"Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death. But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place to which he may flee. But if a man willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar, that he may die. "Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death. "Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death. "When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and the man does not die but takes to his bed, then if the man rises again and walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear; only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him thoroughly healed.
Exodus 21:12-19
The death penalty was inflicted for smiting parents, stealing (15, 16), and for such matters as breaking the Sabbath, adultery, and so on. We do not do this nowadays, and the law is very substantially modified in those directions. But this is not to say that these severe penalties were wrong then. Israel in those days was a people under discipline, and God had begun to fulfil His purposes in and through them. And where you have a new thing being established, the disciplines have necessarily to be very strict. When the New Testament Church was born it was very important that its purity should be safeguarded, because it was purity alone that could enable it to go forward. It was for this reason that God visited the sin of Ananias and Sapphira with such severity. God does not ordinarily smite with death people who tell lies, but on this particular occasion He did so, for so much depended on the purity of the fellowship. To have left their sin unchecked would have been to leave an evil leaven that would have affected the entire fellowship disastrously. In the same way, God had a special purpose for His people at this particular time; everything depended on their being a certain kind of people, and it was therefore of the utmost importance that the hedging-in by the law should be of the most stringent nature. A modern parallel existed in the former Soviet Union. Communism regarded itself as having a mission in the world, and it was therefore important to safeguard the purity of the Movement against corruption. It is not surprising, therefore, that the death penalty had been inflicted in Russia for crimes like profiteering. The sin was against the State, and therefore could not be tolerated. This is the kind of emphasis we have in these verses, and in this situation.