"An eye for an eye" was a limit on revenge, not a license

The world this law came from explains it. Where there are no courts, injury becomes feud: you wound my kinsman, we kill yours, and each revenge is larger than the wrong before it. The Bible records that world in Lamech's boast, four chapters into Genesis: "I have slain a man for wounding me... If Cain will be avenged seven times, truly Lamech seventy-seven times." Against that arithmetic, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" is a cap: one eye, and no more than one. The formula that reads as harsh today was a limit on people for whom one eye was never enough.

And Israel did not invent it. The Code of Hammurabi, carved in Babylon around 1750 BCE, centuries before any dating of Moses, already decrees "if a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye." The stele stands in the Louvre, and the differences between the two codes are as revealing as what they share. Hammurabi's version is priced by class: destroy a commoner's eye and you pay silver; a slave's, and you compensate his owner. Exodus states the formula and then, two verses later, does something no cuneiform code does — the slave who loses an eye, or even a tooth, goes free.

Nor do we know how often anyone actually took an eye. Jewish legal tradition, reading the same verses, ruled early that the words set compensation, not mutilation: the offender paid the injury's worth in damages. The principle either way is the same one: the punishment may not exceed the crime.