Ep 23: Abortion and the Bible

00:00"There are a lot of folks who think the Bible is fully on one side or fully on the other and I think we're gonna make things a little more complicated."

00:09"Well, I mean, that's the thing, right? The whole problem with these either or propositions and the Bible is that it never takes all position. It's always a much more nuanced conversation."

00:25"And that's for things that the Bible actually might even take an actual stance on. This issue, the Bible has no stance on. What are you saying?"

00:35"I'm saying that the Bible absolutely nowhere actually addresses the practice of abortion."

00:45"Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan." "And I'm Dan Beacher." "And you are listening to the Data Overdome of the Podcast where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?"

01:02"Just rockin' and rollin', man." "This one's a big one, man. We're tackling issue."

01:08"This one is heavy, and so content warning for those who are sensitive to this kind of thing. We are going to be talking about abortion."

01:21"That's right. We're diving in. The whole show, one topic, and we're not going to decide for once and for all which position you should take on abortion. I think that's safe to say."

01:37"But we are going to explore what the Bible has to say, and we are going to dive into arguments on many sides of the issue and see if the arguments actually hold water."

01:56"I think that's a big part of the question."

02:00"And I think if anything, we're going to muddy the waters a little bit. There are a lot of folks who think the Bible is fully on one side or fully on the other, and I think we're going to make things a little more complicated."

02:12"Well, I mean, that's the thing, right? The whole problem with these either/or propositions and the Bible is that it never takes all position. It's always a much more nuanced conversation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to believe something."

02:32"And that's for things that the Bible actually might even take an actual stance on. This issue, the Bible has no stance on."

02:42"What are you saying?"

02:44"I'm saying that the Bible absolutely nowhere actually addresses the practice of abortion. However, some of the constituent, some of the issues that are part of the debate around abortion are addressed to one degree or another in the Bible.

03:01But lest anyone think that we, at least I'm going to speak for myself here, is just in love with the idea of abortion, because that is an accusation that sometimes gets thrown at me when I address these concepts, I agree with the principle that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

03:26And I think that the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that the best way to reduce, to mitigate the occurrence of it, is to provide increased access to women's health care, to contraception, and to comprehensive sex education.

03:41And so for those of you who think I'm out here trying to increase the occurrence of abortion, the opposite is true."

03:50Yeah, I think, I mean, you are trying to increase all those other evil things, like contraception, and sexual education, etc. But absolutely, I think we can agree on all of that stuff.

04:04You know, if you hate the idea of abortion, preventing an unwanted pregnancy is probably your first should be your first line of defense. That is the prerequisite for every elective abortion that has ever occurred.

04:22Yes, an unwanted pregnancy. So we can take a step back and say, "There's your problem." Yeah. All right. So with a caveat in mind.

04:33With a conclusion at the beginning, let's dive in. There's some things that I wanted to get to.

04:40Yeah. So let's start with the idea of the Bible being against abortion. We're going to make a pro-life biblical argument.

04:53And I've seen this, I've researched it, I've looked around, I think that the biblical argument against abortion can be fairly, I think it's fair to say that you can sum it up in this sort of very basic argument, which is premise one, it's morally wrong to kill a human.

05:15I think caveats abound for that, but we'll start with that premise to a fetus is a human.

05:25And then like sort of a little half premise of like abortion kills is the killing of a fetus. And then so the conclusion is, therefore, it is morally wrong to kill a fetus.

05:36Does that seem like a fair sort of summation of the argument?

05:41I think that is a fair summation of the argument that is made by those who would be arguing against the legality and the morality of abortion in general.

05:52Right. Right. So the support for premise one, which is just the morally wrong to kill a human, probably their strongest biblical support is that one of the 10 commandments about thou shalt not kill.

06:07Right. Yeah. Well, and thou shalt not kill is not a great translation. Okay.

06:14So you have a couple of different words in Hebrew that can be translated kill generically. However, what we have in Exodus 20 verse 13 is none of those words.

06:25It's a word. The root in Hebrew is ratsach. And this verbal root refers to illegal killing. So premeditated murder. So this is something distinct from just the generic sense of kill that could be used in reference to murder, but also in reference

06:44to self-defense or to killing in battle or something like that. Yeah. Because we have lots of instances, biblical instances of condoned killing. Absolutely.

06:56So, so yeah, it's not just kill, but yeah, wrongfully kill an innocent person. Is that a fair way of saying it?

07:04And what is important to note here is that illegal killing or wrongful killing is relative to the society that you're in.

07:12This is something that is socially curated and that is not an absolute line. It's something that changes from society to society and even from time to time.

