Sunday, February 16, 2025

Payment For A Murderer's Life

As Satan says in Job 2:4, cynically objecting to Job's integrity when God allows tragedy to befall his life circumstances but not his own bodily health, a person might give all they have to save their own life.  The way they might cherish their possessions might not stop them from offering all that belongs to them if they think it will extend their life in a given situation.  However much wealth someone has, they are never to be allowed to buy their way out of execution for murder.  This is what Numbers 35:31 emphasizes.  He or she deserves to die, and no "ransom" is to be accepted to avert the penalty.

Shortly after murder is mentioned in the Decalogue, Exodus 21:12-14 says that, although accidental killing (sometimes colloquially called manslaughter) is not to be met with the death penalty, murder, the premeditated or spontaneous killing of a human being for reasons besides an accident, justice, or self-defense, deserves capital punishment.  Numbers 35 repeats this information while adding new details.  Among these are the duration for which those who accidentally killed someone are to remain in a city of refuge (until the death of the high priest is what 35:22-28 says) and the direct rejection of a financial ransom to spare a murderer.

While this implies that perhaps some other types of capital sinners might be allowed by God to make payment in exchange for being spared the death penalty, at least one other sin would inflexibly deserve capital punishment in this way: rape.  The sin of having sex with someone against their will is treated very seriously.  In Deuteronomy 22:25-27, rape is said to always be like murder, which both necessitates that the Bible does not teach that only the rape of an engaged/married woman deserves death, as opposed to an unmarried woman or a male victim (by a male or female perpetrator), and that if murder always deserves death, then so does rape.

Murder is not the ultimate sin, after all, either in the sense of being the worst expression of immorality by Biblical standards or the worst thing one could inflict upon another person.  Rape is one such thing that could be far worse, since the victim survives unless the deed is paired with murder and must live with all of their trauma.  A murder victim, if the Bible is true, goes to Sheol, totally unconscious if their mind exists in any form (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), to await their resurrection (Daniel 12:2).  Even if this is not what truly happens to the dead in actuality if this part of Christianity is false, and it is nonetheless something Job longed for during his trials (Job 3:11-19) for the relief from suffering it would bring, the act of rape can still be far worse than mere killing in itself, no matter what hypothetical fate follows death.

Murder is still a Biblically severe sin that is not to be excused.  In the words of Leviticus 24:21, killing someone's animal deserves restitution to be made to the owner, but, contrarily, to kill a person unjustly merits the offender's death.  There is no monetary restitution to be made for taking someone's life.  For even accidental killings, the avenger of blood is still permitted to kill the one responsible without being guilty of murder themself (Numbers 35:26-27).  If this is the gravity of unintentionally ending someone's life in a non-malicious manner, murder is nothing trivial, only trivial by comparison to some of the absolute worst possible forms of torment that one person could impose on another.

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