An Eye for an Eye, A Tooth for a Tooth

One of the most common Gentile misunderstandings of Torah: "The Bible says: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".

That is one of the horrendous distortions in the translations.

In the one and only correct Bible, the Hebrew Torah, that sentence comes directly after a discussion of the laws of slavery. What it means is that if a slave master harms his slave and puts out his eye he must not only set him free, but pay him the difference of what he would be worth on the market with and without an eye.

The same goes for a tooth. Even so much as knocking out a tooth of a slave was reason enough to have to set him or her free plus paying the difference in compensation.

The Talmud goes further still. In the Talmud we learn that it is forbidden to sleep in a better bed than one's slave or to eat better food than one's slave.

Those laws are intended to lead people in the direction of doing away with slavery all together by instilling in people the understanding that slaves are no less human than their masters and deserving of no less physical conditions. And it worked. Jews were one of the first Peoples to do away with slavery.

Now if only we can get wage slave owners to do the same...

The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek originally only because the Greek authorities threatened a massacre if the Rabbis did not do the translation.

There is a reason why the Rabbis said that that was the darkest day in all history.

The Gentiles were neither spiritually nor morally prepared to be able to understand what the Bible was about - and their languages reflect that. This is true to this very day. I have never met a Gentile, no matter how evolved, who really could grasp Torah. I can only shake my head in despair when they quote it, thinking they have understood. All of their "interpretations" begin with basic misunderstanding and just get worse from there.

Let's not even get into the total misunderstanding of what the coming of the Messiah means. I could write an encyclopedia about that one.

Why can't the White man find a religion of his own instead of arrogating the religions of others than he is not at all spiritually tuned to and has no hope of ever understanding properly???

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com