The line modern readers find hardest, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Exodus 21:23–25; compare Leviticus 24:19–20; Deuteronomy 19:16–19), is, in the ISBE's reading, not a licence for revenge but a limit on it. The talion appears in Hammurabi's code too; it belongs to the rough justice of the age. But its work, the ISBE argues, was to cap the penalty at the injury and no further: "while the justice it sanctioned was rough and ready according to the age, it put a restraint on vindictiveness. The punishment might be so much, but no more." Read that way it is a brake on the blood-feud, one eye for one eye, not a life for an eye, and the ISBE sees the same restraining spirit in the law that limited a flogging to forty stripes (Deuteronomy 25:2 f). (Source: ISBE 1915, "Law in the Old Testament" [Rule].)
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