Within Reason - #94 Dan McClellan - What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Dan McClellan is an American public scholar of the Bible and religion. His forthcoming book, "The Bible Says So", is available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan McClellan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Alex. I appreciate it. What do people get most wrong about using the Bible in order to instruct how we live today, our ethical ideas, our practices, that kind of stuff? There's an awful lot, but I think the thing that undergirds probably the majority of the misuse of the Bible in order to try to instruct behavior is the presupposition of univocality. the notion that it all speaks from one single unified perspective and with one single unified voice, meaning that it can't ever disagree with itself. And I think that is distorting because

if you are presupposing that there is always a single answer to every question in the Bible, and it all agrees with itself, in order to actually overcome the pluriformity and the disagreement that's actually in the Bible, you have to impose some kind of unifying framework on it. And that's pretty, and because a lot of that is going on subconsciously, that overwhelmingly is going to result in you reading what you want into the Bible. You're going to give priority to the passages that agree with your worldview and your identity politics. And then those that don't, those that complicate or undermine your worldview or your identity politics, you're going to reinterpret them, you're going to subordinate them to the passages that you're centering,

you're going to ignore them. And ultimately, you're going to read into the Bible what you want to get out of the Bible. I think that's a product of that presupposition of univocality that is so common, not only among folks who are believers in the Bible, but even when folks who are not believers in the Bible, try to engage folks who are believers in the Bible, there's a tendency to kind of operate from that presupposition of univocality, which I think is problematic in a lot of ways.

I'm confused by this, though, because I thought 2 Timothy 316 told us that whole scripture is inspired by God, right? Like, that everything in the Bible must be, in some sense, at least, divinely inspired. Well, and there are a bunch of issues that go into that as well, because in addition to presupposing univocality and here inerrancy, I mean, you have to presuppose it. 2 Timothy 316 is itself inspired in accurate in order for it to apply to the rest of the text. There was no such thing as the Bible when 2 Timothy 316 was composed. The Bible wouldn't exist for centuries later. There were scriptures, and that's what is being referred to with the word grafi, writings, scriptures. but the set of text that would have been indexed by that word scriptures in the time period

in which 2nd Timothy was written is much different from what we now understand as the Bible. And then we also have the problem of the word in Greek, Theopnevstos, which means God breathed. The word for inspired in this time period was Entheos, and that's used in a bunch of other literature talking about inspiration. But Theopnevstos in this time period didn't mean inspired in the sense of God is the one who is the origin and the source of all of it. It meant God breathed in the sense of God breathe the breath of life into Adam, making him a living soul or a living being. In other words, it meant life-giving. And there's a wonderful book by a scholar named John C. Poirier called The Invention of the Inspired Text that goes into detail about how we find this word in a bunch of literature from the first and second century.

C.E. And it's used to refer to the nation of Israel. It's used to refer to streams of water. It's used to refer to sandals. It's used to refer to ointments that are used to preserve the life-like features of corpses for the three days after death. And it's always used in circumstances that suggest the senses life-giving. These things give life, these things preserve life, these things sustain or perpetuate the perception of life in the case of these corpses, it is never used to mean inspired until the third century CE, when we have origin of Alexandria, probably one of the most influential theologians of the early church, who makes a sustained case for understanding all the scriptures as inspired and quotes this verse dozens of times in doing so.

And prior to origin, it's quoted like four or five times total among all. early Christians. So it also doesn't mean what a lot of people today understand it to mean. But with virtually 2,000 years of tradition understanding it to mean the Bible is inspired, that's a pretty thick interpretive lens that is difficult to remove when we're looking back on this passage and trying to understand what it means. And so despite the fact that it begs the question to say the whole Bible is inerrant because as long as you presuppose the inerrancy of one verse, it's talking about the whole Bible. It's not saying what people think it says. Yeah, this is near the beginning of your forthcoming book. The Bible says so, which links to information and pre-ordering and all that

is in the description. And you open with the discussion of this line, because it never really occurred to me before. We didn't actually spell it out. It's 2. Timothy chapter 3, verse 16, all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. And like you say, this has traditionally been interpreted as meaning all scripture is inspired. The inspiration of the Holy Spirit is what guides the authorship of these texts. But it hadn't even occurred to me. Firstly, there's just the word, you know, which, as you say, literally means God breathed.

