Exodus - Lesson 23

Dr. Carmen Imes 
Exodus 
OT605-23
Personal Injury Laws
Lesson Transcript

All right, so in the previous session we looked at the laws regulating indentured servitude in ancient Israel, and we saw that the if-then nature of the law, the casuistic law, means that this is not presenting God's ideal, but it's putting parameters to restrain the power of the powerful so that they don't use it to exploit the vulnerable. And we're going to see that same theme coming up in the next set of laws that we're looking at. So we're picking things up in chapter 21, verse 12, and what you'll notice is that in these first verses, maybe up through verse 26, there is another chiasm.

I guess I'm the chiasm lady. I love finding these literary designs in Exodus where clearly things have been arranged to make a point. And so the first section involves striking someone.

So all of these, this whole section that includes the chiasm, relates to personal injuries, and it's going to regulate different forms of injury. But it will begin with someone who strikes someone else and it results in death, and then the corresponding section at the end will be striking that does not result in death. And inside of that, there's attacking father and mother and then cursing father and mother, and in the very center is regulations about kidnapping.

So we'll read them, we'll slow down and read them and see what they have to offer us. Verse 12, anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death. However, if it's not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate.

But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death. So the principle here is that life is sacred, that anyone who takes the life of another is forfeiting their own life. Now, this is not supposed to prompt revenge killing, because we've already seen in the Ten Commandments that murder is prohibited.

One-on-one, one person taking vengeance on another is not allowed. The community as a whole is supposed to put someone to death if they're in violation of this command. But it's wonderful that God includes here instructions about what if it's not done intentionally, because accidental death is something that happens in our world.

And if someone accidentally kills someone, then there's a plan for how to make sure that that death is not avenged. So they're to flee to a place God will designate. And we'll later see in the Torah that God will set up certain cities in Canaan where there's an altar and it's a city of refuge.

So someone can flee to that city and kneel down and grab the corner or the horn of the altar and beg for mercy. And by going there, they're indicating, I did not mean to kill someone. But then there's another line here saying that if someone schemes and kills someone deliberately, then running to the city of refuge and grabbing onto the horn of the altar does not absolve them of guilt.

So there's a sense here that the issue needs to be adjudicated, that it needs to be investigated to find out if this was intentional or not. And then it seems maybe a bit random to have anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death. But we're in a string of laws that evoke or invoke the death penalty.

And so it's, if you strike anyone and kill them, you're to be put to death. If you would so much as attack your father and mother, then you are to be put to death. This would be completely at odds with honoring your parents as we're told to do in the Ten Commandments.

Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death. Human trafficking is absolutely strictly outlawed. No matter whether the person is a Hebrew or a foreigner, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper's possession.

So if you kidnap someone and then sell them, you can't be like, well, they're gone. I'm not guilty anymore. That's not getting away with it.

If it's been shown that you kidnapped someone and sold them, then that evokes the death penalty. The Bible is very deliberate about what gets a death penalty. There's never a death penalty for a property crime.

It's always one having to do with the life of a human being or with the worship of false gods, which is also taken very seriously, a violation of the covenant with Yahweh. Verse 17, anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death because to curse them is the equivalent of attacking them with the purpose of undermining and killing them. And then finally, we have the matching section about striking that doesn't result in death.

If people quarrel and one person hits another with a stone or with their fist or with anything else, frankly, and the victim does not die but is confined to bed, so they're injured enough that they have to be in bed for a while recovering, the one who struck the blow will not be held liable if the other can get up and walk around outside with a staff. In other words, if you hurt someone so severely that they have to have a period of recovery in bed but they're able to get up and walk around, then there's no death penalty because they did not die. However, the guilty party must pay the injured person for any loss of time and see that the victim is completely healed.

So it becomes the attacker's responsibility to make up for lost wages and to help in the healing process, whatever costs are incurred there. That brings us to verse 20, which is also a set of laws or instructions about injury, but now the situation is different because it's dealing with a servant rather than a fellow citizen of a free person. So again, as we saw with the so-called slavery laws earlier in the chapter, we're going to see that there are guardrails here as well.

So reading from my own translation here, if a man strikes his evid or his amah, so that's his male servant or female servant, these are indentured servants, with a rod and he dies under his hand, he shall surely be avenged. This is really remarkable because what this means is if an owner, if a homeowner or a head of household strikes his servant and they die, he still incurs the death penalty just as he would have if they were free. So he shall surely be avenged indicates that he's still under the death penalty.