07:25So that I think qualification needs to be made that one part of the Bible may understand illegal killing to be a very different set of criteria than another part of the Bible, much less than 21st century United States of America.

07:41So we're already muddying up the waters a little bit. Back to that multi-vocality of the Bible. Yup. Darn you Bible. Why can you be more perspicuous?

07:55Okay, I'll look up the word perspicuous. The perspicuity of scripture is one of the central dogmas of conservative Christianity. It means clarity clear. Okay, sure. Okay, wonderful.

08:09Alright, so premise two is our big sticking point, right? Because premise two is the claim that a fetus is a human.

08:20Yeah, this is something that again is relative because I think when you look throughout history, the debate has not actually focused on is it a human being or not a human being.

08:34The debates have focused overwhelmingly on is it a person? Personhood is something that is distinct from a member of the species homo sapiens.

08:48Okay, let's define them then. Well, I'm not huge on definitions, but I will talk about how I forgot who I was talking to.

08:58I beg your pardon. But there are my mind. There are folks who have attempted to define them or at least describe them in the past.

09:10And historically, the consensus view for as long as we can go back has been that personhood is rarely perceived to pre-exist what has become known as the quickening.

09:26So that is when a fetus begins to move independently in the womb. So when you can start to feel movement in the womb and this corresponds more or less with the what we might call a fully formed fetus.

09:43It is identifiable as a human as opposed to an embryo that may not be identifiable where this embryo could still become twins or this embryo's sex has not yet been established.

10:00So historically, when we look even at early Christianity, when we look at the 2000 years since then, when we look at other societies within Jewish cultures within other what we might label non Western societies.

10:17Very rarely does anyone say an embryo or a fetus that is not yet fully formed or that is not moving on its own has personhood or has the qualities of being a something recognizable as a person.

10:33And there are some societies that would push it off even even further within Judaism it tends to be closer to birth for the most part.

10:41The fetus is considered a part of the woman's thigh within some of the early rabbinic discussions, and it has something approximating personhood but it doesn't achieve full personhood until it's actually born and draws a breath.

10:58There are some societies where the newborn has to survive for a month or two before it is now considered an actual person. And so this there's tons and tons of research on personhood through legal through philosophical through neuro scientific through cognitive

11:16and all different kinds of disciplines. There's been research and debate on how do we establish when the person begins. And so folks who want to dodge that debate and say no it just matters when human life begins.

11:32What is the historical novelty that is the revisionist take on things historically and it's and it's also deeply problematic because if we're going to call that collection of cells a human life then, you know, also a collection of, you know, cancer tumor cells

11:52could be considered, you know what I mean? Like, like there's a whole, I'm not making that claim. I am just saying that when something is that that is a problematic argument to make.

12:06And as we get into these biblical texts, we're actually going to see that the Bible has a position on personhood over and against the threshold of human life.

12:20Let me start with a couple of scriptures and these are scriptures that I've I have read people claim are indicative of personhood for a a fetus in the womb or an entity in the womb you've got Jeremiah one verse five says before I formed you in the womb I knew you

12:43and before you were born I consecrated you I appointed you a prophet to the nations. Now I find this problematic because it talks about before you were even in the womb.

12:57So I don't know that it's actually talking about the the actual womb inhabitant. Yeah, the overwhelming consensus is that the Hebrew here is referring to what is occurring prior to actual conception.

13:15Yeah, so from the start this is talking about God's foreknowledge of Jeremiah and so it's not talking about once you began to be formed in the womb it's talking about even before that ever happened.

13:29I knew about you and according to most Bible based theologies God has foreknowledge of all people and has since eternity. That does not mean that all people who will ever be born already have full legal and moral personhood.

13:49So from the start this this horse doesn't even get out of the gate. If we're actually taking seriously what the text says. Yeah. All right, well then that's okay because that's not the only thing we got.

14:01Right. We also have Psalm 130. And the other sorry to interrupt. No, no, there's one other thing about Jeremiah as well. This is actually speaking of Jeremiah as an exception to the rule.

14:16So we have this idea that God knew most of the prophetic calls happen when the prophet is already an adult and it's like aha you I'm calling you.

14:27And so this is an exception. This is where God is saying mmm wasn't even when you were an adult wasn't even when you were born before you even started forming in the womb. I had already ordained you to be a prophet.

14:40So this is an exception to the rule. So if we're trying to suggest that this attributes personhood to fetuses then this would need to be the norm.

14:51But God knowing the people before they're even formed in the womb is not established by Jeremiah one five because Jeremiah one five is saying unlike every other person.

15:03I knew you before you were even formed in the womb. So this is an exception, not the rule. So is not generalizable to all humans.

