You shall not kill.
This has been worked over too often because certain folks like to play games with English translations. Our Suzerain here merely reiterates what He said back in the days of Noah: His domain shall not be disturbed by unjustified slaying of humans. Lesser creatures are a distinctly different matter in His eyes. It doesn’t take much thinking to realize a casual attitude about the lives of others has already been condemned in previous commandments, so this is nothing new.
What we like to forget is the underlying justice issue. First, God gets to say who dies and when, and He says man should die by natural causes — by God’s own hand — or by means of removing a threat to society. Not society as we know it today, but society as He meant it to be. When someone so distrusts the Suzerain’s sense of justice they can’t wait for Him to take care of something His way, they turn to things like murder to get their way. The explanations later in the Torah are careful to distinguish between starting a fight, slipping into a valid conflict, and simply defending yourself. You should restrain your passions in favor of trusting the society in which you live to work things out.
But this system is valid only if your society is structured as God intended. The modern state bears no resemblance to what God intended, so it cannot pretend to carry out justice. The duty of executing a threat falls to those most closely related to that threat. This is the other edge of the same sword from the previous commandment of taking the family seriously. The family has to take it’s duties seriously, too.
As a side note, ancient biblical justice meant if one of your family did an injustice to another, you were obliged to turn that member over to their justice, if that one would not submit voluntarily. The Suzerain would moderate, of course, so that retribution never exceeded the damage done. The underlying issue is obvious: God does not take lightly folks usurping His prerogatives. There is a God in Heaven, and you are not Him.
