CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE BIBLE

Most people who read through the Old Testament legal material found mainly in the Book of Leviticus are struck with the apparently inappropriate punishments for various crimes. In some cases, the penalty seems to be too harsh by today's standards while in other cases it strikes us as too lenient. But there is a rationale behind it all.

Concerning the former situation, Kaiser asks the question: “Is the death penalty justified for all the crimes listed [in Leviticus 20:1-27; 24:10:23]?” Some of the offenses listed as deserving the death penalty seem justified, even for us today, such as burning babies alive to appease an idol. However, the same penalty for other offenses, such as the various sexual sins listed in Leviticus 20:10-21, seems unduly harsh.

But Kaiser points to three possibly mitigating factors:

    1. The wording of some of the penalties enjoin a “shutting off,” which may refer to excommunication from the community of God rather than death.

    2. Even out-and-out prescription of the death penalty may mean that God will visit a premature death on the offender. Remember that in the OT, the Jews were not given a clear revelation of the possibility of an afterlife so that all punishments needed to be meted out in this life in order to uphold God's sense of justice. But in the NT, it becomes clear that God's judgment often waits until after the offending party has died.

    3. “In fact, there is little evidence that many of these sanctions were ever actually carried out, except in the specific example of a premeditated murder (see Numbers 35:31).” (Kaiser)

Just look at the story of the woman caught in adultery, narrated in John 8. It has all the appearance of a situation purposely set up by the religious rulers in order to test Jesus to see what he would do. For one thing, it is a bit unusual that the man involved in the affair was not also brought forward for trial. Secondly, under Roman law the Jews had no authority to carry out the death penalty for any offense, much less a relatively minor one such as adultery.

On the other hand, consider the types of crime that would probably warrant prison time today such as manslaughter, rape, or grand theft. The OT penalties for such offenses generally consisted of some sort of financial restitution only. We want to know why the criminal wasn't punished more harshly.

One simple answer to that question is that for most of Israel's early history there were no prisons. The biblical stories of prisons that are the most famous are those in Egypt where Joseph was incarcerated and those of the Romans who imprisoned Paul and other disciples for varying lengths of time.

“As a sanction, prison is mentioned quite often in the Bible, but imprisonment was not covered in the Mosaic law, and there were no prisons, in the modern sense of long-term incarceration, in ancient Israel. Yet penal slavery and prisons were part of the ancient Near East and were well enough known that writers could employ prison as an image effectively.” (Dictionary of Biblical Imagery)

Asa of Judah put Hanani the seer into the stocks temporarily (II Chronicles 16:10), and Ahab had Micaiah put into prison for a short time period on rations of bread and water (I Kings 22:27). Also, Cogan says, “Persons could be confined until their case was decided; e.g., the Sabbath violator (Num 15:35-36) and the blasphemer (Lev 24:10-12)...Micaiah was detained until his prophecy could be verified, unlike Jeremiah, who was adjudged harmful to society and so restrained (Jer 37:15; 38:6).”

Concerning that latter case, Jeremiah is actually put into a muddy cistern, not a prison but a place where he was expected to starve to death (Jeremiah 38:6-13). This is even an echo of Joseph's treatment at the hands of his brothers when they agreed to leave him at the bottom of a dry pit. Of course, in both cases God's chosen men are rescued.

The bottom line from these examples is that the Jews never did have the sort of penal system in place that would allow incarceration to serve as a form of legal punishment in which the time in prison could be adjusted to be in line with the seriousness of a crime that was more than a mere civil case and less than one deserving death. Therefore, monetary recompense to the victims was the best option for dispensing justice in those cases.