The Laws of Yahweh Would Stop Crime

by Bertrand L. Comparet

Today I shall teach about some of Yahweh’s criminal laws in the Bible. Today, our criminal laws are very imperfect, the penalties imposed for crimes usually seem to have little to do with the crime. These penalties often leave the criminal with the impression that he is being persecuted, rather than justly punished. For the more serious crimes, the penalty is not decided until long after the criminal has been sent to prison, so all connection seems to be lost.

Yahweh’s laws are simple and direct, nobody can mistake the reason for the penalty and the justice of it. Let’s consider Yahweh’s laws concerning theft, why do some people steal? Obviously, the answer to this is because they want to make a profit, to gain by the theft. If the amount that is stolen is big enough, the thief may be willing to spend a few months or years in prison for it.

Yahweh’s laws take the profit out of theft, the thief loses not gains. Leviticus 6:1-5 gives the proper laws. One who wrongfully withholds from the owner, property entrusted to him for safekeeping, or property he has found, not only has to return the property to its rightful owner but, they must also pay an additional one-fifth of the value of the property.

The true thief, one who got the property wrongfully in the first place, really takes a loss, Exodus 22:1, 4, 9 tells what some of the penalties are. If the stolen property is recovered intact in his hands, he must restore double the amount of the theft. If the thief has consumed the stolen property, or has sold or otherwise disposed of it, he must restore 4 to 5 times the amount that he stole. That really takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?

Suppose the thief is defiant, he says, I can’t pay for it, what are you going to do about it? The defiant thief is sold into slavery for enough to pay for what he owes. Suppose he owes $100.00, he is auctioned off in this fashion: “Who will bid $100.00 for one week of this man’s labor?” If the thief is repentant and really wants to make amends for the wrong he has done, he will probably be a good worker and possibly someone will bid $100.00.

Suppose he is still sullen and defiant, it will take a lot more than a week for him to earn $100.00. In that case, there probably wouldn’t be any bidders for one week of labor, maybe none for a month’s labor or even several months. The thief s own attitude can make it either easier or harder on himself, the degree of punishment is really what he sets for himself. In addition, the injured party receives some compensation for all his trouble and for the time he lost the use of his property.

Consider the crimes of assault, battery and mayhem, inflicting serious bodily injury on another. Today the law shows no connection between the crime and the punishment. Courts get in the habit of using the same routine penalty for all cases. This is even though there is a great difference between the injury inflicted in the different cases. Yahweh’s laws proportions the punishment to the offense, the wrongdoer receives the same punishment he inflicted on his victim. If the wrongdoer knocked out a tooth, he loses his own tooth, if he broke an arm, his own arm is broken and so on. The moral is clear, if you value your own hide, leave your neighbor’s alone. If you don’t want your own arm broken, don’t wrongfully attack someone and break his arm. Even the dullest criminal can understand this.

People of a very philosophical mind, able to understand the connection between a violation of section 240 of the California penal code and a fine of $25.00 imposed by the court some weeks later, aren’t the ones who violate it. The ones who are dull of wit but have a sharp temper and need some restraint, can get the point of Yahweh’s laws much better. That is why Yahweh, in Exodus 21:22-25 and Leviticus 24:19-20 provides the same injury as the penalty.

Once in awhile, there is a case of a man who seeks to injure his enemy by making a false accusation against him, trying to get the law to punish his enemy for something he never did. Again Yahweh’s laws provide the right answer in Deuteronomy 19:16-20. The false accuser receives the same punishment he tried to have wrongfully inflicted on his enemy, whatever that might be. If he falsely accused his enemy of a crime punishable by a flogging, he himself was flogged and so forth. The California penal code section 128, adopts a part of this rule. It provides that anyone who by perjury, causes the execution of an innocent person, is punished by death.

There are other very serious crimes, which are frequently committed, under our modern laws. These crimes are becoming more numerous every year. I’m not going to bore you with the statistics on how many rapes, murders and robberies are committed each hour of every day. These statistics wouldn’t be accurate as they would be last years numbers and not as bad as this year’s record.

