did not overturn the Torah's prohibition of murder and adultery when he alluded to them earlier in the same chapter, consistency demands that Jesus did not overturn Lex Talionis by simply telling people to "turn the other cheek"), many interpretations of the Bible's "eye for eye" penalty treat mirror punishments as if they are the standard punishments of Mosaic Law. However, mirror punishment is not the norm in Biblical laws, and to invoke Lex Talionis where the Bible does not is only to embrace utter hypocrisy.
The Biblical punishments for a host of criminal sins have absolutely nothing to do with Lex Talionis, yet this fact, which can be demonstrated by many different examples, is almost always left out of public discussions about the Biblical verses prescribing "eye for eye" penalties. It is clear that the Bible does prescribe a literal version of Lex Talionis (that is, mirror physical injury is the punishment) in a very specific set of cases involving assault that results in permanent injury or disfigurement, but it is also clear that the Bible opposes Lex Talionis in other contexts. Mosaic Law does not prescribe Lex Talionis in most cases, but it does require a literal "eye for eye" sentence when it does.
Sins like rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), seizing someone's genitals in an act of assault (Deuteronomy 25:11-12), arson (Exodus 22:6), kidnapping (Exodus 21:16), assault with no permanent injury (Exodus 21:18-19, 22), assault (however minor) of one's parents (Exodus 21:15), infliction of permanent injury on one's servant (Exodus 21:26-27), inflicting more than 40 lashes (Deuteronomy 25:1-3), and criminal slander (Deuteronomy 19:16-19) are some key examples of actions which it would be Biblically unjust to inflict on an offender even if he or she did them to someone else. Each of these things is prohibited in itself or assigned a non-mirror punishment. There is no actual ambiguity as to how the Bible does not prescribe "eye for eye" punishments for all sins with a criminal status.
As any observant and rational person could discover by reading through Mosaic Law on their own, Lex Talionis is irrelevant to the vast majority of Biblical crimes. Of course, most readers of the Bible are neither observant nor intelligent, regardless of what worldview they claim to represent. The small handful of verses prescribing Lex Talionis for a similarly small range of crimes are often ignored completely, misapplied to crimes other than the ones mentioned, or mistaken for verses that are using the language of Lex Talionis to always describe financial damages to victims (as apologist Paul Copan pretends).
The Biblical text completely rejects all three of these stances on the matter. Unfortunately, they are the only three approaches to Lex Talionis that most people will likely know of, partly because they are so common and partly because of intellectual apathy or incompetence on their own parts. It is vital for anyone who recognizes the centrality of criminal justice in Biblical ethics to not err to the left or to the right in understanding Lex Talionis and its very limited role in Mosaic Law. Lex Talionis might be a relatively minor part of Biblical morality, but misconceptions of it are anything but minor.
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