15:13That's fair. I had to get that out. So it could be that just aborting Jeremiah would be a problem, but everybody else is fine.

15:22If we ignore that yeah that Jeremiah was that this is talking about before Jeremiah was even conceived. Right. All right. So I'm going to take us to Psalm 139.

15:33Because now we're in the womb. This is decidedly in the womb. We're in verse 13 and it says, for it was you who formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother's womb.

15:46Yeah. The idea here being, at least when it's made as an argument as a pro life argument, it's that like, yeah, this was created by God in the womb.

15:59Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? I think there are a lot of assumptions that are going on here. The fact that God kind of has is curating the development of the fetus is not an argument that the author of this text.

16:15The author of this text understood the fetus to be in possession of full legal and moral personhood so ostensibly according to most again most Bible based theologies God is the creator of all that is.

16:27And so God also would be the creator of a horse developing within the womb, or a little seahorse developing in the womb and I don't know why I'm stuck on horses but that's where it went.

16:39And so if God is the creator of all things and has curation of the lilies of the field and the birds that fly in the air and oversees all of this, then this is in no way, shape, or form, an attribution of personhood, full legal and moral personhood to the entity being constructed within the womb.

17:00That makes sense. Also, I mean it says you knit me together. Let me tell you something. It's not a sweater until it's complete. You know what I mean? You got a half knit thing there. We're not going to call that a person.

17:15I'll jump to Luke, because I think that this one's an interesting one. I've heard this one many times. And this one actually has a little bit of extra to it. I think it's a slightly more fascinating take on whether on on personhood of womb occupants.

17:36And this one says, this is Luke 41, or no, sorry, Luke one 41 and 42. It says, and it came to pass that when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary Mary, Mary is, I believe she's announcing that she is pregnant with with Jesus or going to be pregnant with Jesus.

17:55She's pregnant at his moment. Yeah. Okay. And Elizabeth is pregnant also at the time. And it says, and when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost.

18:11So it seems to be indicating that both that not only was Elizabeth happy about Mary's news, but also Elizabeth's baby was pretty stoked was jumping around for joy.

18:26Yeah, yeah, which raises a bunch of questions. And I'll start by saying that even if we accepted this as indicating the personhood of John the Baptist, it is a post quickening personhood.

18:43It is not John leaping prior to his ability to move within the womb. So it would not establish that this personhood extends all the way back to conception.

18:55But to get to that, we have to cross these questions, which I think are very problematic. One being, if this establishes if this is supposed to be generalizable to all humanity every fetus is the suggestion really that fetuses one can recognize the voices of others outside

19:19the womb, whom they have never heard before.

19:25And two, this means that the fetal John not only knows whose voice that is, but whose baby or who they're carrying in their womb and the mission and the identity of that entity being carried in that individual's womb.

19:43That is not an attribution of kind of natural cognition to a fetus. That is supernatural cognition, which brings up the point that earlier in this chapter, we have another identification of John as an exception to the rule, because it says

20:01he will be filled with the spirit even before he is born, which is foreshadowing this leaping in the womb, which obviously is a product of the machinations of the spirit.

20:14And so basically, this text is stating the spirit made John leap in the womb, and that is unlike every other human that has ever existed. So there's another way of looking at it too, which is just that Elizabeth was so excited that her, you know, whatever was happening inside of her made.

20:32So hormones are something galvanized this reaction. Yeah, that's another way to look at it. The notion that the author here is attributing is suggesting that full personhood is attributable to a fetus in the womb is not demonstrated.

20:52But even if we accepted the argument, which again is taking an exception to the rule and trying to turn it into the rule, it still would only establish personhood with a fully formed fetus that could move in the womb. In other words, a post quickening personhood.

21:11And so the notion that this extends that personhood back to the moment of conception is not in evidence at all.

21:21All right, fine. Fine. I'll move on to another one.

21:26I'm going to go to Romans. I may be springing some of these on you. We discussed a few of these.

21:32We didn't discuss Romans. No, no, no, I'm going to spring it on you. This is what I'm doing. These are gotchas. I'm going to get you.

21:40Romans nine has is talking about Rebecca. It says something similar happened to Rebecca when she had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac.

21:54Even before they had been born or done anything good or bad so that God's purpose of election might continue, not by works, but by a call she was told the elder shall survive the younger again.

22:07I think we're just back to maybe and, you know, we answered this a little bit when we were talking before.

22:12The fact that God had an idea of the person before birth doesn't mean that that person has achieved personhood in the womb.

22:28Right, right. It's a demonstration of God's foreknowledge, which for readers of the Bible today extends back to the Eternities.

