to avenge: to set a wrong right by punishing the wrongdoer, as a rightful authority and not as a private grudge
This is the verb behind the words English Bibles render "avenge," "take vengeance," or "requite." Its modern English equivalents are misleading. To us "vengeance" suggests a personal grudge paid back in kind, the cycle of feud and retaliation. The Hebrew word points the other way: it names the rightful punishment of wrong by someone with the authority to deliver it, far more often God than any human being.
Because the word is about who has the right to repay a wrong, its various uses sort out by who is doing the avenging and whether they are entitled to.
- Most often the one acting is God himself, who repays oppressors and so rescues those they crushed.
- Sometimes a person carries it out, but as God's appointed agent or as a redress the law allows, not on private initiative.
- The law also fixes a set penalty for shed blood and calls that requital by this same word.
- And in a handful of places the word names exactly what it must not become: a private score-settling that Scripture forbids or condemns.
The thread tying these together is that repaying a wrong belongs, by right, to God. That is why the same Bible that celebrates God as the avenger of the wronged flatly forbids his people to take such payback into their own hands. Vengeance is not denied; it is handed upward, to the only Judge who can be trusted with it.