What does "an eye for an eye" actually mean in the Torah?

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (ayin tachat ayin) appears three times in the Torah — Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21 — and it is one of the most misread lines in the entire text. Read as bare English, it sounds like a mandate for literal physical retaliation. Jewish legal tradition has never read it that way, and the reasons are laid out at length in the Talmud, tractate Bava Kamma (83b–84a). The rabbis ask a simple practical question: what happens when a one-eyed assailant blinds someone with two eyes, or a person missing a limb causes someone else to lose one? Literal application becomes impossible or wildly disproportionate the moment cases stop being symmetrical, which the sages took as evidence the phrase was never meant literally. Rashi’s commentary on Exodus 21:24 makes the reading explicit, glossing the verse as a requirement to pay “the value of his eye” — monetary compensation calibrated to the injury, not physical mutilation in kind. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, reasons from the immediately preceding verses (Exodus 21:18–19), which openly describe compensating an injured party in money for lost work and medical costs, to argue the eye-for-an-eye formula was using the same monetary logic all along. So functionally, the verse establishes a principle of proportionality — the punishment must fit the harm, no more and no less — enforced through calibrated compensation rather than mirrored injury. No rabbinic court in Jewish legal history is recorded as having carried out literal retaliatory mutilation under this law.