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.

(orig. W. W. Hyde)

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.