The phrase "life for life" is less used than the phrase "eye for eye," yet both are found in Mosaic Law. The false extrapolation of "eye for eye" to actions that have nothing to do with Lex Talionis is one of the most severe misunderstandings of Biblical ethics that inevitably involves pure hypocrisy, with "life for life" almost never getting cited as supposed justification for, say, raping rapists or stealing from thieves in the misapplied way "eye for eye" is taken out of its strict context of nonsexual assault leading to permanent or extreme injury (contrast this with how Exodus 21:18-19 says to handle lesser assaults, even assaults with an object like a stone).
Life for life simply means murdering someone forfeits a person's right to not be killed--just as other Biblical capital offenses like kidnapping, adultery, or rape do. It does not even mean that the execution must always take the same form as the method of murder, both because this is not part of the prescription and because some forms of killing like flogging someone to death with more than 40 lashes would violate separate commands and therefore disproves the idea that "life for life" means people must be tortured to death. This is perhaps also because life for life is not even about murder having some special status that deserves death; after all, multiple other sins do as well according to Mosaic Law.
One way this could be true that might be obvious to people who actually think about the issue without assumptions is that capital punishment might be what all evils past a certain extent of depravity deserve, and murder happens to fall past that line along with certain other actions. It is not necessarily about killing people who murder others in order to enforce Lex Talionis for its own sake. Perhaps even if the Bible did not say that permanent injuries inflicted during assaults make someone deserve the same injuries as is the core of Lex Talionis, it would still prescribe execution for murder for this reason.
It is at least clear that someone's life is not taken for murder just because every unjust act towards a person deserves the same act in return. In fact, the Bible very blatantly rejects this because Lex Talionis, while entirely literal, does not apply to actions like rape that can actually be far worse than mere murder. Life for life cannot be soundly extrapolated to mean rape for rape, theft for theft, adultery for adultery, slander for slander, more than forty lashes for more than forty lashes, and so on, because Lex Talionis specifically does not apply in these cases according to the limited scope of verses like Exodus 21:23-24 and the fact that these other acts are individually prohibited or given different punishments.
All of these things are true at once about Biblical morality. Mosaic Law teaches a literal Lex Talionis that is loosely associated with capital punishment for murder while plenty of extreme tortures (like flogging beyond 40 lashes) and acts of sexual assault are completely separate from "eye for eye" or "life for life" penalties (see Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and 25:11-12 for examples of the latter). Most Christians just neither care enough about the moral issues of justice they claim to be invested in nor have personally developed the alignment with reason necessary to understand this kind of nuance. The Bible says all it needs to for someone to put elements of Mosaic Law together and realize every single one of these things with the light of deductive reasoning free of assumptions.
No comments:
Post a Comment