cstu said
The purpose of the story was to show that the priest was capable of making an actual abortion-inducing drink in order to terrify women so much that they wouldn’t even consider committing adultery. Whether the priest was actually able to do so did not matter, what mattered is that women believed they could (even with dusty water). These are not scientific people priests were trying to convince, but uneducated people who believed in magic.
No. What matters is you erred, can’t seem to admit it, and now want to pretend the ancients made the same mistake you did.
I blame that on pride. It’s said to be one of the seven deadly sins, you know.
I think that this is tricky. If the “womb discharging” result is in fact the forcing of a miscarriage, it is an abortion-inducing concoction even if the key ingredient is supernatural. Maybe it is rendered okay since it is God who is the catalyst for the effect; and maybe it is okay because it is punishment to the woman for adultery, although the potential child of the adulterous union is still destroyed.
JAS said
I think that this is tricky. If the “womb discharging” result is in fact the forcing of a miscarriage, it is an abortion-inducing concoction even if the key ingredient is supernatural. Maybe it is rendered okay since it is God who is the catalyst for the effect; and maybe it is okay because it is punishment to the woman for adultery, although the potential child of the adulterous union is still destroyed.
It is a difficult pericope to puzzle through when it comes to the punishment God places on the woman.
But presumably the punishment would apply to the adulteress whether she had been impregnated or not.
So we probably are talking about a consequence that is not simply a miscarriage.
That’s just my guess, of course. And a whole bunch of smart people have translated it in different ways.
Oh, I agree that much more than a miscarriage is implied, assuming that the a miscarriage is indeed a part of it. The clear implication seems to be a future inability to conceive, and possibly even to participate in the standard sexual act. But within that broader punishment, an abortion is at least suggested. It should at least give modern forced-birthers claiming a biblical basis for their cause some pause . . . but, of course, it won’t.
JAS said
Oh, I agree that much more than a miscarriage is implied, assuming that the a miscarriage is indeed a part of it. The clear implication seems to be a future inability to conceive, and possibly even to participate in the standard sexual act. But within that broader punishment, an abortion is at least suggested. It should at least give modern forced-birthers claiming a biblical basis for their cause some pause . . . but, of course, it won’t.
I would argue, technically, if God did it, it was a miscarriage rather than an abortion.
But here’s a side note. Since the drink was simply water and dust, nothing was ever likely to happen.
So this ritual was less about determining guilt than promoting domestic tranquility.
The priest got an offering. The woman got exonerated. And the suspicious husband got peace of mind. Everyone would win.
Suspicion is mentioned frequently in the story. And that may be what was at the heart of the matter.
Judith said
There always will be abortions. Do we want to return to a time when it meant risking lives to get them? As a believer, Jeremiah 1:4-5 and many otherBiblical scriptures have us known by God before we were born making it moot the question of when a fetus becomes a person. I believe abortion is
wrong but just as bad is having a child born unwanted, despised and abused.
Truly. Consider Matthew 26:24? “The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”
I think it was Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford professor of biology, who noted in one of his lectures an ad by IKEA in which a lamp was discarded and later adopted by someone from a pile of junk left out as trash. We actually feel sorry for the lamp, well many people do — an object that I hope few would consider as having sentience or a soul. This is what people do — we imbue things with human attributes, from our pets to stuffed toys. And I think this is what we do for a cluster of cells that, at best, is merely a potential human life assuming that many, many things go more or less the way that they need to for that life to develop and emerge. Is it wrong to have a growth on the skin removed? It may have human DNA in it, but surely it is not a human life.
One trick with a child developing in the womb is that it has precisely the status conferred on it by the woman who is carrying it (unless that status is determined by circumstances beyond her control). It is a child as long as she intends to carry it to full term, and it is a problem to be removed as long as she perceives it as a problem. Because it is a potential human life, with a potential, eventually, for existing independently of the woman who carries it, we grant it some degree of status as it approaches that point at which it can live without being in the womb. This is the genius of the moderate pro-choice position, as it acknowledges the developing nature of this dependency, and balances the two potentially competing interests. (The genius of the “pro-life” position is that it preys on our generally optimistic preferences for the ultimate fate of the child and its mother, and on our ability to feel an emotional connection to that IKEA lamp.)
Some years ago, there was a common “pro-life” stunt by which a young child, usually a lovely little girl, would come up to the microphone at a political meeting and ask a candidate if it would have been okay for her mother to have had her aborted. This stunt threw quite a few candidates, until someone finally realized the right answer was to say something to the effect that “I cannot speak to you or your situation, but I can say that if my mother had chosen to have me aborted, that would have been okay because I would never have known about it.”
CEJ said
cstu said
The purpose of the story was to show that the priest was capable of making an actual abortion-inducing drink in order to terrify women so much that they wouldn’t even consider committing adultery. Whether the priest was actually able to do so did not matter, what mattered is that women believed they could (even with dusty water). These are not scientific people priests were trying to convince, but uneducated people who believed in magic.
No. What matters is you erred, can’t seem to admit it, and now want to pretend the ancients made the same mistake you did.
I blame that on pride. It’s said to be one of the seven deadly sins, you know.
Where’s the error?
JAS said
Water and dust, and perhaps guilt and fear of being found out.CEJ said
JAS said
Oh, I agree that much more than a miscarriage is implied, assuming that the a miscarriage is indeed a part of it. The clear implication seems to be a future inability to conceive, and possibly even to participate in the standard sexual act. But within that broader punishment, an abortion is at least suggested. It should at least give modern forced-birthers claiming a biblical basis for their cause some pause . . . but, of course, it won’t.
I would argue, technically, if God did it, it was a miscarriage rather than an abortion.
But here’s a side note. Since the drink was simply water and dust, nothing was ever likely to happen.
So this ritual was less about determining guilt than promoting domestic tranquility.
The priest got an offering. The woman got exonerated. And the suspicious husband got peace of mind. Everyone would win.
Suspicion is mentioned frequently in the story. And that may be what was at the heart of the matter.
That was one aspect of it (if the woman indeed cheated), the other is that the story terrified woman so much that they wouldn’t cheat in the first place.
cstu said
Where’s the error?
Whether you’re actually confused or merely deceitful is something only you know for sure.
If it is a matter of confusion, maybe go back and slowly reread the thread, eh?
I doubt anyone will notice your lips are moving while you do it.
If it’s a matter of deceit, well, there’s probably no cure for that. It’s a character flaw you’ll likely have to live with.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert