vengeance: repaying a wrong with the punishment it deserves.
This word names retribution, the paying back of a wrong with the punishment that wrong has earned. In the Bible it belongs, far more often than not, to God. It is not primarily a hot personal grudge; it is a measured response to real evil, and its aim is as much to rescue the wronged as to punish the guilty.
The word itself is neutral about who is right. The setting decides that. Most of the time it is the vengeance that is God's alone, whether he carries it out himself or hands it to a king, an army, or his faithful people to carry out for him. A few times it is spiteful human payback, and there the text plainly condemns it. Ezekiel shows both edges in the space of three verses: because the Philistines took vengeance with a hateful heart, God says he will pay them back with vengeance of his own.
The prophets turn the word into a promise. When God announces a day of vengeance against Babylon or against Israel's oppressors, the flip side of punishing the oppressor is delivering the people who were crushed. So the same word that sounds only fearsome can be, for the victim, a word of hope: the wrong will not stand, and the God who sees it will set it right.
Nuances
Disputed
The semantic center of the root nqm behind this noun: whether it denotes retributive vengeance or requital broadly (spanning divine justice and, in a few texts, condemned human revenge), or more narrowly the legitimate exercise of punitive sovereign authority (vindication) as distinct from private vendetta.
- majorityRetributive vengeance or requital: the word covers the repaying of a wrong with deserved punishment, ranging from God's just retribution to condemned human revenge. This is the reading of the standard lexica and of Peels's monograph.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. נקמה; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. נקמה; H. G. L. Peels, The Vengeance of God (Oudtestamentische Studiën 31; Brill, 1995)
- minorityLegitimate punitive vindication: the root centers on the rightful exercise of sovereign, punitive authority to redress wrong rather than on private vendetta, so rendering it by vengeance in the vendetta sense misrepresents it.; George E. Mendenhall, "The Vengeance of Yahweh," in The Tenth Generation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)