Truth Unites - Is Stoning Children Really Commanded in the Bible?

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Gavin Ortlund examines one of the Bible’s most difficult passages, Deuteronomy 21’s law concerning a rebellious son, and explores its historical context, purpose, and what it reveals about justice, mercy, and the character of God.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

In Deuteronomy 21, we have one of the most difficult passages in the Bible for modern readers. I'm going to put the whole thing up on the screen right now, but don't worry about trying to read it all through. In just a second, we'll work through every word. But essentially, this is a prescription for the stoning of a rebellious son. This is obviously a very tough text. And so what we want to do is work through it with full honesty, not skirting around anything, but just openheartedly leaning in and seeking understanding of what it's talking about. but here's an initial invitation I can make as a Christian who thinks Christianity is good

and wants to commend Christianity. If a passage like this makes you say, well, that's why I reject the Bible as a source of moral instruction. How barbaric, how cruel, how evil. If that's where you're coming from, I would just love to invite you to hear me out because even if we end up rejecting something, we want to reject it for what it is. We want to have an accurate understanding of that thing being rejected. and this passage is more complicated than it can seem at first pass. So let's work through this asking three questions. I hope this video could serve you all.

It's challenging facing these difficult passages in the Bible, but part of the conviction here is we can't avoid these. Like we have to talk about these because they're going to come up. So this is my effort to serve the body of Christ, but also I really mean that to maybe serve and bless those who might be curious about Christianity. Three questions. Number one, what is the law envisioned here? Number two, what's the crime?

being punished. And number three, what is the procedure that they follow? First, what is the law? Now, my first set of comments here on this first question are not an answer. They're just helping us frame the question more accurately. You can skip ahead in the timestamps at point number two if you really want to make a B-line for the answer. We have to start here because whenever we're reading any kind of literature, it helps to understand the literary genre. What kind of literature is it? Here we're dealing with an ancient civil law. And the first point we have to, we just, this is kind of obvious, but it's so important to emphasize this. Old Testament civil laws were never designed as timeless ideals that later people like modern people should follow. Laws for ancient Israel are laws for

ancient Israel. And even Jesus read the law like this, for example, concerning the divorce laws of just three chapters later in Deuteronomy. I'll put this up in color to make two points, so you see in red there, because of the hardness of your heart, Moses allowed. These divorce laws, according to Jesus, were a concession to human sin. In response to human sin, the law came in to curb against evil. Second of all, in purple, he says, from the beginning it was not so. The divorce laws of Deuteronomy 24 do not reflect God's creational ideal. This is not how God set up the world to work. Now, Jesus is not impuging scripture. Jesus has a very high view of the book of Deuteronomy. And the Pharisees are bringing a verse from Deuteronomy to him there. But what Jesus is doing is

reading the Bible in its historical context and according to its own purposes. Ancient Israel was a theocratic nation with civil laws that are tied specifically to her particular covenant identity and her calling to share in God's holiness. And so we need to be very clear about this just because, man, you have no idea how much my heart aches as I make a video like this. I know how many of you out there have experienced parental abuse or some other misuse of religion that results in violence and coercion. I get that. I know how devastating that is. It's tragically too common. Just to be really clear, no one should apply this verse today as a justification for violence. Okay. With that question in mind, or with that principle in mind, now we can target the more specific question that we are asking,

and that's, okay, granted it's not an ideal for the world today to follow. Why was it given to ancient Israel in the first place? Now we've targeted the question more accurately. Hopefully you see why that first point was important, pastoral. Now, to address this, we need to strive for an accurate understanding of what this law is depicting. And in particular, what is the crime here that is being punished? in the modern world, when we hear of rebellious children, we might think of a nine-year-old mouthing off at the dinner table or a 15-year-old refusing to clean their room, something like that.

That is not what is happening in this text. What our minds should go to would be more something like, number one, an older, maybe adult child. Number two, behavior that is damaging the community. I'm even going to say sabotaging. And number three, a stubborn persistence in that behavior over a course of time. Now, let me, before I justify that from the text, let me document I'm not alone in that perception. Sometimes scholars will speak of the rebellious son here as a defiant middle-aged adult.

You can see from Chris Wright, the language that this is not naughty young children, but a seriously delinquent young adult. Similar statement from Daniel Block. It's not about naughty children, but a young man who refuses to grow up and so forth. Okay, why does so, I could give lots more examples. I try not to camp out on the scholarship too much, and I'm not saying that's universal, but a lot of people think that. Why do people come to that conclusion? Let's read through the passage. This is the most important point right here, and I want to justify those three characteristics I just gave from the text.