22:40And additionally, I think we I don't know that it's in Romans, but in the actual text where it talks about these twins, it talks about them struggling within the womb.

22:48And that would be another example of obviously fully formed fetuses that are already capable of independent movement. So a post quickening concept.

22:57If we accept the argument that there is personhood attributed to them, which I will argue is not a biblical view.

23:07Although in this part of the New Testament, I think it's probably closer to it's more plausible than in the Hebrew Bible.

23:15Okay. Are there any other scriptures that you want to go over in the in the sort of pro life argument side of things?

23:25None that none that I find convincing. I will say that there there are a handful of scriptures two or three that I think come the closest to a plausible argument.

23:36And they're all in the New Testament. So they're all talking about an early Christian perspective.

23:42They're not direct evidence, but it's plausible that they could reflect a general opposition to abortion, not necessarily any abortion at any point in a pregnancy, but generically speaking.

23:57The references to or the, the denigration, the condemnation of those who work what is sometimes translated as sorcery. It is translating the word pharmacia in Greek.

24:12And this usually refers to using different kinds of potions and mixes and stuff to curse people or things like that, but could also refer to elixirs and things that could have been mixed together to fight.

24:26And so it is plausible that the authors of these texts that talk about pharmacia and condemn pharmacia considered a board of fashions to be included within that general condemnation. So I think in all the Bible, the best case someone could make is that some New Testament

24:50authors considered a board of fashions to be included in the pharmacia, the sorcery that they were condemning. That does not, however, address the question of where they thought the threshold of personhood was.

25:04Well, and also like the fact that it's plausible that that could be what they're talking about doesn't mean that we know that it was. Right. It's not positive evidence. It's just a plausibility. So, I mean, you can't use that to say the Bible definitively is anti-abortion because we don't even know if that's what they were talking about.

25:25It's possible. And then again, also, I think you made an interesting point. I think that there's an interesting point here to be made about the fact that almost nothing in the Bible applies universally.

25:39The rules that are laid down, even as we said, the 10 commandments, thou shalt not kill, sounds definitive, and yet is completely ignored in other parts of the Bible, depending on who's saying who should be killed and blah, blah, blah.

26:00Nothing's applied universally. Almost nothing. So, so to say, even if we were to say that those authors in the New Testament were opposed to this form of, you know, abortion potion, that would still not get us to the Bible is anti-abortion.

26:22That would still not get us there, even if we granted all of that. Right. That would require presupposing univocality and then presupposing that particular reading of that text when in fact we see a lot of conflicting perspectives on a lot of different moral

26:36and ethical questions in the Bible. And so, what do we give priority? What do we marginalize and ignore? Well, that depends on how we want the Bible to speak to us.

26:47That depends on what we want to find in the Bible, which is usually a good sign that we are not trying to understand the Bible.

26:56We are trying to leverage the Bible as an authoritative text, as a proof text for our dogmas and our ideologies, which largely are rooted in our own contemporary identity politics and the ethics we've been conditioned to accept and to assert.

27:15Which is an interesting point, I don't want to get too into the weeds about this, but it is useful to note that it was only very recently in our culture's history, especially American culture's history, that the majority of Christians became anti-abortion.

27:35Yes. Up until the late '70s, early '80s, the vast majority of non-Catholic Christians were actually fine with abortion.

27:47I would say they weren't jazzed about it, but they were of the opinion that I expressed at the beginning of this episode that it should be safe, legal, and rare.

27:59And so, for instance, the president of this Southern Baptist Convention, when Roe v. Wade was decided, said, "Hey, we're fine with this.

28:08This decision is between a woman and her doctor and God, and we're going to stay out of it."

28:13And there were anti-abortion activists within evangelicalism, but the biggest players and the consensus view within evangelicalism was, "We're okay with this until we had folks like Paul Weirich and Jerry Falwell put their heads together and say, we need to galvanize a religious right.

28:35We need to get agents of conservative Christianity into the government." And this was primarily because they wanted to protect their universities, that they did not want to admit black students to from being forced into that.

28:50And so thus began this campaign of turning abortion into a central evangelical identity marker. And so, like you said, that was late '70s, early '80s is when the balance shifted, and that took over as central identity marker for evangelicalism.

29:10Indeed. So there you go. It's not like it was even, you know, a lot of people have this feeling like it was ever thus, and thus it would ever be, but that's not at all the case.

29:23In fact, I think even among Catholics, it wasn't until the 19th century that a opposition to pre-quickening abortion became salient and conspicuous. Prior to that, for the 1900 years before that, the consensus view within Christianity was precisely that it was at the moment where the fetus is fully formed, where it is recognizably human, where it is moving on its own accord, that abortion

29:52then becomes a problem or murder or something like that. So personhood throughout the overwhelming majority of the history of Christianity has been viewed as something achieved at some point within the gestational period and not at the moment of conception, although there are exceptions, and we'll get to those later.

