Digest of Biblical Civil Law

The Zacchaeus story [Luke 19:1-10] provides and example of "repaying" a debt of corruption and injustice and of making restitution  for past sins.  Exo. 22:1 says that whoever steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it must pay back four or five to one.  Num. 5:5-7 says, "When a man or a woman wrongs another . . . the person shall make restitution for the wrong, adding one-fifth to it, and giving it to the one who was wronged."  The repentant tax collector, Zacchaeus, gave half of his possessions to the poor and paid his victims four times the amount he had stolen.  In Virginia, the legislature took a step in 2004 toward "atoning" for the state's massive resistance campaingns in the 1950s and 1960s to the enforcement of federally mandated educational equality between the races.  They did so by creating a scholarship fund for blacks whose schools were shut down between 1954 and 1964.  Racial restitution or reparations could take the form of expanding educational opportunities for young black Americans who are still trapped in substandard schools.  Education is the modern asset most equivalent to the old "forty acres and a mule" start-up investment.
 - Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening:  Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America 164-65.