And you'll note the key that I've underlined here. Verse 18, if a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives. And they shall say to the elders of his city, this our son is a, is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard. We'll come back to that in just a moment. Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst and all Israel shall hear and fear. Now sometimes little details can

shine a long light. This is fun to read text and you notice a little tiny thing and then it opens up a whole world. In this case, the parents' conclusive, summative comment, he is a glutton and a drunkard, or some translations, one of my commentaries translates a profligate and a drunkard helps us understand the severity of this situation. Nine-year-olds typically are not drunkards. Even 16-year-olds are typically not drunkards, though sadly that can. can happen sometimes, but the kind of scenario more likely envisioned here would be a much older and potentially adult child. In ancient Israel, households functioned very differently than in the modern West, where we have the nuclear family. Children in ancient Israel wouldn't typically

go off to college when they're 18 and then start an independent life and visit once a year for Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. The household in ancient Israel is a social and economic unit, typically a multi-generational reality tied together by land, inheritance, labor, and family authority. So the prospect of older children still living in the household is not at all implausible, and the reference to a son who's a glutton and a drunkard suggests something less like childish disobedience and more like an older child sabotaging the community. Now, why do we say sabotaging and damaging the community? We need to appreciate how common scarcity was in the ancient world.

Today, at least where I live in the United States and in many other places, if you have a neighbor down the street who's a glutton and a drunkard, it's probably going to not mean that you run out of food yourself. You can still go to Kroger and get what you need because we live in a time of such abundance. We forget how rare this is in world history. But in an ancient subsistence agrarian society, communities were more independent and economically vulnerable. So chronic drunkenness and wastefulness and a refusal to heed correction over a period of time is far more serious,

especially in a setting where the food, the labor, the land, and the future inheritance are all bound together. This is not a private vice. This is a betrayal of the broader community. And not only that, but the scenario envisioned in this law is a stubborn, persistence in this course of behavior for long pattern of time. I'll put back up verse 18 and you can note the phrase I have underlined here, though they discipline him, he will not listen. So we're not, we are not to envision from this passage a one-off offense, but rather a stubborn and persistent pattern of behavior that's exhausted previous efforts of correction. And that is also why the

child is introduced at the beginning of the verse as stubborn and rebellious, not just rebellious. So hopefully this helps us understand the severity of the issue. Look, if you get to the end of this video and you're still wrestling with this, oh, that's totally fair. I'm not trying to coerce someone or something like that. But the thing is, even if we struggle with this passage, we want to struggle with it because of what it actually is. So what we don't want to have, the thing I am trying with all of my heart to push against here is our minds conjuring up in ancient Israel, God commanding the stoning of like an eight-year-old for doing what an eight-year-old does, right? Children sometimes disobey. And there's lots of other texts about disciplining children and those sort of normal

scenarios for younger children. That's just not really what this law seems to be depicting. Actually, I think we can go so far as to say the categories in our minds should probably be more like Proverbs 1926, which I'll put on screen. And you can see this language of doing violence to your father and mother, which is something that sometimes happens. That happens in the ancient. world. I mean, unfortunately, you know, this is the kind of severe situation that can come up. And, you know, if you imagine like a 20-year-old young man who just will not stop sneaking out after everyone is asleep, stealing grain and wine from the supplies, nothing can stop this behavior. And it is causing other people to not have enough food to eat. That kind of extreme

scenario is not implausible as the kind of thing this text is envisioning. We can get a further confirmation of the extremity and the rarity of this circumstance being addressed in this law if we appreciate the procedure stipulated in the passage. Lots baked into these little details. Let's try to unpack it again. You may recall in verse 19 the reference to the gate. The gate was the, and the elders there. The gate was the place of public legal judgment. So the situation here is moving out of the realm of private family discipline and into formal adjudication by the leadership of the community, the elders here. So what you have is a twofold process.

First, the parents themselves initiate, and then secondly, the broader community enacts the discipline, the capital punishment. And importantly, it's the parents who are initiates. and then the civil authorities who carry out the sentence. So the parents have no authority to carry out this sentence on their own, and the civil authorities are not barging into the living room to initiate the process. And so in this two-fold sequence, what we want to appreciate is how rare this would be. Think how extreme this would have to get for the parents themselves to initiate this process about their own child.

In fact, in the entire Old Testament, we don't have any record of this particular law being carried out, which is not to say that it never was. But the point we're trying to make here is this is sort of an extreme circumstance. Now, there is discussion in the scholarship concerning how frequently the laws of the Old Testament concerning capital punishment would actually be carried out, as opposed to serving as a warning to curb against certain behaviors. And I want to be so careful here with this, working through this with fear and trembling before the truth, trying to serve the truth here. On the one hand, we don't want to take away from this particular law, and, you know, again, we want to face it fully. The whole point of this law,

you see in the final seven words I'll put back up, is to create the fear of the Lord. And so this law was designed to inculcate a sense of the seriousness of the Fifth Commandment, honor your father and your mother. One of the interesting things is the and your mother's involvement here. Some patriarchal societies who put more emphasis on the father. Here, the mother is involved in the process. That's another interesting little point. But we don't want to take away from what is happening here. We want, you know, there it is. There's the law.

