Meaning
Retribution should match the injury it answers, so the punishment for a wrong is an equivalent loss. It is invoked either to demand strictly proportionate justice or, more often nowadays, to criticise revenge as endless and self-perpetuating. Serious and proverbial; common in debates about justice, punishment and revenge, and often quoted from or against the Sermon on the Mount. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The formula expresses the lex talionis, retaliation in kind, which appears in earlier Mesopotamian law codes and most famously in the Code of Hammurabi (dated around 1780 BC in the standard references). The Hebrew Bible states it three times, in Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20 and Deuteronomy 19:21 ('eye for eye, tooth for tooth', from Hebrew 'ayin tachat 'ayin', an eye in place of an eye), where it functioned to cap retribution, and Matthew 5:38 quotes it before urging non-resistance. In English the phrase first appears in the Wycliffite Bible of the late fourteenth century; William Tyndale's 1526 New Testament and 1530 Pentateuch shaped the familiar spelling ('an eye for an eye, a toth for a toth'), and the King James Bible of 1611 fixed it as 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth' in Matthew, with the article-less 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth' in Exodus.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an eye for an eye
- an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
- an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
- eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth
Usage Examples
- The elders favoured an eye for an eye, but the judge insisted on proportionate sentences instead.
- An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth leaves everyone blind and toothless, the mediator warned both families.
- The tariff was defended in parliament as an eye for an eye response to the neighbouring country's export ban.