How do you pronounce it? Theopnosis or Theopnosus or something like this? Well, I use modern Greek pronunciation just because I've worked with a lot of modern Greek speakers. So I pronounce it Theopnevstos, but others would say Theopneostos or something like that. Yeah, and that last word is like with the P sound there is where we get like, if you think of like the word pneumonia with the P at the beginning of it coming from like breath and that word like that word origin, that P. in that end together, meaning like breath or spirit in some circumstances, and then Thaeo, like as in Theism, as in God, Theon, means God breathed. And it doesn't really tell us what that means. And it could just, and like you say, an analysis

into other us usages of that term seem to imply that it's God breathed, it seems to imply that it sort of gives life. So what that would mean is that what Paul, quote, unquote, is saying here, is that all scripture, whatever counts of scripture there, gives life and therefore is useful for instruction. And I think that's an interesting thing to point out at first. But then there's also this problem that, like, if you think that if you're going to use this verse to say that, say, the Gospels are guided by the Holy Spirit, if you believe that Paul wrote the second letter to Timothy, you got a problem in that the gospel.

didn't exist yet. And so Paul would have to be writing about a scripture that didn't exist yet. That doesn't make any sense. So even if you believe that Paul was writing this talking about the inspiration of scripture, he can't have been talking about the Gospels. And then on top of that is the added problem that Paul probably didn't even write, Second Timothy. So there are so many reasons to think that this is a bad grounding on which to balance this Holy Spirit inspiration. But is that all we have biblically as an indication that scripture is guided by the Holy Spirit in this way? It's certainly the only thing that can be appealed to as an indication that everything that folks include in the Bible today should be included in that category. You have other indications that certain things are the word of God, Moses spoken.

You know, you have a lot of references to individual passages or individual books. So and so prophesied. You get that in, you know, in reference to Isaiah and things like that. You get it in reference to First Enoch in the epistle of Jude. Verse 14 says, and Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesied saying, which is, and then quotes First Enoch 1.9. So you get one-off references to the idea that certain prophecies and things in scripture can be inspired in that sense. You don't get. get any direct reference to inspiration as explicitly as we find, well, as explicitly as people would like to find in 2 Timothy 316. And so there's no part of the Bible that, one, identifies the Bible, wraps it all up in the neat little Protestant bow that most people want to see in the first century CE already, but two, that identifies it all as inspired. So, yeah, that's not something you're going to find within the covers of a Bible. Do you think that the New Testament does, in some instances, offer explicit moral teachings that are pretty like uncontested, that aren't just broad things like love your enemy?

But you talk about issues in your book like abortion and slavery and women and all of this kind of stuff, more specific stuff. And there's a problem that it's always a little bit unclear. Do you think that there are sort of some hyper-specific ethical injunctions in the New Testament? There are certainly very specific moral issues that are addressed in the New Testament. I don't think that there's any one that is unilaterally agreed upon or is addressed by all of the different authors in the same way. I think you certainly within the Gospels have a pretty harsh critique of empire, and that's because the gospel authors are operating. from a position of oppression in the face of the Roman Empire. And so there's a degree to which you could argue that extreme wealth and empire and political

power and things like that are critiqued. But then you get to something like the Book of Revelation. And it's not a critique of the system per se. It's a critique of the people who are occupying specific positions within the system. and Revelation is kind of a fantasy about switching those positions and the people who are being oppressed being in the position of the oppressor. So there's some fantasies about violent retribution and things like that in the book of Revelation. So when you look across the New Testament, there's very little consistency regarding those moral

issues. But you brought up slavery. This is one that is uncontested across the entire Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. ever questions or much less condemns the practice of buying, selling, and owning other humans. That is just presupposed to be normative and apparently moral from beginning to end. So when I'm fond of saying that the Bible is not univocal, that there is disagreement all over the place, but there are a few issues on which pretty much everyone is in agreement. And the benevolence of slavery seems to be one of those, to the degree that you have in the New

