Part II.
Our text – Deuteronomy 32:35 – is just as central to Christians as it is to Jews. In the New Testament, it is enshrined in Romans 12:19. Paul is writing to the congregations in Rome. He writes in Greek, Emoi ekdikesis, ego antapodosio, legei kurios. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew holy texts that Paul would have known, Deuteronomy 32:35 goes, En emera ekdikeseos antapodoso.
Paul is describing to the Roman congregation how belief in Christ affects the Christian’s everyday manners and behavior. For example, in Romans 12:17, he writes, “Recompense to no man evil for evil: procure things honest in the sight of all men. In 12:18, he writes, “If it be possible, as much as in you is, have peace with all men.” And the whole of 12:19 reads, “Dearly beloved, avenge not your selves, but give place unto wrath [that is, avoid wrath]: for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.’”
Paul, as we see, is certainly right that he is citing the Torah, but his use is somewhat slanted. Deuteronomy 32:35 does not refer to personal behavior. It is God’s action, not individual action, that Moses speaks of. Paul is right, though, to think that Jewish law of behavior rejects revenge. “Thou shalt not avenge, nor be mindful of wrong against the children of thy people, but shalt love thy neighbor as thy self: I am the Lord,” commands Leviticus 19:18. So, why does Paul, who as a Pharisiac leaning Jew thoroughly familiar with Jewish Law, use the Deuteronomy citation rather than the Leviticus one?
First, the transferred context is deliberate. Paul, or someone close to Paul, quotes the same text in Hebrews 10:30 adding “The Lord shall judge his people.” But in our text, Paul intends to show the distance between his Christic religion, a promise of personal salvation through personal belief and action, and the tribal, Jewish redemption through law. Second, by citing the crucial passage in which the chosen people are on the verge of entering the promised land within his discussion of Christian salvation, he substitutes salvation in afterlife for the promised land, belief in Christ for obedience to law, the personal for the tribal. Paul believed that the second coming was imminent, within his own lifetime, and he is promising imminent salvation to those who follow Christ.
Remember that Paul’s ministry is to the uncircumcised, to gentiles. The salvation he promises, therefore, cannot go through being part of the Jewish tribe. Thus, he expends great effort in Galatians to separate being “justified” by Law from being “justified” by faith. In Galatians 3:16, the crux of this issue, Paul says the covenant goes through Christ and therefore not through the tribe, creating a continuity between Abraham and Christians that bypasses the Law.
Paul’s revolutionary transformation of this vassalage relationship from the nation to the individual avoids the covenant and does, indeed, place God’s punishment in an entirely human arena at the same time universalizing it. But this contextual shift changes everything.
Paul’s text is about relations between people who are more or less equal in status. A parent may punish a child, but between siblings, to reciprocate hurt for hurt we call “revenge.” So Paul shifts the text’s meaning. That is why the Christian translations of our text speak of vengeance. It is now, in Christianity, an issue not of violation of law and a corresponding punishment by an authority but an issue of social ethics, a morality of social behavior. The text is still a prohibition, but it prohibits retribution, what scholars call “retributive justice.” I will repay, saith the Lord: that is, retributive justice is in God’s hands. God’s words in the original Greek are even more emphatic: ego antapodosio, I am retribution. Paul denies the right of retributive justice to humans.
Leviticus 24:19-24 commands retribution equitably, proportionately: Also if a man cause any blemish in his neighbor: as he hath done, so shall it be done to him: Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: such a blemish as he hath made in any, such shall be repaid to him. And he that kills a beast shall restore it: but he that kills a man shall be slain. Ye shall have one law: it shall be as well for the stranger as for one born in the country: for I am the Lord your God.
But instead, Paul follows Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5: 38-45: Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever will compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asks, and from him who would borrow of thee, turn not away, Ye have heard it has been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies: bless them that curse you: do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which hurt you, and persecute you, That ye may be the children of your Father that is in heaven: for he makes his sun to arise on the evil, and the good, and sends rain on the just, and the unjust.
Yet the country whose every dollar bill states “In God We Trust,” sends billions of dollars and arms to aid and participate in Israeli punishment and retribution as a sign of its own, not Pauline ethics.