05 June 2014

Biblical Justice

The Bible does not take a reductionist approach to setting forth what kind of justice and retribution God approves of, or has made Biblical law.  Instead, it strives to comprehensively prepare the reader to analyze what is just in the sort of commonly recurring specific situations, great and small, that might just come up in daily life.  Here are a few examples, for future reference:
Keep my statutes. . . . Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.
- Leviticus 19:19 (the King James translation is more specific and only prohibits linen-wool blends).
[W]hile the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.
- Numbers 15:32-36.
When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. 
- Deuteronomy 25:11-12
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die.
- Deuteronomy 21:18-21
Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. 
- 2 Kings 2:23-25 NIV
He [Josiah] executed the priests of the pagan shrines on their own altars, and he burned human bones on the altars to desecrate them.... He did this in obedience to all the laws written in the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had found in the LORD's Temple. Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and soul and strength, obeying all the laws of Moses..
- 2 Kings 23:20-25 NLT

The Bible makes the world of "Game of Thrones" look positively progressive sometimes.

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