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The Lex Talionis in Leviticus 24 from Legal-Historical and Literary Perspectives

  • Korean Journal of Old Testament Studies
  • Abbr : KJOTS
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.87~118
  • DOI : 10.24333/jkots.2026.32.2.87
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Old Testament Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology
  • Received : April 17, 2026
  • Accepted : May 19, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Young Hye Kim 1

1연세대학교 미래캠퍼스

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Lex Talionis in Leviticus 24 from Legal-Historical and Literary Perspectives This paper examines the lex talionis in Leviticus 24 from two complementary perspectives: legal-historical and literary-structural. While the lex talionis has long been recognized as a legal principle shared between the ancient Near East and the Pentateuch, the distinctive literary characteristics of its formulation in Leviticus 24 have rarely been subjected to systematic legal-historical analysis. This study aims to fill this lacuna by situating Leviticus 24 within the broader trajectory of ancient Near Eastern legal traditions and demonstrating how its redactor transformed inherited legal forms into a vehicle for a distinctive theological expression. The paper proceeds in three stages. First, it conducts a diachronic analysis of the lex talionis across six ancient Near Eastern law collections, establishing that the lex talionis was not a universal principle but a selectively adopted one, consistently subordinated to social hierarchy and expressed through quantitative monetary compensation. Second, it compares the three Pentateuchal texts containing the lex talionis — Exodus 21, Deuteronomy 19, and Leviticus 24 — identifying the unique transformative trajectory of each. Third, it analyzes the formal and substantive peculiarities of Leviticus 24 in depth. The analysis reveals that Leviticus 24 exhibits two layers of differentiation. Formally, it integrates narrative and legal prescription within a single unit — a feature unattested in ancient Near Eastern law collections — and organizes its legal content through a sophisticated chiastic structure. Substantively, this chiasm serves as a legal reasoning system that ranks crimes hierarchically according to their theological gravity rather than their economic value, incorporates blasphemy within the domain of the lex talionis, and extends equal legal standing to resident aliens. The paper concludes that in Leviticus 24, the redactor appropriated the legal language of the ancient Near East while fundamentally reconstituting its conceptual foundations, establishing Leviticus 24 as the most theologically sophisticated expression of the lex talionis in the Pentateuch.

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