Assault And Battery

Assault and battery is the modern legal pairing for unlawful physical violence — battery being actual harmful or offensive contact and assault the threat or attempt that precedes it — and Scripture has no single word for the category, addressing it instead through case law, poetry, and narrative using ordinary verbs for striking, beating, slapping, and spitting. The case law in Exodus 21:22 treats a fight between men that injures a pregnant woman as a matter for damages: if no harm follows, the striker is fined whatever the husband demands and the judges allow, and the wording of that verse implies a heavier outcome where harm does follow. Deuteronomy 17:8-9 places disputed cases “between stroke and stroke” — that is, contested claims about injury — before the priests and the judge at the central sanctuary, and Deuteronomy 17:12 makes disregard of that court itself a capital offense, so bodily violence in Israel was adjudicated publicly rather than settled by private revenge.

Prophetic and wisdom texts set alongside this a counsel of endurance. The servant of Isaiah 50:6 says, “I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who plucked off the hair. I didn’t hide my face from shame and spitting,” and Lamentations 3:30 advises, “Let him give his cheek to him who strikes him.” In the teaching of Jesus, Matthew 5:39 commands, “don’t resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also.” One way to read the difference is that the case law addresses what a court must do when injury is brought before it, while these texts address what a person may voluntarily bear rather than insist on.

The passion accounts narrate the beating of Jesus in just these terms: they spat in his face and beat him with their fists (Matthew 26:67), spat on him and struck his head with the reed (Matthew 27:30), covered his face and beat him, ordering him to prophesy (Mark 14:65), mocked and beat him (Luke 22:63), and kept slapping him (John 19:3). Historically, these are the Gospel writers’ own accounts, and the echo of Isaiah 50:6 in them is a connection the texts invite rather than a modern inference.

Christian traditions read this material differently. In this tradition, Anabaptist and pacifist bodies take Matthew 5:39 as a binding norm for disciples that rules out personal and usually state violence, while most Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant bodies treat it as governing personal forbearance and forgive-ness rather than the magistrate’s use of force, appealing to the judicial procedures of Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 17 as evidence that public justice for bodily harm is divinely ordered; many also hold that Isaiah 50:6 and the passion narratives describe a unique redemptive suffering rather than a pattern required of victims of assault. Readers differ, too, on whether Jesus’ words concern insults and honor (a backhand to the right cheek) or physical injury generally — a point of live scholarly and confessional disagreement rather than settled fact.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.