On the other hand, in the civil law systems when new countries are formed, as soon as you get the core laws passed (which takes some years of transition) you do generally make a clean start where only the new code of laws matter and everything else is discarded - you explicitly choose which parts of earlier code get included in the new laws, and that's it, old laws get pulled out only if there's a relevant dispute about some events which happened back when those old laws were in force.
One must wonder if its host nation-state had survived for longer, what iteration would be out in the wild.
"Eye for an eye" comes from the Book of Exodus, and it was meant not as a prescription, but as a limitation:
> The intent behind the principle was to restrict compensation to the value of the loss.[1]
So it was also a prescription - but yes, as you say, it is also a limitation for retaliation, assigning an equivalent punishment to limit escalation of vengeance.