Matthew 5:38 known as the principle of "lex talionis", is an ancient statement of the principle of retributive punishment dating back to the Code of Hammurabi. This phrasing appears several times in the Old Testament at Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. This was a moderate rule compared with the blood feuds described in Genesis 4:23-24. The New Testament scholar R. T. France notes that by Jesus' era such punishments were no longer in practice, rather they had been replaced with fines judged to be of equal value to the damage caused. Thus, according to France, Jesus is not here condemning
The Exodus were Canaanite rulers of the Egyptian Delta in the 16th century BCE, may have formed the basis of the descent into Egypt and the exodus. The meaning a reader takes away from a text depends on his or her understanding of the literary "type" to which it belongs: as one scholar puts it in his discussion of the Genesis creation myth, "it makes an enormous difference whether the first chapters of Genesis are read as scientific cosmology, creation myth, or historical saga" (Wood, 1990). There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as