Eye For An Eye

          If a man takes the life of any human being, he shall surely be put to death. The one who takes the life of an animal shall make it good, life for life. If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; just as he has injured a man, so it shall be inflicted on him. (Leviticus 24:17-20)

          The Trojan war was fought, we are told, because a king from one city ran off with the wife of the king of another city. The result of his lust, her adultery, and the first husband’s bruised ego were the deaths of possibly as many as 70,000 people. This wasn’t and isn’t unusual. In ancient times, a slap on the face might lead to the slaughter of a family or a city.
          So how do you measure individual pain? If we both experience the same injury – say, a sprained ankle. Does that mean we both feel exactly the same amount of pain? How could we possibly tell? If you have a high tolerance for pain (or are taking a pain med that I’m not) you might say your pain is at a 3 on the scale of one-to-ten. Since I’m a wimp, I might say it’s 7 (leaving room for kidney stones, childbirth, and maybe a lost love to be considered worse – after all, emotional injuries can hurt just as much as physical.) Given the number of times I’ve sprained ankles, it’s not likely, but how can we objectively measure how much pain someone is experiencing?
          Harder still, how do we put a value on that pain? Millions of people suffered as slaves. How can we possibly begin to put a financial or another statistical figure on that? Then there are the accusations of further abuses after slavery was abolished, including claims of “systemic racism” today. How does one measure the pain of being pulled over for “driving while Black”? Is that pain less if the driver is alone in the car? Or greater? 
          Scripture limits us to an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. We aren’t permitted to follow the practice of killing the family of the man who embarrassed us. There is a place in the Bible where it describes the penalty for a crime as being equal to the price of the labor if someone had been hired to do it. Who gets the recompense? Is it divided among the descendants of the slaves, or does each descendant of each slave get the full compensation? Do we calculate it in terms of the money of the time period in which each slaved lived, or in today’s dollars? Is it in terms of the number of years slavery was practiced? Is the money only collected from descendants of those who owned slaves? And what happens when the debt is technically paid? Will those who have been receiving recompense then put out their hand and befriend the person he’s been punishing for the last 5, 50, or 500 years? And will those who have been being punished for something they never did, say that there is no debt owed to them?
     This is probably part of the reason that God put restrictions. There is no way to truly evaluate what punishment is enough for pain that’s been inflicted.  It can never be enough. There is no amount of money, no amount of contrition that will ever make up for what was done to the slaves. There is no price that will make up for the unfairness that humans show to one another. More often than not, those who have been hurt aren’t really interested in fairness or justice. They want revenge. And those from whom revenge is extracted don’t tend to shrug their shoulders and say the debt was owed – they want revenge for the pain caused to them, and the cycle continues.
          Another likely reason that God restricts penalties to “an eye for an eye” is that while we fallen humans seem to have a limited capacity to love, we have an unlimited capacity to hate. If you hate to the level of “an eye for an eye,” in hating, you become just as evil, just as hateful, just as hurtful as the one(s) you hate. God didn’t give us the “eye for an eye” limit to spare the hated. He gave it to spare the hater.