However, if after a day or two days he stands up, that is the one who was attacked stands up, he shall not be avenged for it is his silver. Now in the NIV this reads, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two since the slave is their property. This translation makes me cringe because again human trafficking is prohibited, servitude is for is temporary, so I don't think it's right to say the slave, I don't think slave is the right translation and I don't think property is the right way to describe him.

So what I'm giving you here is a more woodenly literal translation of the Hebrew, he shall not be avenged for it is his silver. So if we read this in light of the section we just read above where if you hit, if you strike someone and kill them you are guilty and you need to die, but if you strike someone and injure them then you're just responsible to pay for their lost wages. That's now being set into a context of a master-slave relationship and we find that if you strike a slave and he dies you are guilty and have to forfeit your own life, but if it's just an injury and there's lost time, what do you do? This person, this servant is not being paid wages because they're working off a debt, so the lost time is actually the master's own lost time.

He's the one who's losing out when his servant is unable to get up and work for him and so I think what it means here when it says he shall not be avenged it means you don't, there's no death penalty if he hasn't killed him, but he also doesn't have to pay a fee to somebody for the lost time because he'd be paying a fee to himself since the labor belongs to him at this period of time. So it's not saying the person is his property, but it is his silver is indicating it's a metaphorical way of indicating the labor done by this person is his own gain and so there's no need to pay it off. So again there's a death penalty for killing a servant, the loss of work is borne by the master himself since he's responsible for the injury, he can't add this to the debt of the servant, he's the one who's liable for the lost time.

So the point is that there's no need to enact an eye for an eye by punishing the master because the master has already borne the loss of his servant's labor as the servant recovered. This is I think an important conversation to have because you could just be like reading through this on a you know quick bible read through skimming through and go what? God condones slavery and you're allowed to beat your slave and it's his property? Like there's all sorts of things that heap up here but when we slow down and consider the cultural context and what's really going on in this the literary design of these being put side by side I think a different picture emerges. Some more special cases of injury in verses starting in 20 which we've already read up through 27.

So let's read beginning in verse 22 since we've already done 20 and 21. If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there's no serious injury the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. So the principle here is injury demands a fine even if that injury is a is a baby who is yet unborn.

There's a value both to the woman and to her unborn child. There's some debate about how to translate this. Some read this as she gives birth prematurely and it's a miscarriage and then he's just being fined.

I think it's possible that it's saying she gives birth and the child lives therefore there's just a fine. It's not a life for life. He doesn't incur the death penalty for that but if there is serious injury and I would say either to the woman or to her unborn child then you are to take life for life eye for eye tooth for tooth hand for hand foot for foot burn for burn wound for wound bruise for bruise.

And this is the classic eye for an eye tooth for a tooth passage in the bible that is sometimes referred to by its latin designation lex talionis where the punishment fits the crime. And sometimes people construe this as if it's saying if someone hurts you you have to hurt him back and if someone hurts you again you hurt him back but that's actually not what's happening here. This statement is actually restraining the the kind of punishment that can happen.

If you burn someone that's not the cause for the death penalty. You can't take someone's life who injured someone else. The punishment needs to be equally as weighty as the crime and not weightier than that.

And so here if there's serious injury then there's life for life if someone dies but if it's less than that then the person needs to bear the brunt of the kind of injury that they've committed. So this is reducing punishment not expanding it. It's not trying to institute a cycle of vengeance.

And we then we get some more examples of this and I love this one. An owner who hits a male or female evid in the eye and destroys it, that is they cause the servant to go blind in their eye, then they must let the slave go free to compensate for the eye. So this is not life for life and there's no need to blind the master but if you are beating your servant sometimes physical force may need to be used.

Physical force is allowed but if the physical force causes permanent injury then your servant gets to go free because you have proven that you are not a worthy master. And if an owner who and an owner who knocks out the tooth of a male or female slave must let the slave go free. Again servant must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth.

So the body of a servant does not belong to the master. They are still their own person. They still retain dignity.

The master can't do to them whatever they want to do. All of these laws about injury are drawing on a principle that was expressed back in Genesis chapter 9 verse 6. After the flood when God releases Noah and the animals into the earth he explains whoever sheds human blood by humans shall their blood be shed. That's instituting the death penalty for cases of murder and then the reason for that is given.