30:14Well, or as you say, sometimes a little bit after birth. Yes. Yes. So there's also that possibility. Well, okay, so there we have the argument, the pro-life argument, it doesn't seem too strong to make a biblical pro-life argument.

30:31Yeah, I think at most you could say, within the New Testament, it seems like there was a belief that personhood was achieved around the quickening, and so they were most likely opposed to abortion at that time.

30:45And we actually have a couple of texts that dedicate the epistle of Barnabas, some other second-century Christian texts that are firmly opposed to abortion, and they seem to be quite popular, quite widespread, and explicitly address it, although without discussing how far back personhood goes.

31:05So it seems likely that the earliest Christians were opposed to abortion, and so that's why it's more plausible that this is the position within the New Testament, but yeah, the Bible itself, nowhere directly addresses it.

31:21Okay, all right, well, I'm going to go the opposite route now, and I'm going to try to sum up some of the arguments on the other side where people are saying the Bible doesn't support a pro-life position.

31:38Okay. And we'll start, I think, with the one that you and I have sort of, I'm not going to say, clashed over, but you had to sort of put me in my place about it a little bit, and I'm going to let you do it again now, because my humiliation is everyone's entertainment,

31:57because I have used Numbers 5 as an example, I thought, of when the Bible actually has an explicit abortion, and I don't think that it does.

32:13I've reread it in multiple translations, and I think I was wrong about that, but I've seen plenty of people who are closer to my side of the argument, making this same argument.

32:27So let me present it, and then you can tell me why I was an idiot. So the idea is that there is a question, which is, if we don't know, there's a woman and her husband suspects that she has been unfaithful, suspects that she has had an affair with another man,

32:53who takes her to the priest, and there is basically a big ritual that is to be done to determine whether or not she was faithful, was pure, was whatever you want to say.

33:10So this is Numbers 5, it starts in verse 11 and goes down through stuff, but basically, the ritual is that there's an offering, there's a grain offering, and then the woman has to drink some bitter water.

33:29And then there's some tricky language, it says, "And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass that if she be defiled and have done trespass against her husband, that the water causes the curse shall enter into her and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot, and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

33:58And if the woman be not defiled but be clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive seed."

34:03Now, I and many others have read that to mean that if she were pregnant from the other guy, her thigh shall rot, the thigh thing, you explained it earlier, you'll have to re-explain it, it's very confusing to me.

34:21But I read that as she would miscarry, or she would then basically, this ritual will have caused an abortion.

34:31Yeah, that is, it's not an uncommon reading, like the passage we're going to get to a little later in Exodus, like the reading I'm going to support is overwhelmingly the consensus view.

34:52So the issue comes down to the two verbs that are used here, her belly shall swell in the KJV. This verb is "sava" in Hebrew, "sadi, bait, hay."

35:05And it only occurs in a couple of places. Actually, I think it only occurs twice, once in verse 27 and once in verse 22.

35:15And we're not exactly sure what it means. There's an Arabic cognate we think that means to grow or to sprout.

35:27And so we have the KJV render swell, but some people would suggest sprout, we're thinking of a flower like sprouting blooming.

35:36Well, maybe this is the baby coming out. If we kind of go that conceptual route, it could also mean it distends, swells up, which could just be a disfiguration.

35:50So we don't really have a way to know which one of these conceptual routes we should take. And then the next one, it says her thigh will, shall rot in the King James Version, the verbal root there is nafal, which means to fall.

36:05And so her thigh will fall, her thigh will droop, sag, something like that. Again, we could take this in the direction of disfiguration, or we could take it in the direction of the fetus will fall out.

36:21Now, there's an argument to make for the, for the kind of miscarriage slash abortion reading to this. However, I don't think it fits within the broader context, because when we look at other literature to see if language like this imagery like this is being used.

36:42It's primarily being used in places to reflect a curse of infertility, where genitals are disfigured and disformed in order to be a sign of infertility.

36:56And I think one of the strongest indicators that that is the case here is that the very next verse says, and I'll read from the King James Version just because we're in that groove. And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive seed.

37:14And this is unambiguously pointing into the future. She has not conceived here. She will conceive, which I think indicates that whatever is precipitated, this ritual, this ordeal, it is not a pregnancy.

37:32If it were a pregnancy, then it would just say, and she'll have a healthy baby. But no, it's saying she will conceive, or she will be blessed with fertility.

