NOTES for Exo 23:4
The Torah, like the Bible as a whole, never encouraged revenge and never prompted anyone to vengefulness. There is, of course, among the laws of the Torah the one Jesus quotes in the Sermon on the Mount, about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This norm was part of the principle consistently carried through in the legislation of the Book of Exodus: the principle of talion, of recompense and compensation. But this principle can be put into practice in different ways. For example, one can adopt a law prescribing payment of monetary compensation to the one who has suffered damage. There are many such norms in the same Book of Exodus.
If a person caused someone personal or property damage, as a rule he is sentenced precisely to compensate the damage inflicted, often in a multiple amount. In the case of personal injury, the one who inflicted it is obliged to pay for the victim's treatment and support him at his own expense until his capacity for work is restored. And if this does not happen, the guilty person is obliged to support the victim at his own expense until the end of his days. The norm following the principle "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" was rather a survival from the past, when revenge was the only, or at least the chief, way of settling relations and compensating for harm inflicted.
Here the matter is more about limitation than prescription: that for one eye knocked out, both eyes should not be knocked out of the guilty person, and that he should not be deprived of all his teeth for the loss of one by the victim. But even in such a limited version, revenge still remained revenge. It is no accident that Jesus abolishes this norm: it was an obvious concession to human sinfulness. And how the Torah actually regards revenge is easy to see from the example of the law forbidding one to take it out on an enemy's property. One must not use a misfortune that has happened to a person in order to do him evil, even if he is your enemy.
At most, if there is no way at all to restrain oneself, one may inflict proportional damage on him, especially if, for example, a fight is involved. But one must not take revenge even on one's enemy at every opportunity. Such revenge without limits means only one thing: endless and unceasing hatred toward the one on whom revenge is taken. Hatred with which it is impossible to live. And not even because, hating in this way, sooner or later you may kill the one you hate, but because by this hatred you kill yourself. Forever and irrevocably.