Revenge

You may have heard the story of Moby Dick, the great white whale which swam the Seven Seas, and which Ahab, the whaling captain, had sworn to kill because it was through Moby Dick that he lost a leg.  And so he hunted for Moby Dick, year after year, in order to get his revenge, until at last he found him again.

The idea of revenge, of getting one’s own back or getting even, is a very old human instinct.  In the early days of the Jewish people they had a law that, if someone killed another, even accidentally, then the slayer had to be killed by the nearest relative of the dead person. You can well see that if this law took its course every time, many innocent people would suffer.