These vast number of crimes are not committed by a large number of people. On the contrary, a comparatively few people, most of them habitual criminals, commit this great number of crimes. Our modern laws have become so distorted that their purpose no longer seems to be to protect society against the criminal. These laws seem to exist just to furnish highly paid jobs for a lot of fuzzy minded do gooder social workers, to coddle the professional criminal.

Yahweh’s laws don’t make this mistake, the purpose of these laws is to protect the innocent from the wrong doers. Leviticus 24:17, Numbers 35:16-21 and Deuteronomy 19:11-13 give the penalty for willful murder, that penalty is death. Numbers 35:10-15 and Deuteronomy 19:4-6 give a different law for an accidental death. A person who killed by accident, without any wrongful act was not punished, he was protected from any revenge on the part of the dead person’s relatives.

Deuteronomy 22:25-27 & 24:7 gives the penalty for rape and kidnaping, death. It was intended that these vicious and loathsome crimes should be stamped out. Under Yahweh’s laws, we would not have seen the spectacle of a man guilty of these crimes, delaying his punishment for many years until he exhausts the long suffering patience of the courts. The penalty is to be death, swift and certain.

The Bible says, “So shalt thou put the evil away from among you. And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.” Adultery was also punished by death. How this would depopulate Hollywood! Various minor crimes could be punished by flogging, but not more than 40 lashes.

The state of Delaware had a statute authorizing flogging of robbers and burglars, but it had not been used in a long time. In 1922 the situation became so bad the insurance companies writing robbery and burglary insurance in the state of Delaware, all agreed not to issue any more of these policies. This caused the Delaware courts to have robbers and burglars flogged. In one year, these crimes were reduced by over two thirds of the former rate.

Under Yahweh’s laws habitual criminals, who could not be reformed by such penalties, were not allowed to continue to harm the innocent, nor were they supported at public expense for life. Death was the penalty for habitual crime, this alone would take care of most of our crime problem today. Most of our serious crimes are the work of habitual criminals.

We still see large gangs of criminals running free in every large city, while our laws require we must wait until after they have committed the robberies and murders they are planning, to apprehend them. We must always sacrifice innocent victims on the altar of crime. Yahweh’s laws would not allow this, these criminal gangs would all be destroyed because they are habitual criminals. The honest people of the community would have peace and safety.

The Bible records when our ancestors enforced and obeyed Yahweh’s laws, they had peace and prosperity and were respected by other nations. Israel was condemned to captivity and exile because they abandoned the laws of Yahweh and followed the statutes of Omri, as Micah chapter 6 records.

Today, we too are keeping the statutes of Omri. Consequently we are suffering the penalty in a frightful rate of crime, which is steadily getting worse. We have the record of over 3,000 years of experience. Man’s laws always fail, Yahweh’s laws alone will bring peace, prosperity and safety. When will we learn to make Yahweh’s laws the law of the land, and thereby reap the benefits?

Critical note by Clifton A. Emahiser: It should be noted here that Bertrand L. Comparet speaks of crime among our own Israel people, and the Biblical answers for keeping that sort of situation under control. But today we are experiencing crime from a foreign element which goes far beyond what Comparet addresses here. For instance, a negro is 10,000% more prone to become a criminal than a White. Back in the early 1950’s, I was working as a barber in Bowling Green, Ohio where they have the Bowling Green State University. One of the professors at the university who patronized our shop, would each year on his summer vacation voluntarily have himself locked-up in a prison for the purpose of studying the prison population. He would do this each summer, and for all the prisoners knew, he was just another prisoner. By doing this, the inmates would reveal their personal stories of the background they came from and on what conditions they came to commit their crime etc.

One day he dropped into the shop when the business was rather slow, and he was freer to tell us some of his experiences in his research into the causes of crime. It has been a long time, and I don’t remember his name, but I’ll never forget what he related to us that day. He told us that day that 90% of the prison population was black. That statement immediately struck me, as I knew that in the general population of the United States, the blacks at that time were only 10%. From the college professor’s statement, and my mathematical mind, I quickly multiplied the 10% of the general population that was black times the 10% of the prison population which was White, and inasmuch as 10 X 10 = 100, I realized for the first time that the blacks were congenitally 100 times more prone to commit crime than a White. 100%=1; 1000%=10; 10,000% =100.