Testament, and it starts in the Hebrew Bible, you have in the New Testament the notion that the ideal relationship that someone should have with God is the relationship of enslaved to enslaver, where God is in the position of the enslaver, and we are enslaved to God. In fact, the concept of redemption that we first see in the Hebrew Bible fundamentally means to buy back, and the metaphor that is frequently used is that of a slave that has been sold to another master, and then God or Jesus redeems by buying the individual back. And so Paul says, for instance, who are no longer enslaved to sin, you're enslaved to God in the sense that, oh, you've been purchased from the wicked master and now you are enslaved to the benevolent, kind master. And that is your deliverance

is to be enslaved to a better master. And so that metaphor is even used to talk about how we should stand in relation to God. Do you struggle to focus? I know I do sometimes, and especially given the nature of my work, it can be incredibly frustrating when I'm seemingly unable to just sit down and get on with what I'm supposed to be doing. Luckily, people like me are exactly who today's sponsor, Brain FM, was created to help. Brain FM is an app for professionals seeking productivity boosts.

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That's brain.fm forward slash within reason for 30 days free. It is interesting, this whole conversation around, like, slavery used to specifically mean the ownership of human beings of private property, but then used as potentially a metaphor, but maybe a kind of way of thinking about one's relationship with God, because I think one thing that goes missing in this slavery conversation is that we are talking about a different kind of slavery to what comes to mind when you say slavery. People think of antebellum slavery. They think of, like, the American slave trade. we're talking about a different kind of slavery. It's still very bad. But what gets lost in a lot of this is that you have a lot of Christians or Jews saying the Bible does not condone slavery when it does. But you have a lot of atheists sort of trying to paint the slavery in the Bible as if it is like antebellum race-based slavery, which kind of can't make sense because we don't even have this concept of race in the same way back then. And so there's a lot sort of getting lost in the weeds there. But I think in the discussions I've had with people about this, it is just undeniable that the Bible itself recognizes the legitimacy of owning human beings as private property.

There's no way that you can read even the Old and New Testament and come away thinking that that is not the case. Jesus uses an analogy at one point where he says something like, you know, which one of you when a slave comes to you would say, come and eat. at the table, no, no, first you would say, go and do your day's work, go and do this, go and do that, then you would come back and get your food or something like this. That's not Jesus saying, like, slavery's great, but he uses just as an example, just to make a point, the relationship between a slave and the slave's master. And you would think that if secretly he implicitly kind of wanted to get rid of slavery one day, he might have picked a different example. He seems to at least implicitly recognize the significance of that. One of my

favorite, like, conversations that I have on this, every time I talk about slavery in the Bible, people like to point to the line in Galatians, where Paul says, there is neither slave nor free, for we're all one in Jesus Christ. Some people point to that and say, well, this is Paul undoing this master slave relation. What do you make of that? Well, you have three things that are mentioned there. There is neither slave nor free. There's neither Jew nor Gentile. There neither man nor woman, but all are one in Christ Jesus. And I think this is, certainly there's an idealism there. That would be nice.

There are an awful lot of folks who see this as eschatological, that in the kingdom of God, once this world is over, that will be the reality. There are some folks who think this is Paul trying to suggest we should be trying to strive for the deconstruction of all those boundaries. But certainly throughout the rest of Paul's letters, there is recognition of all of these boundaries. Yes. And what's really interesting about this is that, like, people don't think about the fact that, as you just said, there are three things mentioned. It's there's neither June or Gentile.

There's neither male nor female nor slave or free, for we're all one in Jesus. So when people say that this is obviously Jesus saying that, you know, slaves shouldn't exist. I'm like, oh, I didn't know you were also a radical gender abolitionist because this must mean that the Jesus also, that Paul at least, also didn't want gender to exist. Yeah. But no, clearly, if somebody says, like, if a gender, if a gender theorist came to an evangelical Christian and said, didn't you know that Paul said there's neither male nor female for all one in Christ, they would say, that doesn't mean that there's no such thing

as man and woman. It just means it's not relevant to your salvation. And the same has to be therefore said of slave and free in that passage. Yeah, absolutely. That it's the gospel is open to all, is free to all. and you, everyone has equal access to it. But yeah, and Paul himself elsewhere in his letters, is pretty firm about the need to maintain those distinctions.

