Brutal Law

In the bible we see on chapter 21 “life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (21. 24) There was evidence of this same laws and punishments in The Code of Hammurabi. Now for us, these rules seem absurd and too great for the crimes. In that time these were normal. Sadly today we have taken it to the polar opposite; in the Colombia system the penalties are very low for great crimes. It is so that we have to send some of our most dangerous to the United States partly because of their involvement in drugs but also because otherwise they would be free again and back on business in a matter of years. To many of us this isn’t justice and although work is being done to improve the system we still have a great task ahead.

As we continue through these set of laws we can imagine the problems of the time. Laws reflect the problems in our society and here, that is what we see. Although problems were simple and had simple solutions we were very savage and had to do a lot of things before we reach a more “civilized” stage. We can also have a glimpse of the social classes at the time, we can see who wrote this and for whom. When the Moses says, “And if he smite out his manservant’s tooth, or his maidservant’s tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.” Here we can see that although the punishment for tow normal people was “tooth for tooth” for one social class bellow it wasn’t really as great. We can see that this was given to those who were rich on order for them to treat people in a fairly good way, but written by people with a higher status in order to ensure that nothing too bad would happen to them because of their actions.

There is another way to see this which is its exact opposite. We can say that this was written by people of lower social status in the group in order for them to achieve their freedom in an easier way and in this way achieve a social jump from a lower one to the next one. Also this would help those that were Menservants and Maidservants to get a more decent treatment. We can see it both way but in either there had to be a great inequality at the time.

Although the people at the time might have been savage this was a very good step to what we call civilized today. They realized the error of their ways and decided to make this set of rules in order to maintain an order. The role of god in all of this is to scare people of future generation with the anger and justice of a being which they can’t run from and to whom they will eventually have to pay what they owe. Finally I would like to add that it is interesting that until here god reappeared after the first chapters of the genesis and people couldn’t really see clearly who he was for he came covered in smoke.