Restoration demands both justice and purification
It didn’t occur to me until reading Matt Webb’s musings, but sometimes direct restitution is insufficient for true justice.
Webb quotes a 1917 paper by Walter W. Hyde called The Prosecution of Lifeless Things and Animals in Greek Law: Part I to make his case that Greeks felt that, even if the perpetrator of a crime could not be brougt to justice, the community still required purification from the offense.
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For the idea was that, in case of a murder, not only a crime had been committed, but also a pollution had been caused in the community and some person or thing was to blame and must be punished to rid the state of defilement.
Even before I saw that Hyde mentions a Semitic correlation, I remembered a recent Bible Project podcast that explores the same dual concept in Levitical sacrifices. Worth a further exploration I think.