37:43And so I think the imagery and the context suggests there is suspicion of infidelity, and either she's going to be cursed or even killed with this kind of curse of disfigurements of infertility, or if she's innocent, she would be blessed with fertility.

38:03And I think one of the indications that that's how this text was understood by the earliest readers is that we see this being debated, this ordeal by early rabbis who were arguing whether or not it would be appropriate to submit a pregnant woman to this ordeal.

38:21In other words, they don't understand the text to be presupposing a pregnancy, and they are wondering, "Hey, if that infidelity resulted in a pregnancy, if that is what raised the suspicions, is that appropriate?"

38:34And I think ultimately they decided it would be appropriate. But yeah, if a woman was pregnant and they went through this, none of this process would actually result in a forced miscarriage or an abortion.

38:50This is sympathetic magic. For lack of a better word, we're going to write a curse and scrape it into some water and you're going to drink the water. That's not an actual abortive fashion.

39:01But yes, if this were actually to take place and this curse were actually to occur, it would result in the death of any fetus that were present. So in that sense, there is a, you could say, if a pregnant woman were to participate, yes, that would abort the child.

39:25So if you want to go that route, you could argue that, yeah, it would abort any fetus that were present. Although I am not a huge fan of going this route for another reason, and that is that if this were to result in the death of a fetus, it would be against the will and the agency of the woman involved.

39:50This is something that is forced upon a woman, not something that she is engaging in voluntarily. And so where the pregnant woman's agency is completely ignored.

40:02I don't think it is rhetorically helpful to appeal to this story as a way to suggest that abortion was an option for women in the ancient world.

40:14Listen, if we're going to be looking, if we have to only allow for scripture that actually supports the agency of women, we're going to be looking for a minute.

40:25Don't hold your breath. Yeah, absolutely.

40:28But I do, I mean, I'm going to just say, you took me away from this as being an argument, and then you put me back into it. So I'm going to say that this one's a possible argument.

40:40Okay, although I will say where the agency of women is championed in the Bible, it usually has to do with her sexual agency.

40:49And that's an interesting point. Her deployment of her sexual agency to get what she needs within a system that is stacked against her.

40:58Right.

41:00Although you say that I'm about to take us to Exodus where women and agency are not going to be a part of this, a strong part of this next question.

41:11Not at all. So Exodus 21, we're in the part of Exodus that is just rules about everything.

41:21Yeah, I mean, we're talking rules about what have, who gets what if somebody's ox falls in a hole? It's granular about a lot of things.

41:32Very specific. If an ox gets out of its pen and gore somebody and the owner has been warned before about letting his ox get out of his pen to gore people, you kill the owner.

41:43Yeah, it's very specific.

41:45And oddly so, like not in the way, like, yeah, okay, that's fine. But I think we can glean some interesting stuff from some of these things. And we're talking specifically now about two different sort of scenarios, both in which strangely men are fighting

42:10and then a woman is injured. Yes.

42:15What is happening?

42:18How often did women just get caught up in a middle of a man fight and then get injured or whatever?

42:28And this is not the only law that addresses what happens if two men are fighting and a woman gets involved.

42:34The other one is where if two men are fighting and one of the men's wives grabs the other guy by the genitals, then she gets her hand cut off.

42:44Yeah, don't do that, ladies. Don't dive in and grab your husband's opponent's junk.

42:51And there's a comedian on TikTok who shared this passage and I'm sorry I forget the creator's name, but I responded to it. But his presentation of the story is chef's kiss. It is so funny.

43:07However, in Exodus 21, 22 through 25, if you want to go all the way to the end of the legislation, it's talking about two men are fighting and they accidentally injure a pregnant woman.

43:21There are two outcomes for which we have penalties prescribed. One of the outcomes is if this causes the woman to miscarry.

43:32And the fine is that the husband imposes a fine on the other gentleman.

43:39Right.

43:40Who's not a gentleman, obviously.

43:43And the other outcome that is addressed is if the injury causes the death of the pregnant woman, in which case the text says, you will give life for life, eye for tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound.

43:57So this is what's known as talionic justice, whatever happened to the victim, you do the same to the perpetrator. And so this is the death penalty.

44:08And there is, there have been attempts to try to reread these two scenarios as referring to what happens to the fetus, where the first scenario is this enders the pregnant woman and causes her to give premature birth.

44:26But, and the Hebrew is a little cryptic here. It says, and there will not be harm, asone is the word in Hebrew.

44:37And so the text literally in Hebrew says, two men are fighting and they hit the pregnant woman and her children go out and no harm occurs.

44:52And so this is sometimes interpreted to refer to premature birth, where no harm actually comes to the prematurely born child.

