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“When you make your neighbor a loan of any sort, you shall not go into his house to collect his pledge. You shall stand outside, and the man to whom you make the loan shall bring the pledge out to you.” Deuteronomy 24.10, 11
In ancient Israel, how would a man have been judged who did, in fact, enter his neighbor’s home and rifle through it to find the pledge his loan required, while his neighbor stood by, humiliated? It’s not clear, but physical punishment might not have been out of the question. At the very least, we can suppose – based on the principles of retributive or restorative justice – the violator would have been required to put his neighbor’s home back in order and to recompense him for any damage.
This and every breach of obligatory justice would have to come before the judges and officials of the community for a ruling. We can only speculate as to how they might have corrected the injustice – the slight done to a neighbor’s dignity – such an unlawful action would have incurred.
But that judges had the power to correct for failings of obligatory justice, through one or another form of restorative or retributive justice, was certainly the case, as we shall see
Learning to do justice is not, therefore, in the first instance a role for government. It is a role for parents, as they raise their children to love and respect them and their siblings and to treat others as image-bearers of God. Were the practice of obligatory justice, understood in terms of neighbor-love, more faithfully taught in the homes of the land, ours would be a society more given to justice in all its forms.
Which is probably why God insisted that parents in ancient Israel take great care to instruct their children in all the ways of God’s Law and all the forms of justice (Deut. 6).
T. M. Moore
Visit our website, www.ailbe.org, and sign up to receive our thrice-weekly devotional, Crosfigell, featuring writers from the period of the Celtic Revival and T. M.’s reflections on Scripture and the Celtic Christian tradition. Does the Law of God still apply today? Order a copy of T. M.’s book, The Ground for Christian Ethics, and study the question for yourself.