29 November 2010

To elevate vengeance

Desert is the executive's brand of justice. It is often swift and furious. Fairness is more judicious and temperate. 
To try to eradicate the desert form of justice, as the left often wishes to do, is to leave it for the mean and cunning to embrace. The biblical regime incorporates talionis into its definition of justice so as to elevate vengeance into the divine realm rather than leaving it to the strongman rulers. 
The anger and the fury YHWH often expresses is not just an ancient world's anachronism. It is the display of desert being prosecuted as it was meant to be in a well balanced society. 

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