A Bull With A Habit Of Goring

There are parts of Yahweh's laws that deal with the right treatment of animals by humans, including the command of Deuteronomy 25:4 to not muzzle an ox while it is treading grain.  Others are about how humans are to treat other people indirectly by means of their animals.  Exodus 21:28-32 falls in this category.  Explaining what to do in the case of a bull that gores someone to death both without precedent and when it has gored someone before (non-fatally), these verses are connected with the higher value of humans than animals (compare Exodus 21:28-32 with 35-36), the degrees of moral responsibility someone has for deaths brought about by their pets or farm animals, and the difference between negligence and murder.

In verse 28, the owner is not treated as responsible if the beast kills a man or woman spontaneously or unexpectedly.  They would have had no reason to anticipate the attack.  If, on the contrary, the animal has already attacked someone so that it has a habit of doing so (21:29), warnings have been given by others if the owner did not witness the event(s), and the owner does not pen the bull up in order to prevent a likely continuation of that behavior, it is not only the bull that is to be killed, which is about pragmatically keeping humans safe instead of punishing the animal for moral wrongdoing.  The human owner is to be executed for his or her severe negligence that led to the very gratuitous loss of human life.

The possession of bulls and other such animals is more limited in the likes of modern America to agricultural land or private ranches.  Many residents of my country will likely never own bovine animals that have the potential to suddenly or habitually gore someone to death (or kill them in some other way).  This law is not strictly about bulls, though, but about domesticated animals that kill people.  Someone with, say, a vicious dog that has attacked a child sins if they do not contain their pet, and if it kills a person, they would by necessity deserve to be put to death if Exodus 21:28-29's obligations exist.  It would follow by logical necessity that the same obligations apply with other animals.

In this situation, there is still a permitted escape for the negligent owner: they can pay an unspecified amount of money to not be executed (21:30).  This differentiates how murder and the mishandling of a dangerous animal are addressed by the Torah even more.  For murder, no payment of money is to be accepted in place of the murderer's life (Numbers 35:31).  He or she must be killed (Exodus 22:12-14).  The offense of Exodus 21:29 is negligence that led to another person's death.  It is not murder unless the owner intended for someone else to perish thanks to the beast.  As for the death of a servant, money is to be paid to the master/mistress of the deceased slave, but the animal is still to be killed (21:32), and, as mandated by verse 29, the owner of the animal must still be executed if their creature had a habit of goring.

Since Exodus 21, alongside addressing miscellaneous physical assaults and the varying punishments justice requires (and "eye for eye" is prescribed only for one of these, not for Exodus 21:15, 18-19, 22, or 26-27), deals with cases of murder and manslaughter (Exodus 21:12-14, 20-21), detailing the obligations around holding dangerous animals is rather relevant here.  The text does not have to talk of animals beyond bulls to establish far more than merely how to handle an bull with a habit of goring people.  As with many things in Mosaic Law, Exodus 21:28-29 affirms by the direct wording and by logical extension more than just the obligations to follow in one scenario only.  It touches on a great deal about how humans are to treat each other and how animals are to be confined or even killed for the sake of human safety.