For in the image of God has God made mankind. Because humans are the image of God we can't just go around picking off the people we don't like. We have to treat every single human being with dignity whether they are employees or employers whether they are neighbors or foreigners.

Every human being's life is precious and that's the principle that underlines these laws. Now I don't know about you but when I you know now that we're knee-deep in the covenant code it's worth just noticing these are still really valuable laws. The principles behind them work in our society today.

We need to not just be so quick to dismiss them as outdated. We can learn what matters to God by paying attention to these laws. A number of years ago when when I was still in college my husband and I lived just across the street from our university in some apartments and one day we were out playing in the common area between the apartments and the guy in the apartment next door was outside grilling some some meat for dinner and we struck up a conversation and he found out that we were students at the local bible college and he was like you know I sure wish there was a dot-com bible and I said what do you mean and he says well you know it's just like the laws in the bible are so outdated they don't have anything to say about this internet age and there's all these new things for us to think about that they don't offer us any help with.

I said funny you should say that because I was just hanging out in the laws of and I think it was Deuteronomy at the time but I was hanging out in the laws of Deuteronomy that match the ones we're about to read in exodus 21 about the goring ox or the goring bull. I said you know last week I saw on the news a story about a pit bull and this pit bull attacked a child and mauled it like mauled the child so that it had permanent injuries to its face and what absolutely rankled me about that story is that the pit bull had done this before it had done this before and somehow the owner had not put it to death and had not kept it restrained so another child was permanently injured. I said that's precisely the thing that the laws in the old testament are trying to prohibit if you're a if you're an owner of an animal and your animal kills someone then that animal must die and if you refuse to put it to death then you're liable if they do it again and I think that's the kind of wisdom that we need as we think about how to adjudicate animal ownership in a modern world where we have pets like pit bulls if they go if they run amok then the owner should be held responsible. 

So let's let's go ahead and read this and you can just begin to imagine what are all the ways that we might live this out in our culture so we'll pick it up in verse 28 of exodus 21 if a bull gores a man or woman to death the bull is to be stoned to death this again draws on that principle from exodus 9 6 because it's not just humans who kill humans who are liable and need to be put to death it's also animals who kill humans are liable human life is sacred so the bull is to be stoned to death and its meat must not be eaten so there's no human benefit from the from the killing of this bull but the owner of the bull will not be held responsible it's just a one-time thing.

 If however the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman the bull is to be stoned and its owner is also to be put to death this is serious business this means i'm responsible not only for my own actions but for the actions of any animals that i possess if i know that my animal is violent and dangerous then it's my responsibility to put it to death if it's killed someone or keep it penned up so that it can't get at anyone and if i don't do that then i'm liable. 

It's also worth noting that if it kills a man or woman, men are not more valuable than women. The lives of men are not more valuable than the lives of women. Either death is to be avenged. Verse 30, however if payment is demanded the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded this is beautiful because what this indicates is that the death penalty is not a fixed thing. You don't have to kill the owner of the bull if this happens the family that's been affected by it could decide we're not going to press charges we don't want you to be put to death because that doesn't help anything. We will allow you to pay a fine instead. 

So this introduces a principle that's true of all the biblical laws what we get with the penalty is the most severe form of the penalty but it doesn't mean that you're locked into meeting out that penalty if somebody violates the law. It's just the outer limit of the penalty and you may show grace or you may have another more lenient way of dealing with it. You need to take it seriously but it doesn't have to be the death penalty. 

Verse 31, this law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter. So just to clarify, we're not talking about only adults whose lives matter. It's also children whose lives matter and they need to be taken seriously. If the bull gores a male or female servant the owner must pay 30 shekels of silver to the master of the servant and the bull is to be stoned to death. In other words there's a double loss here. Not only is it a human who needs to be avenged because this person has died but it's also a financial loss to the one who they were contracted to work for, and so there's also a fine of 30 shekels of silver to the master. So this implies that this is the first time this has happened. 

