It is difficult to know when retribution was first used as a philosophy of justice, but the concept regularly recurs in many religions. There are mentions of it in several religious texts, including the Bible and the Qurʾān. In the Christian tradition, for example, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden because they violated God's rules and thus deserved to be punished.
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Many Christians believe sinners will suffer a fiery afterlife for their transgressions. The Qurʾān discusses retribution by God for those who are disobedient or wicked. Allah is specifically addressed as the Lord of Retribution in a selection that discusses those who reject beliefs in him. The Buddhist Dhammapada mentions retribution as following bad acts, and the Hindu Bhagavadgita ties retribution to bad karma.
Most legal scholars agree that restorative and retributive justice elements coexisted for centuries in justice systems that recognized the value of victims and their recovery from harm perpetuated by offenders. In 451–450 BCE, the Law of Twelve Tables was drafted by a committee of Roman judges.
Those laws signaled the end of private justice achieved through blood feuds by confirming compensation as the accepted method of justice in ancient Rome. In the Twelve Tables, restitution was the sanction of choice for most crimes, and victim retaliation was tolerated only when attempts to obtain restitution had failed. In many respects, the Twelve Tables indicated the beginning of state-involved justice.
The collapse of the Roman Empire led to a reassertion of private justice in the 5th century CE. British rulers noted problems with relying on private justice and tried to remedy the situation by issuing successive legal codes, such as Aethelberht I's laws in the early 7th century. By the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, Anglo-Saxon justice had been successfully restored to a system that typically involved payment of a wergild (or wergeld) to compensate victims or their families for the harms they suffered.
The wergild system reduced reliance on private vengeance, because victims or their families could expect restitution, and private revenge was undesirable because such vengeance had often been met with additional violence. Wergilds were paid to the victims or their families, and more serious injuries meant paying a higher wergild. The highest wergild was paid for homicide, the smallest for injuries that healed quickly, such as bruises.