45:00And then the other scenario is if the prematurely born child actually passes away.

45:06And so this would, I would suggest be an awful reading of this text for a couple of different readings.

45:14The first is that if this causes the premature birth of the child, but no further harm comes to the child, there's no material loss.

45:23And that would violate the entire logic of the legislation of the Hebrew Bible, which imposes fines where there is material loss.

45:32So there would be no penalty at all, if two men caused a woman to give premature birth to a healthy child. So that's nonsensical.

45:43And the, and people argue that, well, the verbal root here, yatsah, which means to go out to depart, that is used to refer to natural birth.

45:54And yes, it can be used to refer to natural birth. I don't know that it's used to refer to premature birth anywhere, but it can also be used to refer to a miscarriage.

46:04And so that's not determinative, noting that we have this verbal root yatsah.

46:09And also the word for child there is in the plural, which I suggest may indicate this is an abstract plural. And so we're not actually referring to, it's not like this law only applies to twins.

46:23I'm suggesting this is the, you can have, you can use the plural to take a noun and render it an abstraction. And so her pregnancy leaves her. In other words, she loses her child. So that would be a perfectly legitimate reading of that plural form of that noun.

46:43So the other reason that this is clearly a wrong interpretation of this passage is that we know exactly where the author of the covenant code Exodus 21 got this law from, because they're taking most of their laws from the laws of Hammurabi.

47:00In fact, you mean directly from the mouth of God. Okay, you go ahead and tell me about her Hammurabi. That's fine. So laws of Hammurabi coming from about 1000 years before the covenant code has been written.

47:14There's a wonderful book by a scholar, a former Latter-day Saint scholar named David Wright called inventing God's law, where he demonstrates, I think convincingly, that the covenant code is borrowing directly from the laws of Hammurabi showing that the content, even the order that the content is going

47:34to match is the way it's presented in the laws of Hammurabi and the laws of Hammurabi have a section for what to do should a female citizen who is pregnant be injured by a man and either lose her pregnancy or be killed herself.

47:51And this matches laws that we find in Middle Assyrian laws and other ancient South West Asian law codes that address the exact same scenario. What happens when a man injures a pregnant woman and she either miscarries or is killed.

48:08It's always the same two scenarios and so we have no grounds to say Exodus 21 is presenting two entirely different scenarios.

48:16And so I would say that this is a pretty cut and dry situation where it's referring to, it's referring to the loss of a fetus as property loss. Right. This is not a person.

48:30Because if it were a person, then we'd be back to life for life, life for an eye tooth for a tooth. But instead, it's just a fee. It is a monetary reimbursement required. Right. So, and the husband is considered the owner of this property.

48:48And therefore, he is the one who assesses the fine. And so this is a pretty clear indication that at least in this period, the composition of the covenant code, a fetus was not considered to be a full person.

49:03It was considered closer to property than to a person. And I think the argument is pretty strong that this obtains throughout the entire pregnancy. In other words, the quickening was not the achievement of full personhood.

49:17It was birth that was considered the threshold of personhood, at least in this period.

49:23Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there are multiple scriptures that do talk about the breathing of life, the breath being the moment of personhood, or at least I've heard that argument being made.

49:38Yeah. So if we go to Genesis 2, 7, we have the idea that God formed the man and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And he became a living soul.

49:49What's funny is that there are two words that are frequently translated life. Well, there are three.

49:56Chai chai is one kind of the standard word for life. But we also have Nefesh and Ruach. And both of those actually mean breath.

50:09So Nefesh is sometimes translated soul. There's a whole debate to be had about that. And there's a great book by Richard Steiner.

50:20It should be called disembodied souls, but talks about the different type of Nefesh concepts in the Hebrew Bible.

50:29But Nefesh means neck or breath. And then Ruach can mean wind, can mean spirit, can mean breath. And it is also used as a euphemism for life.

50:41We have references in the flood story and in elsewhere to God killing everything that breeds everything that draws breath.

50:51And so it never says, Hey, if it doesn't have breath, it's not a person. But throughout the entire Hebrew Bible, breath is treated as the very essence of life.

51:03And so this is why within Judaism, within the majority streams of Judaism, personhood is considered to be achieved at the drawing of the first breath.

51:15And I would suggest that that accords with what we see in Exodus 21. And so it's not that the Bible explicitly says this.

51:23I mean, Genesis 27, just like we can't say that, well, this is an exception over here with John the Baptist in the womb, Genesis 27 is not establishing that this is, you know, can be generalized to all humanity.

51:37But it points in the direction of the conceptualization of life as requiring breath. And so within the Hebrew Bible, I would suggest that that is their threshold for personhood.

