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In lugnet.build.ancient, Rick Clark wrote:
> In lugnet.build.ancient, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
> > Of course, much more
> > interesting to me is God commnding "eye for eye and tooth for tooth", etc.
>
> That passage is much misunderstood. At the time it was written, it instructed
> a *limit* to retribution, not an encouragement to revenge. Prior to "Eye for
> eye" laws, it was much more common for the people to follow the practice of
> "Death for eye." Yikes!
>
> For more info, see
> <http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_eye_for_an_eye>
If we're just looking at this law as man-made, devoid of any divinely-commanded
or divinely-inspired status, in that case, I don't really find it all that
disturbing or surprising considering when it was written and compared with the
laws/morality of other ancient societies.
What *is* disturbing to me is that people now, in modern times, view this as
God's divine law for humanity. Or rather, what is confusing to me is why modern
people still laud, say, the Ten Commandments while dismissing this and other
much more obviously disturbing laws from the same section of the same book.
But if we're not talking about this from a religious standpoint, your point
about limiting revenge is well taken. That law, at that time, may well have
been an improvement, but it hardly seems like the sort of perfect moral law one
would expect from God (if one believes God to be morally perfect, that is). The
whole point of my illustrating these laws set in modern times is to highlight
how awful and barbaric they are compared to our modern sense of morality.
-Rev. Smith
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament lays down The Law
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| (...) That passage is much misunderstood. At the time it was written, it instructed a to retribution, not an encouragement to revenge. Prior to "Eye for eye" laws, it was much more common for the people to follow the practice of "Death for eye." (...) (21 years ago, 25-Jun-03, to lugnet.build.ancient, FTX)
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