“When a man steals an ox or a sheep and butchers it or sells it, he must repay five cattle for the ox or four sheep for the sheep. If a thief is caught in the act of breaking in, and he is beaten to death, no one is guilty of bloodshed. But if this happens after sunrise, the householder is guilty of bloodshed. A thief must make full restitution. If he is unable, he is to be sold because of his theft. If what was stolen – whether ox, donkey, or sheep – is actually found alive in his possession, he must repay double.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Getting justice right is hard. On the one hand, the person who has committed a crime should face some kind of consequence for whatever it is. But the consequence needs to be proportional to the crime itself. A punishment too severe relative to the crime becomes an injustice in and of itself. The trouble here is that when a crime has happened to us, we aren’t much interested in an appropriately proportional response. We want vengeance. A significant part of the Law of Moses involved setting out just penalties for various crimes. Let’s take a look at an example of that here.

Justice is always a reflection of God’s character when it is pursued rightly. This is because God is just. It is also, however, a reflection of the culture in which it is being pursued. Every culture has a sense of what is right and what is wrong. In every culture there is a collective restraint that sits over its people’s behavior which, if violated, triggers a whole variety of consequences designed to bring a person back in line with the expectations of the whole either gently if the person readily complies and didn’t go too far beyond the boundaries of acceptability, or more forcefully if the person is more resistant or drifted further afield.

That’s something we need to keep in mind when engaging with the Old Testament law. What we find here in terms of crime and punishment often sounds strange and unjust to us. That’s because we have grown thanks to the guidance of God’s Spirit over time and through the example of Jesus to better understand the scope and limits of God’s just character. Somewhere north of 3500 years ago, though, the people were still learning. God had to meet them where they were in order to bring them forward from there.

In that wild, wild west sort of world where violence was much more accepted as part of life than it is in at least the West today, God had to show the people how to handle crimes in a manner that was proportional and not vengeful in nature and scope. Punishments for crimes couldn’t get out of control and cross the line of injustice themselves, but they also had to be sufficiently severe so as to act as an effective deterrent.

One of the more famous laws from the Code of Hammurabi was that a thief should have his hand cut off. Yet in that day and time, such an injury could often be deadly. That was unjust. Here, God directed the people to set economic penalties for theft since it was an economic crime. If you stole something and dispensed with it, there was a price to be paid. If you were caught with it, there was a price to be paid. If you weren’t able to pay the required restitution, you had to work it off.

That last consequence there brings us back to the challenging question of slavery in the Old Testament. This, however, would have been an indentured servitude, not slavery. The thief who was sold would have been paid a wage, was afforded all the rights and dignities of a servant laid out in various other passages in the law, and had a term of service that was capped at seven years. At the point his restitution was met, the expectation would have been that he was to be freed.

The one other thing of note lies right in the middle of the passage here. If a homeowner defended his property against a thief with deadly force and the defense took place at night, there was no guilt assigned to the homeowner. If someone was breaking into your house at night when it was dark and you couldn’t see very well whether the thief was armed or not (and they couldn’t turn on the lights like we could today), you had the right take whatever measures were necessary to defend your house and its occupants. If the break-in happened during the day, though, when you could see more clearly what the threat really was and could more discerningly choose not to exercise deadly force, you needed to do that.

Okay, but where does all of this land for us? Hopefully you are starting to learn this chorus by heart by now. We’re not responsible for keeping this law since we live under the new covenant of Christ. The principle here, though, that punishments for crimes should be proportional to the crime itself is one worth noting. If our response to injustice is itself unjust, we haven’t accomplished anything positive. Determining what is and is not just, though, can be challenging. Such determinations have to be made in an environment that is neutral to and unaffected by any particular crime. Deciding which course is just in the heat of passion that comes once a crime has been committed is never wise. We’ll be driven by unrestrained emotion and our sinful desire for vengeance.

As a general rule, we need to let the love of God expressed through Christ be our guide in these matters. Love and justice seem like they would be opposites, but they actually go hand-in-hand. Justice calls for the right thing to happen, love motivates us toward that end. Of course, we have to keep in mind that love is an intentional decision to see someone else become more fully who God designed them to be. Moving someone in that direction necessarily means holding them appropriately accountable for their choices. It means limiting their ability to make some choices in the first place that will lead them away from that end until they demonstrate a consistent willingness to hold themselves accountable. It also means addressing crime with reconciliation and restoration as the goal. Punishments aren’t merely to be punitive, but instructional and rehabilitative. How we do all of that will have to be the subject of another conversation.