Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But which of the law's good points shall I defend first, rather than the one heresy has been most eager to tear apart — the rule of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bruise repaid for a bruise? This does not sanction the mutual license of doing injury, but looks entirely to restraining violence altogether: since to a people so hard-hearted and faithless toward God it would have seemed a long wait, even an incredible one, to expect vengeance from God — vengeance to be proclaimed only later, through the prophet, in the words 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay, says the Lord' — in the meantime the commission of injury was to be uprooted by the fear of an immediate reprisal, and the license of retaliation itself served as a check on provocation, so that the seething of wickedness would subside, since the second wrong permitted deterred the first, and the first, once deterred, meant the second was never committed — the fear of the like-for-like being all the easier to feel through that same taste of suffering. Nothing is more bitter than suffering the very thing you have done to others. [2] And if the law withholds certain foods and pronounces unclean certain animals that had once been blessed, understand it as counsel toward the exercise of self-restraint, and recognize the bridle placed on that appetite which, even while eating the bread of angels, still craved the cucumbers and melons of Egypt. Recognize too the foresight shown toward gluttony's companions — lust, of course, and luxury — which generally cool under the discipline of the belly. For the people had eaten and drunk and risen up to play. So too, in order to curb the ardor for wealth on the side that pleads the necessity of sustenance, the pursuit of expensive foods was cut away — and finally, so that man could more readily be trained by God toward fasting, he grew accustomed to sparse and plain fare, with nothing more sumptuous left to hunger after. [3] The Creator is indeed to be blamed — for taking foods away from his own people rather than from the still more ungrateful Marcionites! Let no one find fault, either, with the burdens of sacrifices and the fussy business of rites and offerings, as though God had desired such things for his own sake, seeing that he cries out so plainly, 'What are your many sacrifices to me?' and 'Who required these things at your hands?' — but let him instead perceive that industry of God by which he wished to bind a people prone to idolatry and that sort of transgression to his own worship through observances of the very kind by which the world's superstition operated, so as to call them away from it, bidding them, as if he desired it, to do for him what would keep them from sinning by making idols.
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