Word: smiteth
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...your Essay on capital punishment, you claim that the Bible contradicts itself on this issue. You quote "Thou shall not kill" from Exodus 20:13 and "He that smiteth a man so that he die, shall be surely put to death" from the next chapter. There is no contradiction. The passage in Exodus 20 should be translated "Thou shalt not murder." Hebrew has a specific word for murder, a word that is never used where the context is war or the execution of a criminal...
...calls for clemency in individual cases. Jews are generally against the death penalty, and Israel has no capital punishment except for genocide and war crimes, which covered Eichmann. As for the Bible, it instructs, "Thou shall not kill," and then, in the next chapter of Exodus, provides, "He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death...
This, the observant naturalist points out, is the meaning of the Biblical admonition : " 'And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other.' Not so that your enemy may strike you again do you turn the other cheek . . . but to make him unable to do it." Naturalist Lorenz, drawing a moral, says that the day may come when mankind will be divided into two camps, each with the power of destroying the other. "Shall we then behave like doves or wolves? . . . We may well be apprehensive...
...strongest influences in leading Gandhi toward Satyagraha was the New Testament. Said he: "When I read in the Sermon on the Mount such passages as 'Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on thy cheek turn to him the other also' ... I was simply overjoyed . . ." Gandhi once wrote that a living faith in nonviolence "is impossible without a living faith in God. A nonviolent man can do nothing save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won't have the courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation...
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