Revenge

Revenge is the personal repayment of harm for harm — returning evil to someone who has wronged you — and Scripture consistently treats it as something to be refused rather than pursued.

The instructional material is direct. Leviticus 19:18 forbids both taking vengeance and bearing a grudge against one's own people, and joins the prohibition to the command to love your neighbor as yourself, grounding it in the words "I am Yahweh." Proverbs 24:29 addresses the inner resolve as well as the act: "Don't say, 'I will do to him as he has done to me; I will repay the man according to his work.'" The New Testament repeats the prohibition in similar terms. Romans 12:17 says "Repay no one evil for evil," and Romans 12:19 adds, "Don't seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God's wrath. For it is written, 'Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.'" The same instruction appears in 1 Thessalonians 5:15 ("See that no one returns evil for evil to anyone") and 1 Peter 3:9 ("not rendering evil for evil or insult for insult; but instead blessing"). Linguistically, the Hebrew verb behind "take vengeance" in Leviticus 19:18 is naqam, and the Greek noun in Romans 12:19 is ekdikēsis, with the participle ekdikountes ("seeking revenge") naming the action being prohibited. The consistent pattern in these texts is that vengeance is not denied outright but reserved — it "belongs to" God, and human restraint is described as leaving room for God's wrath.

The narratives show revenge as a human reality that Scripture reports without commending. In 2 Samuel 13:28 Absalom instructs his servants to strike Amnon down when his heart is merry with wine, an act the wider chapter sets in the context of Amnon's violation of Tamar (2 Samuel 13:1–22); the text narrates the killing and its command ("Haven't I commanded you? Be courageous, and be valiant!") without endorsing it. Acts 23:12 similarly reports men binding themselves under a curse neither to eat nor drink until they had killed Paul — a report, not a model. Against these stands the death of Stephen: full of the Holy Spirit, he sees "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56) and, as they stone him, calls out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" (Acts 7:59) rather than cursing his killers. 1 Peter 2:23 holds up the same pattern in Christ, who "when he was cursed, didn't curse back" but "committed himself to him who judges righteously."

Christian traditions differ on how far the prohibition reaches, and these differences are interpretive rather than textual. One common reading holds that Romans 12:17–19 and 1 Peter 3:9 govern personal conduct while public justice — courts, magistrates, punishment — rests on other scriptural warrant; another, characteristic of Anabaptist and pacifist traditions, reads the command as binding on disciples without exception and treats nonretaliation as the church's settled posture. A related disagreement concerns what "give place to God's wrath" in Romans 12:19 means: some read it as pointing to final eschatological judgment, others as leaving space for lawful human adjudication. Readers also weigh how the imprecatory passages of Scripture fit with these commands. The texts themselves are unambiguous that personal revenge is forbidden and that God claims vengeance as his own; how that conviction is worked out in the ordering of public life is where the traditions part ways.

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.