So if you own a bull and it gores someone to death, normally the bull is to be stoned to death and it's all done. But if that first time offense is of a male or female servant then the bull has to be put to death and a fine has to be paid to the master who's now lost the labor of those who were contracted to work for him. This doesn't mean that that slaves are viewed or servants are viewed as less valuable. This is that first offense if an ox that or a bull that has had a habit of goring gores and kills a servant then we kick back to that previous law in verse 29. The owner knows about this and hasn't done anything about it then he also receives the death penalty. So in that case you'd have to kill the bull he'd have to pay a fine and then he would be put to death. So the the problems heap up. So it's actually more expensive and more problematic for the bull to kill a servant because there's multiple layers of responsibility. 

These are i think fascinating because um they they talk to us about uh the responsibility for our treatment not only our treatment of others but how well others fare when they're on our property or when they're near us and uh the animals that we possess. 

And then we have some related uh laws that have to do with animals. Verse 33, if anyone uncovers a pit or digs one and fails to cover it and an ox or donkey falls into it the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange. So if you're going to leave a gaping hole in the ground and someone else's animal dies in by falling into that then you are responsible you have to pay them for that animal. You can have it so if it's edible you're allowed to eat the meat but you owe the full amount to the owner because it's your fault that it died. You need to take care of the the environment so that people don't get injured on your property. 

Verse 35, if anyone's bull injures someone else's bull and it dies so now we're talking about injury to animals either in a pit or now from another animal if a bull injures someone else's bull and it dies the two parties are to sell the live one and divide both the money and the dead animal equally. Isn't that interesting. So this is again a first-time offense this bull kills the other bull so there's there's not an a disproportionate weight or of responsibility borne by the ones the one whose bull did the goring because this hasn't happened before. It's a first-time offense so they sell the they sell the live one split the money and they each get half of the dead one the meat of the dead one. So they mostly haven't lost haven't had any great loss. 

However if it was known that the bull had the habit of goring yet the owner did not keep it penned up the owner must pay animal for animal and take the dead animal in exchange. So again, if there's a pattern here then you're responsible to do something about it. You can't just say oh i didn't you know not my thing. 

This has been all about personal injuries caused by humans or caused by animals or injuries to animals but i can think of how in principle these things can be applied more broadly. If you have a set of stairs on your property and you know that one of the steps is rotted through and you don't do anything about it and somebody is injured walking down your stairs, or if you have a hand railing that's wobbly and you don't take care of it and someone falls to their death this is on you. It's your responsibility to make the environment safe for those who come on your property. We'll get an expansion in that direction in the book of Deuteronomy where Deuteronomy says you have to when you're building a house you need to put a parapet or a like a low fence around the roof line. Because in those days they had flat roofs and so they didn't want anyone to be guilty of blood guilt by letting someone fall off the roof. So that's an adaptation of this same principle to property law because the homeowner is responsible for making their property safe for other people. 

Now my house that my husband and i own a house in southern California and the roof is like this and we're very rarely up on it, although we did climb up there to watch fireworks on the fourth of july last year but but it's not the sort of place that people hang out. So it's okay that we don't have a railing around it. But if we had a flat roof like people did in ancient israel and they do a lot of living up there sleeping maybe threshing grain maybe putting out clothes to dry maybe cooking then it should have a low wall around it so that nobody accidentally falls to their death. 

So the the overall principle is the value of human life and the importance of caring for one another and caring for the well-being of other people. 

Any questions? 

If we were to apply the the verses as they're written about attacking your father or mother or cursing them and being put to death as a result of that it in our culture we would have a lot of people susceptible to that yeah so how do we look at? 

There's been a cultural shift in in ancient Israel it's a strong honor shame culture so to bring dishonor to your parents is a huge problem. It would be the it would be the equivalent of a social death. If you went around bad-mouthing your parents it would be a kind of false witness that would undercut their standing in society so it's not a physical death but it's a kind of social death that that ruins their reputation and probably that's factoring in here. I could say something about my parents that's dishonoring and it wouldn't affect their lives because my parents live in another state and we're far apart from each other. i'm not advocating that we do that but i do think we're in a different kind of social context it's not an honor shame context and it's not a close-knit society where we're living in the same household. Some of us do live with with extended family and in those cases maybe this is a closer match but i think this probably also harkens back to that command from the 10 commandments about honoring your parents and it's about passing on their faith. So if you are attacking them or cursing them then you're then that implies that you're also doing away with their worship of Yahweh and striking out on your own which is unacceptable