An Eye for an Eye

On this day when horror and revulsion of a so called "revenge" killing is available on the internet, I am reminded of the moral triumph of the much maligned maxim of biblical antiquity:

Leviticus 24
19 If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured.

While many criticize this teaching as a license for revenge, ironically it is a curb on revenge. Today's "revenge" is the kind common to man: you humiliate and torture one of ours and I'll kill one of yours. So goes the human reality of justice (unless we're naive) until the God of Moses breaks in and demands that justice take no more than what was taken.

The bible shows this reality of human justice in Genesis 4:

23 Lamech said to his wives,

"Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed [8] a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.
24 If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times."

Lamech was doing what all of us desire to do, which is go beyond justice and demand a eye for a tooth and a head for a humiliation.

Only the bigoted or the simple miss the power of God's introduction of a divine standard of justice in Leviticus 24. It is to curb the kind of evil that today's "revenge" displays.

Similarly, only the bigoted or the simple would compare the U.S. Military generally or the U.S. culture generally as morally equal to the kinds of butchers that killed Nick Berg. Hewitt quotes a politically motivated bigot. I've met plenty of the simple in my days on campus at CU Boulder and in Venice Beach. Yet ironically, even the morally reprehensible conduct of the idiots that ran Abu Ghraib prison didn't result in anyone being beheaded. That's because those idiots were Americans. And Americans can be idiots but generally we view murdering the innocent as evil, not as a tactic of revenge or jihad.

The grisly murder of Nick Berg may have been a grave mistake by Al-Qaeda because it will possibly make wise the simple with regard to the war that we are already fighting and the relative importance of Abu Ghraib when compared with daily atrocities by islamists in Iraq and Sudan (just for openers). Perhaps this murder will remind the simple of 9-11 and the reality of what we're fighting in the war on Islamic Terror.