An eye for an eye, it turns out, is a pretty good principle for responding to wrongs done to us by enemies.

Proportional Justice

My seminary Christian Ethics professor, the late Dr Paul D Simmons, taught me 45 years ago that the ancient near Eastern principle of “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” ultimately incorporated into Mosaic law and thus Hebrew scripture, was an antidote to limitless retribution. If you knock my tooth out by accident or on purpose I get to knock out one of your teeth as opposed to burning down your tent or killing your mother-in-law. Proportional or retributive justice.

A number of Christians take the eye for an eye principal as step one in figuring out how to respond to violations of our space or property or a person answer suggest that Jesus’ teaching that we should forgive our sisters and brothers 70×7 times, which is an idiom for unlimited forgiveness. The issue is set up literarily in the Gospels with this question asked of Jesus by Peter, How often must I forgive a sister or brother who offends, literally sins against, me? Peter tosses in, 7 times 7 forgives should do the trick, right?

Jesus’ response meant something like: if you’re counting you’re not forgiving.

Did that mean I have to be the only one in the community minus a tooth. Probably. Both Jesus and Peter are probably thinking about sisters and brothers as people in the community, people with whom you have a relationship, people that you’re going to keep on seeing and interacting with. And the sins being referred to are indiscretions, repeatable offenses—not spouse stealing or murder.

Peter might well have asked then, What about the big stuff?

Involuntary manslaughter is one thing. Premeditated murder is entirely something else.

Some deeds should not be forgiven. Holocaust victims should not have forgiven Hitler. The citizens of Gaza should not forgive Netanyahu.

I watched in horror yesterday a news clip of an Israeli police officer sitting on a Palestinian child until that child died. I think the little boy was five years old. He had done nothing to offend the Israeli officer; even if a five-year-old had smarted off she he does not deserve death. But that officer should not be forgiven. He smothered the life out of a child, and that officer deserves the death penalty using the same method he used on the child.

ICE agents who abuse and murder people they have made their prisoners deserve the death penalty using the same causes of death they used to kill their prisoners. Same for those who give the orders for such atrocities. Taking someone’s life is not forgivable.

Alternatively, murderers should all be taken to the same island and left there with other murderers, but never allowed to return to mainstream society. The murderers together are left to figure out their own fates.

I am not at all sure the Dr. Simmons would have approved of my take on this topic. I am also not assured that Jesus would give the go ahead, though I insist he did not have heinous crimes in mind in his conversation with Peter. So I think when lives are being taken, certainly in random violence or a genocidal situation, human beings must actively take matters into their own hands to protect the innocents and stop the madness. Not to be vindictive or to get even, but to honor life.

—David Albert Farmer