I have been thinking about social contracts and covenants here recently, when I happened upon a description of the discoverer of the Nag Hammadi Library in a book by Bart Ehrman:

Mohammed Ali and his family had for a long time been involved in a blood feud with a tribe in a neighboring village. It hard started some six months earlier, when Ali’s father, serving as a night watchman over some imported German irrigation machinery, had shot and killed an intruder. By the next day, Ali’s father had himself been murdered by the intruder’s family. Several weeks after they discovered the old books in the jar, Mohammed and his brothers were told that their father’s murderer was asleep by the side of the road, next to a pot of sugarcane molasses. They grabbed their mattocks, found the fellow still asleep, and hacked him to death. They then ripped open his chest, pulled out his still warm heart, and ate it–the ultimate act of blood vengeance.

Uhhhhh Wuuuuuuuut? This is some seriously advanced blood feuding. Makes those mixed martial arts guys look like pansies.