Bible Verse That Says Killing a Woman Is Punishable by Death and Killing the Baby Is Not
President Donald Trump holds a Bible equally he visits outside St. John's Church across Lafayette Park from the White House on June one, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
(RNS) — One of the standout images of gimmicky politics is that of President Donald Trump, probably the most profane person to ever occupy the White House, belongings a Bible in front of a boarded-upward St. John's Lafayette Church building, a sign to his evangelical Christian supporters of his unwavering bail with them.
That bond hangs on the president's championing of evangelicals' pro-life beliefs. It'due south that same impulse that has brought Amy Coney Barrett, a bourgeois Catholic, to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. Regardless of the president's personal morality, the argument runs that Trump backs "biblical values" and so tin exist viewed as an agent of God.
It's worth noting at this laissez passer in American history that the supposed "biblical values" he champions often have picayune basis in the Bible. This disconnect is nowhere more axiomatic than in the debate about ballgame and the supposed "right to life."
The Bible's ambivalence on the subject of a right to life begins in its beginning book, Genesis. In affiliate ix, God tells Noah afterward the flood: "Whoever sheds the blood of a human being, by a homo shall that person's blood exist shed, for in his own image God made humankind."
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Since human being beings are created in the image of God, life is protected, just the penalty for bloodshed is more bloodshed. God can even demand human sacrifice on occasion, almost famously in the case of Abraham and Isaac, and the death punishment is routinely in the Bible for all sorts of offenses. The Bible, in fact, lacks any soapbox of human rights. Life is a gift from God: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
The debate about a right to life is not primarily concerned with the death sentence, yet, but with abortion. Given the importance conservative Christians, Cosmic and Protestant, have granted abortion in contempo years, some might assume that their own opposition stems, in some way, from biblical teachings. Just in the entire corpus of biblical law, ballgame is never mentioned.
Guess Amy Coney Barrett speaks subsequently President Donald Trump announced Barrett every bit his nominee to the Supreme Court, in the Rose Garden at the White House, on Sept. 26, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The practice was certainly known in antiquity. A prescription for ballgame tin can be found in an Egyptian papyrus dating back to the 16th century BCE. The only people in the ancient Near East who explicitly condemned it were the Assyrians, who were primarily known for their cruelty in state of war rather than for their humane concerns about the lives of the vulnerable.
Ballgame was known, at least as a possibility, in Israel. The prophet Jeremiah curses the 24-hour interval he was born and the homo who brought the news to his father, "because he did not impale me in the womb so my mother would have been my grave."
Withal in that location is no police in the Bible forbidding the practice.
The text that served as the ground for later on word in Jewish tradition is in Exodus, whose 21st chapter reads (in Hebrew): "When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, only no other impairment occurs," there is a fiscal punishment.
The Greek translation of this poetry is quite different, in line with Greek views most the beginning of life: "If ii men fight and strike a meaning woman and her child comes out not fully formed, he (the striker) volition be forced to pay a penalty. But if it is fully formed, he shall give life for life." A person who kills a "fully formed" baby is discipline to the decease penalty, as a murderer would exist. If the infant was not fully formed, the punishment is financial, every bit was typical for property crimes.
This translation has been interpreted to mean that by implication, the permissibility of abortion, too, depends on whether the fetus is fully formed.
On the issue of when the fetus reaches this stage, opinions have fluctuated through the centuries. In later Jewish tradition, which is based on the Bible but tries to fill in the gaps where the Bible is not explicit, the issue is often whether the greater function of the head has emerged. If it has, abortion is no longer an pick. In some cases, the infant has only been deemed a person when it is fully built-in. Modern medicine permits greater awareness of stages of development within the womb.
An accidental miscarriage, of form, is not the same affair as an intentional ballgame. As far as abortion itself goes, the Jewish historian Josephus, writing at the cease of the kickoff century CE, claims that the Police force of Moses — that is, the starting time 5 books of the Hebrew Bible or Quondam Attestation — forbids abortion and regards it as infanticide, but at that place is no such law in the Bible.
More typical of Jewish tradition is the Mishnah (a drove of laws based on oral tradition, written downward well-nigh 200 CE), which allows abortion in the case of hard, potentially life-threatening labor, since the life of the mother takes precedence over that of the child.
In that location is no discussion of abortion in the New Attestation. The first explicit condemnations of ballgame in Christian tradition appear in the 2nd century CE in the Didache, a writing that claims to be based on the teachings of the apostles, and the Epistle of Barnabas, another early Christian work, modeled on the letters of Paul.
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While the Bible does not prevent ballgame, information technology does non let it either. It simply says naught most information technology. Perchance it was non widely practiced. It was a dangerous process, not to be undertaken lightly. Children were generally regarded as a blessing and childlessness as an disease.
But for whatsoever reason, the Bible provides no definitive ruling on the subject. Information technology neither affirms a right to life for the fetus nor a woman's right to choose.
Such putative rights take a identify in modern discussion. Anybody in the modern world, regardless of religious commitment, is shaped by the legacy of the Enlightenment, which gave us the discourse of human rights. Christians can point to a long tradition of condemnation of abortion, dating back to the menstruation just afterwards the New Attestation, and may reasonably feel that this tradition carries weight.
But at that place is no line to be drawn from Trump's Bible display to a Supreme Court justice who may overturn Roe. v. Wade — or rather no line that is not heavily overdrawn by politics. Just Christians who plough to Scripture to trump a political debate with the force of biblical authorisation should exist reminded that the Bible does not really say annihilation at all on the topic. On this issue, there is no divine revelation to exist had.
(John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Erstwhile Testament at Yale Divinity Schoolhouse and author of "What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Cardinal Ethical Issues." The views expressed in this commentary exercise not necessarily reflect those of Faith News Service.)
Source: https://religionnews.com/2020/10/16/what-does-the-bible-really-say-about-abortion/
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