Where in the Bible Does It Say Killing Babies
President Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John's Church building 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 e'er occupy the White Firm, holding a Bible in front of a boarded-upwardly St. John'southward Lafayette Church, a sign to his evangelical Christian supporters of his unwavering bail with them.
That bond hangs on the president'south championing of evangelicals' pro-life behavior. It's that same impulse that has brought Amy Coney Barrett, a bourgeois Cosmic, to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. Regardless of the president'due south personal morality, the argument runs that Trump backs "biblical values" and then tin be viewed as an amanuensis of God.
It's worth noting at this laissez passer in American history that the supposed "biblical values" he champions oftentimes accept niggling basis in the Bible. This disconnect is nowhere more evident than in the debate about abortion and the supposed "right to life."
The Bible's ambivalence on the subject of a right to life begins in its offset book, Genesis. In affiliate 9, God tells Noah after the flood: "Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed, for in his own paradigm God made humankind."
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Since human being beings are created in the image of God, life is protected, simply the penalty for bloodshed is more bloodshed. God can even demand human cede on occasion, about famously in the example of Abraham and Isaac, and the death punishment is routinely in the Bible for all sorts of offenses. The Bible, in fact, lacks whatever discourse of human rights. Life is a souvenir from God: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
The debate most a correct to life is non primarily concerned with the death penalty, notwithstanding, just with abortion. Given the importance conservative Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have granted ballgame in recent years, some might assume that their own opposition stems, in some fashion, from biblical teachings. But in the unabridged corpus of biblical police, abortion is never mentioned.
Guess Amy Coney Barrett speaks afterward President Donald Trump announced Barrett equally his nominee to the Supreme Courtroom, in the Rose Garden at the White Business firm, on Sept. 26, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The practice was certainly known in artifact. A prescription for ballgame tin can be found in an Egyptian papyrus dating back to the 16th century BCE. The simply people in the ancient About Due east who explicitly condemned it were the Assyrians, who were primarily known for their cruelty in war rather than for their humane concerns almost the lives of the vulnerable.
Ballgame was known, at least every bit a possibility, in Israel. The prophet Jeremiah curses the day he was built-in and the man who brought the news to his father, "considering he did non kill me in the womb and then my mother would take been my grave."
Yet there is no law in the Bible forbidding the practice.
The text that served every bit the ground for later discussion in Jewish tradition is in Exodus, whose 21st chapter reads (in Hebrew): "When people who are fighting hurt a pregnant adult female and so that there is a miscarriage, but no other impairment occurs," there is a financial penalty.
The Greek translation of this poetry is quite different, in line with Greek views about the beginning of life: "If two men fight and strike a pregnant adult female and her child comes out not fully formed, he (the striker) volition be forced to pay a penalty. Simply if it is fully formed, he shall give life for life." A person who kills a "fully formed" baby is subject to the death penalisation, every bit a murderer would be. If the baby was not fully formed, the penalty is financial, as was typical for property crimes.
This translation has been interpreted to hateful that by implication, the permissibility of abortion, too, depends on whether the fetus is fully formed.
On the result of when the fetus reaches this stage, opinions accept fluctuated through the centuries. In later Jewish tradition, which is based on the Bible only tries to fill in the gaps where the Bible is not explicit, the effect is often whether the greater function of the head has emerged. If information technology has, abortion is no longer an choice. In some cases, the baby has only been accounted a person when it is fully born. Modern medicine permits greater awareness of stages of development inside the womb.
An adventitious miscarriage, of course, is not the same matter as an intentional ballgame. Equally far as ballgame itself goes, the Jewish historian Josephus, writing at the end of the first century CE, claims that the Law of Moses — that is, the showtime five books of the Hebrew Bible or Former Testament — forbids ballgame and regards it as infanticide, simply at that place is no such law in the Bible.
More typical of Jewish tradition is the Mishnah (a collection of laws based on oral tradition, written down virtually 200 CE), which allows abortion in the case of hard, potentially life-threatening labor, since the life of the female parent takes precedence over that of the child.
There is no give-and-take of abortion in the New Testament. The first explicit condemnations of ballgame in Christian tradition appear in the second century CE in the Didache, a writing that claims to exist 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 forbid ballgame, information technology does not permit it either. It just says goose egg about it. Peradventure it was not widely proficient. Information technology was a dangerous procedure, not to be undertaken lightly. Children were generally regarded as a blessing and childlessness as an affliction.
But for whatever reason, the Bible provides no definitive ruling on the subject. Information technology neither affirms a correct to life for the fetus nor a woman's correct to cull.
Such putative rights have a place in modern discussion. Anybody in the modernistic world, regardless of religious commitment, is shaped past 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 menstruum but after the New Testament, and may reasonably feel that this tradition carries weight.
But there is no line to be drawn from Trump'due south Bible brandish to a Supreme Courtroom justice who may overturn Roe. v. Wade — or rather no line that is not heavily overdrawn past politics. But Christians who turn to Scripture to trump a political debate with the force of biblical authority should exist reminded that the Bible does non actually say anything at all on the topic. On this issue, there is no divine revelation to be had.
(John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Former Testament at Yale Divinity School and author of "What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Central Upstanding Issues." The views expressed in this commentary exercise not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Source: https://religionnews.com/2020/10/16/what-does-the-bible-really-say-about-abortion/
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