Indeed, but are these words actually the will of God, or simply laws codified by over-zealous Israelites of the time?

For example, Exodus 21:15 and 21:17 says that any child who hits or swears at his parents should be killed. Rabbis have argued for centuries about whether such an extreme penalty was *ever* put into place. It may have been written into the Torah, but there's no evidence this penalty was ever effected - an analogy here would be the UK having the death penalty on its books for certain crimes right up until the 1990s, but never actually enacting it after the 1960s.

And we must be careful of how we interpret language, too. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is often quoted as an example of a fairly brutal system of justice - wasn't it Gandhi who said "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"?

However, looked at in context, it makes much more sense - it's talking about appropriate penalties and compensation. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Exo 21:24) means if someone hits you and knocks a tooth out, the maximum penalty you can extract legally is to knock his tooth out; you can't murder him simply because he hit you, all you're allowed to do is hit him back. In fact, you don't *have* to exact the punishment - compensation will do instead. Indeed, Exo 21:27 - in the same section talking about "eye for eye" - makes it clear that the compensation even applies to slaves/servants (the Hebrew makes no distinction between the two terms). If you hit your slave and knock his tooth out, you have to let him go free. In a part of the world and a time in history where slavery was pretty much universal, this probably represented the most liberal code of law around at the time.