And we see gender distinctions pretty clearly in the genuine Pauline epistles and even more explicitly in the pseudo-pauline epistles. So, yeah, it's there, but again, you've got this idea that a lot of people superimpose upon the Bible that it's all univocal. And if you have to force this all to agree, folks are going to impose unifying frameworks interpretive lenses that are going to give more prominence to the things that already agree with whatever their needs and their exigencies within their social and historical circumstances demand. And that's usually going to mean advancing their own identity politics. And unfortunately, right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation is often at the top of the list of folks. who try to make these arguments. Hmm.

Is there something to be said for this idea of enslavement to Christ or enslavement to God? As, I mean, we say that, and you brought it up as a point to say, like, look at this language, it's slavery, but is slavery intrinsically bad? Or is it just bad because of the fallibility of the master? Like, the reason I ask that is because, like, it may be. So I'm thinking of a quote by C.S. Lewis. where Lewis said Aristotle said that some people

were only fit to be slaves I do not contradict him but I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters the idea being that like of course slavery is bad because every single time it manifests

it leads to disaster because of the fact that people are corrupted and they're going to mistreat their slaves and no man has a right over another man. But God kind of does have that right over us. He's like the only one that can legitimately claim that right over us. And so enslavement to him is not just sort of okay, but like the appropriate thing to do. So that language of slavery actually kind of works there.

I think the specific relationship could work. I don't know that we need the language of slavery because all that's doing is taking this institution. on earth that robs individuals of their autonomy of their humanity and superimposing it on God. And I think if we want to try to understand this relationship in a way that doesn't reflect back on us, I think we can come up with better language than enslavement is a great framework, a great metaphor for talking about our relationship to God. Now, now we're getting into theology a little bit. getting into questions of how our relationship with God should be understood rather than just addressing how it is reflected in the text. But I think there's a big problem with trying to

suggest that God is okay with that kind of relationship because it does give license, I think, to folks to talk about that relationship that is something appropriate for here on earth. know, when we look at things like the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, that was written by somebody who enslaved his own children. And so there's always going to be a disconnect between the ideals that we talk about and the ideal relationships that we can conceptualize and an actual behavior. And I think it excuses an awful lot of that corrupt behavior to suggest that there can be different levels of, or that it can operate on different levels. Slavery is okay if it's our relationship to God, but it's not okay for us.

I think that's a pretty, I don't know, I, that every time I've seen arguments like that, outside of someone maybe playing. devil's advocates. It has usually been some kind of attempt to obscure or mask the harm that things like that are done to folks here on earth. And I think with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, we developed a much more salient concept of individualism, of individual rights, of human rights. And I think ever since then, I think we need to abandon. this notion that there's anything legitimate about the ownership, the purchasing, the buying, the selling, the passing on as inheritance, other human beings because it does deny their autonomy, their humanity, their human beings. Yeah, well, that's the thing. And if people are interested, I mean, longtime viewers will know that I talk about this a lot. I mean, I had a podcast with Joshua Bowen for some two hours a couple of years ago, where we went through just the actual example. So if you're listening to this and you're like, what are you talking about? Like, go and check out that video because we go through some of the, the verses, but it is palpably clear that the ownership of human beings and, like you say,

passing them on as inheritable property is condoned in the Hebrew Bible. Like, there's no question about it in my mind. It's really interesting this, this language being annexed by Paul to talk about your relationship with God, because of course there are instances in which slavery is, is romanticized as a concept such as in, I'm thinking of like Shakespeare's 59th sonnet, being your slave. what shall I do, but tend upon the hours and times of your desire. And he's sort of trying to express the depth and severity of his love. So true a fool is love that in your will, though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

And describing himself as a slave. And he clearly doesn't mean, I am your legal property. He just means to express how utterly devoted he is to this person. And I like to think that when Paul is talking about, you know, enslavement to Christ, He's using it in a similar way. He doesn't mean that we are the private property of Christ. And if Christ wants to sell us to Jimmy down the street, he can do. Clearly, it's taken on a new meaning, which is where I think there might be some absolution for that, for that usage of that term.

