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[Name Withheld]

I'm trying to understand the Old Testament. Is it telling about how to suppress empathy?

Deuteronomy 25:11-12. 11 When men strive against each other, and the wife of one draws near to deliver her husband out of the hand of him who strikes him, and puts out her hand, and takes him by his private parts, 12 then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.

How to suppress empathy? How to not have pity?

[jimwalton]

The chapter of Deut. 25 is about justice, not empathy. It's about various casuistic situations (applying rules to work out moral situations) that can be used in their courts to judge offenses.

In this case, the example given is that two men are fighting, and the wife enters the fray to help her husband. She chooses to help by grabbing the opponent by his testicles—always an effective measure, but always thought to be unfair in the fight, because reproduction was almost a sacred duty and blessing. There is a similar law in the Middle Assyrian code (#8) in which the degree of punishment due to the woman is based on whether one or both testicles were damaged.

In Israel the law comes across as slightly different. The punishment is not based on the degree of physical injury, but on the immodesty of the act. Although she is attempting to help her husband, by grabbing the other guy's genitals, she has committed a sexual act that dishonors both her and her husband.

In exchange, v. 12 indicates that she has her "hand" cut off. The word used here is kaph, not the typical word for hand, which is yad. "Kaph" is any round, concave object: the palm of the hand, a dish, bowl, spoon, or even the arch of a foot. In other places in the Old Testament, kaph is used for the pelvic area (Song of Solomon 5.5; Gn. 32.26, 32), and in the S of S is a metaphor for a woman's sexual organs. This makes more sense in an "eye for an eye" situation. In addition, the verb for "cut off" is a very mild form of the verb, not the strong and intensified one. Used in that sense it often means "clip" or even "shave".

While ancients Near Eastern laws often call for bodily mutilation, the Mosaic Law never does. The most reasonable explanation of the verse, the offense, and the punishment is that she has committed a dishonoring sexual act, and in exchange a dishonoring sexual act is done to her. Shaving the pubic hair (as practiced in Babylon and Sumer) was considered a humiliating punishment. Since here there is no indication that the man has been physically harmed, this punishment is not mutilation for mutilation, but humiliation for humiliation. She has publicly humiliated the man, and in exchanged she is publicly humiliated—something quite severe in a shame/honor culture, and no mercy was to be shown. Justice must have its day.