Why does god want to cut off women's hands?

[Ryantology]

I disagree. I don't think that most societies want to put people in jail, but rather they'd prefer their citizens to be law-abiding.

It depends on what the law is designed to enforce. If the law is constructed so as to protect the people who are to follow it, then most times, not so. When the law is nothing more than a tool to legitimize a despot's arbitrary whims, as is the case with God's law with its multifarious examples of harsh and disproportionate retribution, then it is, at best, tantamount to making psychopathic behavior official.

For all you know, the statute in question was completely effective as a preventative, and never needed to be enforced.

Except, the likelihood of this is virtually nonexistent, and it's irrelevant either way.

If the result is loss of reproductive ability for the man, then loss of a hand is a disproportionately light sentence.

Perhaps that says something about the functionality of your penis, but a man without his penis is inconvenienced. A woman without a hand is seriously handicapped.

And a woman's maximum punishment is less than that of a man's in this case. It's a compromise.

Compromise implies an imperfect system, which implies an imperfect god. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.