But it's at the very least unhelpful, given what's happened since the writing of the Bible in relation to slavery and how we view it today, that that language is embedded into the scripture. It's unfortunate at best, I think. And one thing I'll bring up, you mentioned the difference between pre-Civil War American slavery, the Atlantic slave trade and what's going on in the Bible, and something that I bring up in the book, and I've talked about frequently on social media, is a lot of people try to make more of that difference than actually exists, particularly folks who want to try to excuse the slavery of the Bible or suggest that it's a more benevolent slavery because, oh, it's a better slavery than what you had in Hamarob. code and things like that, or, you know, God was trying to slowly lead Israel and then Christianity towards abandonment of slavery. And one of the things that I try to help people understand is that when it comes to what's in the Bible, we don't know how enslaved people were treated on the ground. We don't have any records from enslaved folks to know how they were actually treated if any of the legislation in the Bible that protected slaves was ever enforced or was even widely known about.

most scholars would say it wasn't, that the legislation that we find in Exodus, that we find in Leviticus, that we find in Deuteronomy was more propaganda, was used for scribal exercises and things like that, and didn't really affect jurisprudence on the ground. When it comes to pre-Civil war American slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, we pretty much only know about the facts on the ground, how people were treated in plantations and in the fields and things like that. And it's awful, But you can go look in the state legal codes. Like Louisiana's 1825 legal code has provision saying that they are, you know, enslaved folks or the property of their masters who can chastise them but not with undue severity and not to maim or to, I forget what the other word is, but they were, this law code says you cannot. maim or kill your enslaved person. So the laws on the books in the southern states in pre-sivil War

America are very, very similar to what we have in the Bible. So in one case, we have the laws on the books. We don't know how that played out in real life. In the other case, we only hear about how it played out in real life, and we tend to ignore the laws on the books. So it's somewhat comparing apples to oranges, but what you're absolutely right about is that it was not race-based in the sense of a question of skin color. That was something that Europeans developed in the medieval period. So we have no concept of that anywhere near the Bible. But of course we do have the differential treatment of Israelite slaves and non-Israelite slaves, which you might think of that analogously today as a kind of race-based slavery. They wouldn't

have thought in terms of race, like things like skin color, but things like national tribe, whereby your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you. From them, you may buy and sell slaves. You may also purchase some of the temporary residents living among you, and they'll become your property, and you can bequeath them to your children as inheritable property, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly. So there is this distinction existing there, too. So there's a lot of discussion to be had about the similarities and differences between

antebellum slavery, but the only reason that ever comes up is not out of a scholarly interests in the differences, but rather as an apologetical tool, either to make the Bible sound as bad as it can or to make it sound as good as it can. And maybe we can sit somewhere in the middle on that point. There are other instances. I talk about slavery a lot on this channel, especially in debates and stuff. And so people will be familiar with that. So shelving that, because it's one chapter among many, there are other issues which are so, you know, are so, are so, like, not present in the Bible that it's amazing how much Christian faith is relied upon to, like, buttress these movements in the modern political sphere. The main one that comes

to mind right now has to be abortion, whereby if somebody is fervently pro-life, they're not necessarily religious, but they've probably got a better chance of being so. And a lot of the time pro-lifers don't like to use the Bible to justify their positions because it doesn't really work politically, but they'll often admit to privately that being the sort of origin of their ultimate belief in the sanctity of all life, including the fetus. Now, if you just listened to a debate on like a college campus between Charlie Kirk and some student or something about abortion, you might be led to believe that the Bible explicitly condemned abortion in every gospel. I don't know if that's true of Charlie Kirk, but you know what I mean.