51:51There's another. Okay. So I feel like, I feel like that's a pretty strong argument, not for pro choice, but against the idea that it is clear that the Bible is pro life.

52:07Yeah, I think we, I think that, I think that as like, if we take the Bible as a whole, especially, I think it's pretty, it's pretty clear that it is not that you can't make the argument that the Bible is definitively anti abortion.

52:25Yeah, at best you can say a minority of the passages in the Bible are plausibly opposed to abortion at some period within a pregnancy.

52:37And, and even that portion that could plausibly be argued to be taking that position is taking that position not because God said so, but because they're actually adopting Greek philosophical frameworks, because this was actually a debate going on among Greek philosophers when personhood started.

52:58And so for Plato, you have this idea that personhood, the person begins at conception for, I think it's Pythagoras, the idea is that no, the person does not start and tell birth.

53:16And then Aristotle was right in the middle saying no, the person starts at the quickening or at the period, the, the fully formed fetus where it is recognizably a human and so these debates were going on at the time.

53:30And the Aristotelian position kind of takes the lead within early Christianity and you have early Christians debating this saying, well, if it's before the quickening, it's ethically wrong, but it's not murder.

53:42If it's after the quickening, it's murder.

53:45You have others saying it's not wrong at all.

53:48If it happens before the quickening because this is nothing remotely approximating a person.

53:54And then once you have the quickening, it's murder.

53:56You have others saying it's not murder until you actually have birth, but a lot of this is responding to Greco Roman practices associated with abortion, particularly as a result of sex work.

54:11And also exposure, which was a practice that was, it was waning in popularity once you get into the Christian period, but it was something that was still conventionally associated with the more the excesses of the Greco Roman world so Christianity was in large part, pushing

54:28back against what it saw as inappropriate practices within the Greco Roman world.

54:33And, you know, people took different stances depending on which philosophical framework they thought made more sense to them.

54:40Well, all I can say is thank goodness we live in the modern era when the question of when a person achieves personhood is solved and everything's easy now and we've cracked the code and we know exactly when personhood starts.

54:55I do want to mention, I want to mention one thing that I have never heard discussed and me and I'm springing this on you too, you may not have an answer and that's okay.

55:11The final question of abortion, at least from a legalistic standpoint, is that none of what we've discussed so far addresses the woman's bodily autonomy question at all.

55:27The question of whether a woman or a sorry a pregnant person can be made to support another life at at hazards to her own life at risk to her own life and I think that that is a it is one of the most salient legal questions that we have to answer.

55:48I mean, like, if you if you're not comfortable saying that, you know, someone could be forced to donate a kidney to save another person's life, then you shouldn't be tremendously comfortable saying that a woman or a person a pregnant person could should be forced to support

56:05a life using her own body at hazard to her own health. Well, and more extreme example is the fact that it is totally illegal to take an organ out of a deceased body, even if it is the only possible way to save a life.

56:21A dead person in our country has more bodily autonomy than women do. Yeah, in under certain under certain rules. Yes. Yes. And so, but the bodily autonomy of women in the Bible is not great, not salient.

56:40She was she was in many ways she had a degree of personhood a higher degree of personhood than a slave a lesser degree of personhood than obviously a male citizen, but was also to a large degree considered property.

56:55So it's these aren't black and white categories. There was overlap. There was bleeding in and out of these categories. There were it was integration. So a woman could both have personhood and also be considered somewhat property, but bodily autonomy.

57:10Yeah, that wasn't really considered by the authors of the Bible.

57:15Well, there you have it. I got to say, Dan, I don't think the Bible is tremendously useful for this conversation. No, no. Anyone who appeals to the Bible as the trump card in this debate does not understand either the Bible or or the debate.

57:31Yeah. So, well, as promised, I don't think that we've actually solved anything other than other than saying, you know, if you're appealing to the Bible, cut it out. It's not you got nothing. Yeah, your your your appeal is not meaningful.

57:46Yeah. And we don't we're not here to solve stuff. We're here to muddy the water and upset people. Yeah, exactly. That's if we've done that mission accomplished.

57:56Well, there you go. I think you and I are going to have a little more discussion about this in the patrons only content. That'll be fun. So if you are a patron, tune in for that. If you're not a patron, you can go ahead and become one.

58:10And then you'll get all the patrons only content and, you know, you'll be you'll have the privilege of knowing that you're helping the show go to do so. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you want to reach out to us, you can find us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and Dan, thanks so much for another interesting show.

58:35Dan, thank you. I appreciate it. And I hope everybody has a wonderful week. See you next week. Goodbye. Bye everybody.