OK, fair enough.
Correct me if I'm wrong (haha), so you want to follow the bible for punishments called for for various crimes.
Essentially, yes, with important caveats.
Unlike Arthur, however, I’m happy to actually explain those caveats rather than just wave around ‘common sense,’ emotion, and current custom as though that settles anything.
You are calling for death for murder, adultery, incest, blasphemy, sabbath violations, striking parents etc. Seems a little harsh.
Some of those yes, others no.
Let's back up a moment, so we have a better frame of reference, because otherwise you’re just throwing a pile of laws together with no distinctions.
The Mosaic law is not a random pile of commands. It contains moral principles, civil case laws, and symbolic or covenantal ordinances tied specifically to Israel.
I am not arguing that every penalty found under Moses is mechanically transferred wholesale into modern civil law with no distinctions.
The question is which civil principles reflect enduring justice for human society as such.
For that, the core civil standards are things like murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness as a window into motive. Those are foundational to any civilized society because they protect life, marriage, property, truth, and social order.
By contrast, things like blasphemy and sabbath violations belong to a different category, because they were tied to Israel’s covenantal status in a way that is not identical to ordinary civil administration now.
At bottom, the law is not arbitrary. It is the golden rule expressed juridically. It tells you not only what you may not do to others, but what justice requires when someone has done those things.
So to answer your question, things like murder, rape, incest, adultery, would indeed result in the death penalty, and in the case of adultery, for both participants.
And corporal punishment would entail what? Public lashing? Flogging?
Yes, actual corporal punishment.
The biblical standard is proportionate justice: eye for eye, hand for hand, life for life.
It's not cruelty, but a restraint on cruelty. It keeps punishment proportionate to the offense instead of letting the state either indulge in excess or dissolve justice into sentimentality.
So yes, flogging would apply to many crimes, such as assault. Scripture builds in restraint. Even the forty-lash maximum shows that biblical corporal punishment was not open-ended brutality, but justice bounded by restraint, literally by God's merciful command.
So if, in the commission of a crime, you caused an innocent person to lose an eye, the punishment would correspond to that injury directly. The point is measured justice, not sadism.
I don't think you're going to get a lot of public support for such measures though. Would you be willing to water down biblical pronouncements... you know, go along to get along?
That is just an appeal to popularity.
Whether a law is fashionable has no bearing on whether it is just.
And no, I would not water down divine justice to make it more palatable to a crowd. “Go along to get along” is precisely how societies lose the moral courage to punish evil at all.
And that point alone should already tell you that the prison-heavy system you appealed to earlier is not a serious refutation of my position.
It's quite interesting, the tension between the different scripture writers, some who emphasized the justice and retribution of God, versus those who emphasized the merciful nature of God.
There is no contradiction there.
God is not a one-dimensional Being.
He is loving and merciful, and He is also just and wrathful toward the unrepentant wicked.
The tension is not in God nor in His word, but in man’s tendency to redefine mercy as indulgence and justice as cruelty.
Mercy does not mean pretending evil is less evil than it is. And justice does not mean the absence of compassion. In Scripture, both belong to God’s holiness.
You can find a verse in the Bible to support almost any point of view.
Well, you can rip verses out of context and twist them to support almost any point of view, sure.
That does not mean the Bible supports all those views. It simply says more about what people are willing to do with Scripture than about what Scripture actually teaches.
Scripture gives a man the rope he needs either to pull himself out by truth or to hang himself by twisting it.
The real question is not what people can make isolated verses sound like, but what the Bible actually teaches when read rightly.