Yeah. What does the Bible say about abortion? It never mentions it directly. At least we do have, there's talk about stillborn children. There's talk about miscarriages. We don't have a reference that I can identify, and I've been looking for quite some time, to the actual practice of abortion. Now, there are folks who will point to numbers five, known as the SOTA or the trial of bitter waters as it gets characterized as instructions for carrying out an abortion or something like that. I tend not to agree with that reading for a handful of different reasons. To begin, this is something that's taking place against the will of the woman who may be pregnant, and I don't think it's helpful to appeal to the destruction of her own body, her

reproductive system, and potentially a fetus against her will as a defense of abortion. Can you spell out what Numbers 5 actually sort of says before we discuss it? I could read it out if you like, but it might be quite long. So this is a ritual that is offered in Numbers 5 if a man suspects that his wife is unfaithful to him, but he has no evidence. What he can do is bring her to the temple and force her to go through this ritual known as the Sauta or the trial of bitter waters. And it's kind of what's known as an ordeal, which is where you leave it up to God to make the decision, because you don't have the evidence. And so, you know, if they, you know, does a witch weigh more than a duck kind of thing.

If you throw a witch in the river, and if she drowns, it turns out she wasn't a witch. But if she lives, then she was, then you execute her. Like, this is where we can't really tell. We don't have the data. We don't have the means, so we're going to leave it up to God. And in this instance, there's a curse that is written out. And then you take a jug with some water. You throw some dirt from the temple floor in the jug.

You scrape the ink from the curse into the water, stir it all together. The woman pronounces an oath. there's a, there's a, a heave offering that is done, she drinks the water. And this is kind of symbolically internalizing the curse. And then if she is innocent, what happens is, it says she will conceive. But if she's guilty, it will cause basically her genitals to become deformed. And literally the text says her, her thigh will fall. And then her womb will either swell up or sprouts or something like that. The verbal root there is not a very clear one, but in other languages there's a similar root that means sprout. And so some folks think,

well, this means swell up. Other folks think, well, it must mean whatever is in is coming out. So there are folks who understand this to mean that she will miscarry. It will be an induced miscarriage. And that's what contributes to the interpretation of this. curse as something like an abortion. That would mean in at least some instances intentionally administering a kind of an abortive fashions. That will cause an abortion. But interestingly, it's sort of, because it's part of this test, it's not like you're

pregnant and you're going to take this to have an abortion. It's like you're going to take this to find out. It's more like figuring out if the woman is faithful rather than like the intention being about an abortion. Yeah. And I think one of the indications that when this was being written, now one, this is like the Hebrew Bible was full of legislation written by men who did not know much about how women's bodies function.

And this is a good example of this. But a little ink, a little dust, a little water does not an abortive fashion make. And I've had people who've been like, well, they used a lot of lead in the ink back then. So that could have been a could have been an abortive. No, they didn't use a lot of lead in their ink back then. And no, there wouldn't remotely have been enough to cause a problem. But if the woman is innocent, the blessing is that she will conceive. It doesn't say, you know, she'll deliver a healthy baby.

It says she will conceive, which is suggestive of the absence of a pregnancy. And then another thing to consider is this imagery of genitals becoming deformed and a womb swelling up and all this kind of stuff. We see this in other ancient West Asian literature, and it is imagery that is symbolic of infertility and the curse of infertility. And so I would suggest that what's going on here is that the outcomes are you are cursed with infertility. That is like you can tell from across the street kind of curse. And then the blessing would be fertility. You will conceive. And so to me, this is not written as if there's is a pregnancy in view, as if a guy's like, wait a minute, when did this happen? We're going to

the temple. I don't think that's what's going on here. Now, we see the early rabbis actually arguing about whether or not it would be appropriate to submit a pregnant woman to the ritual of the Sotah. And they ultimately decide that it would be. So it's not that I'm not suggesting there's no chance that a pregnancy could be involved. One, I don't think this ritual was ever actually done. But two, I think if this actually was carried out and a woman was pregnant and these things actually happened, which they wouldn't have, that obviously would have ended a pregnancy. And I think it does suggest that at least the authors of this passage within numbers were not concerned for the personhood of the fetus. If a fetus was there,