Yes, this is there. But at the same time, and I don't have an opinion on this myself, I want you to be aware of the discussion in the scholarship about this. Walt Kaiser, an Old Testament scholar, makes this argument, and he's summarizing from others, that there are 16 crimes in the Old Testament law calling for the death penalty. And he says, only in the case of premeditated murder did the text say that the officials in Israel were forbidden to take a ransom or substitute. This has been widely interpreted to imply that in all the other 15 cases, the judges could commute the crimes deserving of capital punishment

by designating a ransom or substitute and goes on forbidden to give some examples of scholars that proposed this idea. What Kaiser is referring to there is Numbers 3531, where there's a forbidding of taking a ransom in the case of murder. And so what? what some scholars think is, well, this implies that you could have a ransom in other cases. Otherwise, why forbid it if that never happened? Now, again, I don't really have an opinion on that. I'm uncertain about that, but I want you to be aware of that. So that's another issue highlighting the extremity and rarity of this particular circumstance.

However, none of that makes the passage easy. What I am attempting to do in this video is give us an accurate understanding of what is going on here. That doesn't take away the difficulty. I think it takes away the wildest caricatures that come up from this. but this is a difficult text. Now, I have to say, the more I struggle with these Old Testament passages, it's not surprising that we're going to be challenged by laws from 3,000 years ago. The ancient Near East was a very brutal place.

Anything from any culture at that time is going to be surprising and bracing for modern people. The cultural differences are so vast. But I think it's a fair appeal for me to make to judge the particular details in the Bible in light of the larger whole of the Bible. Just like if you had a friend, and you've known this person for seven years, and you've got a lot of data to work from and watching his pattern of behavior and his speech,

and there's a couple of occasions where he says something that really puzzles you, you're not just going to immediately take that in the most cynical way. You're going to interpret those details in light of the broader relationship you have with this person. And so I want to step back from Deuteronomy 21 now

and situate this particular law, again, reminding us, this is not the creational ideal. This is a particular law for an ancient nation. It wouldn't have really been surprising to the other nations at that time. It reflects that ancient context, but it's also dealing with a very severe circumstance. But yes, let's acknowledge this is a command for the stoning of this person. This is a very severe crime. And so this is the response. So then you say, what do you do with that? How do you fit that into the broader story of the Bible? Well, the overriding, this is what I like to say, is step back from the detail, see the big picture. If anyone else,

struggles with these texts. Oh, how I hope this could just be a help to you with respect to the truth. Let's see the overriding emphasis of the Old Testament law. Because it is different in some important respects from other ancient Near Eastern law codes. And one of the motifs that I detect, and I find so beautiful, is the emphasis upon care for the vulnerable. Over and over, for example, The Lord commands that since the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, they must now have compassion on the sojourner and outsider who's among them. Now on screen, you can see just three examples. There are so many others. And in particular, one aspect of the character of God, as it's revealed from the whole Bible, as we look at it, that I really want to emphasize because it is so thrilling and beautiful.

And I think the Christian story of this has actually shaped some of our inclinations today about this topic is God's care for children. right so if all you read was Deuteronomy 21 you might be wondering about that a little more if you read that verse in the larger context you see actually this is a god who's constantly sticking up for the vulnerable against the bullies and children would be one example of that a favorite example of mine i love the story of hagar for some reason and when ishmael is crying in the wilderness hagar has been sent away this is genesis 21 and she thinks she's going to die she's run out of water and the child, Ishmael is crying. Twice the text emphasizes in verse 17, God heard the voice of the boy. Just, I don't think it's wrong for me to emphasize this point because I think it's consistent with the whole of the biblical revelation of the character of God.

God hears the crying of the child. God has compassion. Can we even fathom how much compassion God has on little children? Another way we see this is Jesus, of course. I think one of the clearest windows into the heart of Christ is his attitude toward little ones, the little children in Mark 10, for example. He says, he's indignant that they're being held back. He says, no, no, no, these are the people I'm here for.

And then he says, it says in verse 16, as you can see on screen here, he takes them in his arms and he blesses them, laying his hands on them. Jesus can't keep his hands off the kids. He's hugging them. You know, what's the look on Jesus's face as he's loving on these kids? this is the heart of God for children. And so that's the broader biblical backdrop that we should interpret difficult laws

like Deuteronomy 21 in light of. And I think that encourages not being overly cynical in using our imagination for how a law like that would be applied. We're not taking away from it. It's a harsh penalty. Ancient laws were. But we're situating it in context.

Last point, we mentioned the idea of ransom earlier. I think that motif gets us right into the very heart and essence of the Christian story. In other words, if there's a broader biblical backdrop story that we want to interpret the details in light of, it's certainly this. You've got, in numbers 35, you know, no ransom can be accepted because blood guilt can't simply be waved away. Justice matters. So on the one hand, you have this habit of ransoms and substitutes because of the desire for mercy. On the other hand, you have the desire for justice, in some cases, premeditated murder, that's not good enough. You find this tension between the desire for mercy,

the desire for justice, of course. How can we not at that moment think of the cross? This is the epicenter of Christianity. This is where God himself becomes the ransom. The perfect spotless eternal son of God goes all the way to a cross to fulfill the demands of justice and yet also to exhibit God's desire to show mercy. That is the clearest revelation of the heart of God. the details in light of the big picture, and the big picture is a God who's willing to hang on a cross to save you. That is a God who is worthy of all of our trust. Let me know what you guys think about this video. What am I missing? Help me think it through. I'll read the comments. Thanks for watching.