Should you punish people with an eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Leviticus 24:19-20 codifies the *lex talionis* — "breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth" — in a Priestly legal block (Lev 24:17-22) that also appears at Exodus 21:23-25 and Deuteronomy 19:21. Matthew 5:38-39 places Jesus in the rhetorical posture of citing that statute by name and then countermanding it: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye... But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil." The tension is whether Jesus abolishes, qualifies, or transcends a written Torah command.

The standard apologetic harmonization, deployed by R. T. France, D. A. Carson, and Craig Blomberg, distinguishes the statute's domain. On this reading Leviticus 24 was always a courtroom standard governing proportional judicial penalty — and, crucially, a *limiting* principle that capped retribution at parity rather than licensing escalation — while Jesus targets its misuse as a charter for private vengeance. France's NICNT *Matthew* develops this in detail; Matthew Henry was making the same move three centuries earlier. The harmonization has real grounding in the Hebrew and comparative material. Jacob Milgrom and Bernard Jackson both argue that talionic formulae in Israelite law functioned to limit blood-feud escalation, and that in practice compensation was frequently monetary rather than literal mutilation. The cuneiform parallels confirm the pattern: in the Laws of Hammurabi (§§196-201) talion applies between social equals but converts to fixed payments across class lines, and the Hittite Laws operate almost entirely through compensation. Raymond Westbrook's comparative work treats the talionic clause as a ceiling on vengeance, not a mandate to maim. So Jesus' Matthean correction has a genuine target if first-century hearers were extending the statute to personal retaliation.

Where the harmonization runs short is the rhetorical architecture of Matthew 5. The six antitheses (5:21-48) are structured "You have heard that it was said... but I say unto you," and the thing said is the Torah text itself — "an eye for an eye" is Scripture, not a rabbinic gloss the evangelist flags as error. Hans Dieter Betz, in his Hermeneia *The Sermon on the Mount*, argues the antitheses do not merely correct misinterpretation; they advance a "higher righteousness" (5:20) that in places revises the Torah's plain demand. Ulrich Luz, in his Hermeneia *Matthew*, concedes that 5:38-39 raises a genuine question of whether Jesus fulfills or supersedes, and notes the church has negotiated that ambiguity since the second century. The reception history makes the point concrete: Marcion read the antitheses as Jesus replacing the inferior law of the Creator; the Reformers read them as Jesus intensifying and internalizing it. Both readings are textually defensible, which is itself evidence that the text does not settle the matter cleanly.

The sharper difficulty is internal to Matthew. Just twenty verses earlier, 5:17-18 has Jesus declare he came not to abolish (*katalysai*) the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill (*plērōsai*) them, insisting not one jot or tittle will pass away. The antitheses then appear to do precisely what 5:17 disavows — at least with the divorce permission (5:31-32, against Deut 24:1-4) and the talion. Davies and Allison, in their ICC *Matthew*, treat "fulfill" as Jesus bringing the Law to its intended eschatological completion, which absorbs some of the tension; but "resist not evil" plus "turn the other cheek" relocates the moral standard somewhere the talionic ceiling never went — from limiting retaliation to renouncing it. That is not a clarification of Leviticus 24 but a transposition of the whole question from justice to non-resistance.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable. The civil-versus-personal distinction genuinely softens the surface clash, and the limiting-principle reading of Leviticus is sound. But the antithetical form, the direct citation of the Torah statute, and the unresolved tension with Matthew 5:17-18 mean Jesus is best read as moving the ethical bar, not merely restating where Moses set it.