it would have been destroyed. And I don't think the authors could have cared less because a fetus was not considered a full legal and moral person in this time period. What makes you think that this never actually happened, that nobody went through this test? Because I think they would have found out real quickly that everybody turned out to be innocent because this is not an abortive fashion. But again, most of the legislation that we find in the Pentateuch in the Book of Exodus, primarily Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, but you have some legislation in numbers as well. A lot of this

wasn't widely known about and doesn't seem to have been widely enforced until around the middle of the second century BCE. This is where we begin to suddenly see indications that people are publicly following all the legislation and the prescriptions and proscriptions that we see, such as avoidance of pork and things like that. And this probably has to do with the rise of the Hasmenean kingdom. So the Maccabees, they throw off Seleucid rule, and now they've restored briefly a somewhat independent Jewish kingdom. And there's an argument to make that the widespread knowledge of the Torah and the enforcement of the Torah was intended to kind of assert and create this Jewish identity that had long been kind of diluted among a bunch of different movements

prior to that. Yonatan Adler's book, The Origins of Judaism, is a recent argument for that, but John Jake Collins has another book called The Invention of Judaism from a few years before that also talks about how what we know as Judaism doesn't seem to really have been practiced until much later than most people think. And so I think this is probably one of those things that would have fallen into that category of, of just propaganda, things that were used as scribal exercises. And I suggest people think about, you know, the Ten Commandments being posted in front of courthouses. That's just for show. You go into a courthouse, no judge is ever going to say, you know, because the Ten Commandments say so, this is my ruling. They're never going to cite

the Ten Commandments, because that's not what actually controls jurisprudence on the ground. And I don't think we see any of the texts of the Penitouc being in force that way until around the second century BCE. And another good indication of that is the fact that they contradict each other in a bunch of ways. And so right around the second century BCE is when we suddenly see a bunch of people trying to figure out how to reconcile everything. We start seeing. What's an example of a contradiction like that? Well, we talked about slavery. Exodus 21 says a male slave serves for six years goes free in the seventh.

A female slave never goes free unless a series of things happens with her master because she's basically a concubine or a sex slave. You go to Deuteronomy 15 and it says male and female slaves, both go free in the seventh year. Not only that, you've got to give them some money on the way out the door. Leviticus 24 says debt slaves go free in the Jubilee year, which means if you become a debt slave, the year before the Jubilee year. Congrats, you only have to be a debt slave for a year. But if you become a debt slave the year after the Jubilee year, you got 48 years you're staring down.

So you have a just in how long a debt slave serves, there's a lot of contradiction. And there are a bunch of others. But yeah, it's not consistent. And this is what gives rise to what people call the oral Torah or rabbinic literature, Halakic literature, which is all about, one, how do we fill in the gaps in all of this? Because when we actually try to apply these things, there are a bunch of things that are not covered. And two, how do we harmonize what's going on in all this legislation? Because so much of it is inconsistent. And that's what gives rise to the halakic literature that would turn into all the rabbinic literature that we see later on down the road. Sure. Okay. So Numbers 5 is not an example of an abortion, probably, because you sometimes find, essentially more like liberally minded Christians or non-Christians trying to make a point about Christianity. In your book, you talk about how somebody put up like an Instagram post that said, like, abortion is only mentioned once in the Bible, and it gives you instructions

on how to perform one. And the point is like, surprise, like the Bible's actually super endorsing of abortion. You don't think that's true. So the Bible doesn't endorse abortion. A lot of people think the opposite is true that the Bible condemns abortion. But if this is the only place where it seems to actually directly mention something about abortion, and even then it's probably not even about abortion, where does this opposite idea come from that the Bible does condemn abortion? Most of the time, folks who argue that the Bible condemns abortion, they're going to appeal to a handful of passages that suggest God has knowledge of and concern for gestation.

