When YHWH acts to right some injustice He does so as an engaged party. YHWH’s demand for justice is not merely in the abstract but manifests as a personal issue that matters to Him. He gets angry; He can overdo His response; He can get upset – justice is an emotional and not just a rational and reasonable thing with Him.
Desert is justice as the right hemisphere experiences it.
YHWH as the vengeful God extols a system of justice that operates from both hemispheres of the brain. He personifies justice both as an interested party and also as a disinterested party. He is both the vigilante Who rights the wrongs as well as the prosecutor that serves the institutional rules and regulations.
The biblical regime is based not exclusively on justice as deservedness and not exclusively on justice as fairness but on a combination of both – and that's what makes the biblical regime’s system unique among the systems of justice around the world.
Lest we think that such a system of justice is impossible, i.e., that we cannot build a system of justice where the authoritative court needs to be able to function both as an interested and as a disinterested party, the answer is it is not impossible: such is the posture of every parent to their children. The model of God the father and mother is not to say that God cares for His children, it is to say that as far as He is concerned He sees Himself not as a king Who can relate to His subjects only through the disinterested administration of justice but as a father Who brings as well an administration of justice that is personal and deeply felt, both compassionate and furious, respectively.
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