a grave, usually fatal calamity that befalls someone; a deadly accident or mishap
This is a rare and shadowy word, used only five times in the whole Hebrew Bible, and its exact force has never been pinned down. At its heart it names a grave misfortune that overtakes a person rather than an injury someone deliberately inflicts. The harm comes from outside, often unseen and beyond anyone's control, which is part of what makes it so dreaded.
Its range runs from general "harm" to a specifically deadly accident. The word itself does not spell out how bad the calamity is; the surrounding story does. Where the text makes the outcome fatal, the word carries the weight of death, but that lethal edge comes from the context, not from the word standing on its own. Ancient translators already felt this flexibility: the same term was once rendered "illness" and elsewhere "death."
The word lives in just two settings. Three times it voices a father's terror in the story of Joseph, where Jacob will not let Benjamin travel to Egypt for fear that some calamity will strike him on the road and drag him, grieving, down to the grave. Twice it appears in a single law about a pregnant woman caught in the middle of a brawl, where the presence or absence of such a calamity decides whether the penalty is a fine or a life for a life. That legal use has drawn attention far out of proportion to how rarely the word occurs.
A close cousin is the ordinary word for a sudden calamity (אֵיד), which falls on a person or a whole nation, often as judgment; this word, by contrast, leans toward a private, feared, and often fatal accident that overtakes one individual.
In the law of the injured pregnant woman, whom the presence or absence of this calamity concerns, and therefore what the "life for life" penalty in the next verse protects.
- majorityThe calamity is further harm to the mother, chiefly her death; the loss of the unborn child is compensated by a fine, and only the mother's death triggers "life for life." This is the reading of the ancient Jewish interpreters and of most critical scholars, and it matches the pattern of older Mesopotamian law such as the Laws of Hammurabi.; Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus (JPS Torah Commentary), 1991, 124-126; Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus (OTL), 1974, 471-473; Shalom M. Paul, Studies in the Book of the Covenant (VTSup 18), 1970, 70-77
- minorityThe verse describes a live premature birth, and the calamity applies to the mother or the child alike, so the death of either brings "life for life." The verb for the child coming out is the ordinary word for being born, and the clause leaves the victim unspecified.; Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, Magnes, 1967, 275; Meredith G. Kline, 'Lex Talionis and the Human Fetus,' JETS 20 (1977): 193-201; John Makujina, 'The Semantics of יצא in Exodus 21:22,' Bulletin for Biblical Research 23 (2013): 305-321
- minorityThe Greek Septuagint recast the distinction as one between an unformed and a formed fetus, imposing a fine for the unformed and a life for the formed. Most scholars judge this to reflect later Greek ideas about the development of the embryo rather than the original Hebrew, but it shaped Christian moral teaching for more than a thousand years.; John William Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Exodus (SBLSCS 30), 1990, 332-333; William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (Anchor Bible 2A), 2006, 224-227; Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 3.108-109
- minorityThe word is a technical term for death caused by an unknown hand: because two men were fighting, the one who struck the fatal blow cannot be identified, so the clause imposes a shared liability. A related view treats the talion clause as a later legal expansion.; Raymond Westbrook, 'Lex Talionis and Exodus 21, 22-25,' Revue Biblique 93 (1986): 52-69; Bernard S. Jackson, 'The Problem of Exodus XXI 22-5 (Ius Talionis),' Vetus Testamentum 23 (1973): 273-304
Disputed
Whether this word lexically means a fatal accident (that is, death) or a more general grave calamity whose fatal outcome is supplied only by the context.
- majorityThe word denotes grave harm or calamity in general; where it amounts to death, that is a specification drawn from the surrounding context rather than from the word itself, as its elastic ancient renderings show.; David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), I:345; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אָסוֹן
- minorityThe word is effectively a euphemism for a fatal accident or death.; KBL (Koehler-Baumgartner Lexicon, 1958), s.v. אָסוֹן ('toedlicher Unfall'); Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Nezikin 8; Targum Onkelos, Exodus 21:22-23