And so you see this in, for instance, Jeremiah 1.5, where Jeremiah says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and consecrated you a prophet to the nations. And the argument is that, well, Jeremiah was obviously a person. Jeremiah was a human being prior to being born. Therefore, human life begins that conception. You also have in the Psalms, you have a passage about how God knit me together. my mother's womb. You have the story of John the Baptist, the fetal John the Baptist leaping for joy in Elizabeth's womb upon hearing the voice of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Those are the three most popular passages that get appealed to to suggest that a human being begins at conception. And the idea is murder is the killing of an innocent human, human lives. begin at conception, therefore abortion is murder and therefore abortion is wrong. And what this neglects to take account of is the fact that when we look at legal codes and legislation and stuff like that, we tend to assume that if there are principles anywhere, that they apply universally

and that everything fits perfectly into a perfectly systematic whole. And so the idea must be that, you know, if over here we treat a fetus as somebody who can leap for joy or something like that, well, then we could never, obviously, treat a fetus in another part of the text as not a full legal and moral person. But what we see throughout the Hebrew Bible is that a fetus was not considered a full legal and moral person. It was considered more property. And the most explicit example of that is in the covenant code Exodus 21. We have. versus 22 through 25 where we have this peculiar bit of legislation where it says if two men are fighting and they hit a woman and a pregnant woman. And there are two outcomes that are addressed

in this legislation. If the injury causes her to miscarry, then there's a fine that is imposed by the husband and then there are arbitrators that are there to ensure that it is exorbitant. If the injury results in permanent injury to the woman or her death, then it is talionic justice, which is life for life, eye, for an eye, tooth, for a tooth. In other words, if this injury causes the woman to die, then it's the death penalty for the perpetrator. And what this indicates is that the destruction of the fetus does not result in talionic justice. It's just a fine. And what's more, there's no standardized value that is placed on the fetus. It's up to the

husband to decide what fine to impose. Because an enslaved person has a standardized value. It's 30 shekels. And you see that elsewhere in the covenant code. 30 shekels for the life of an enslaved person. But it's up to the husband to decide the value of this fetus should this injury result in a miscarriage. And this indicates that a fetus was considered property, was not considered a full legal and moral person. And there are arguments about, that folks make about why it ought to be translated a different way to indicate that the first outcome is premature birth that isn't followed by any other injury or anything like that. And the second outcome is the actual miscarriage.

And in the book, I go through several reasons why that's just not a plausible reading of the passage. And so... Okay. So that's really interesting because it demonstrates that at the very least the Hebrew Bible in this instance, does not consider a fetus to be of the same value as a grown human life, right? And that may mean that, well, it doesn't consider the fetus to be a human, or it might mean that it considers the fetus to be a human, but a human that's worth less. Because as we know from our slavery discussion,

the Hebrew Bible is no stranger to treating different humans differently. They've got different worth it. It's the same thing with slavery. Like if you kill a slave, I'm not sure that, at least in all circumstances, like if you beat a slave and the slave dies, then you should be punished. I think in that case you are punished with death. I can't remember. It's been a while since I've looked at the verse.

It might be unclear. I'm not sure. But it's actually ambiguous. It just says he will be avenged. And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that the reason is because the punishment would be different depending on whether or not that was a debt slave who was a native Israelite or a chattel slave who was a foreigner. Which would make all the difference.

Yeah. So we've got indications here that there are human beings who are, cruelly speaking, worth more than others, whether it be their literal monetary value, what you're allowed to do with them. There are at the very least different ways that you're allowed to treat them, right? And so when that applies to killing, there's no reason why that wouldn't also, there wouldn't also be a difference between fully grown humans and fetuses. But that doesn't mean that the Hebrew Bible doesn't recognize the fetus as a human.

It might just be a human that's worth less. And it's still the case that if that fetus dies as the result of whatever violence this person inflicts upon the pregnant woman, there still is that fine to be paid. So it's not like, oh, whatever, who cares? It's just a clump of cells. It is still, well, this is something that's worth something. So can we still construct an argument that this tells us that abortion, is wrong, it's just not as bad as killing a grown human being.

I think that would be a somewhat strained argument to make for a couple of reasons. I think it does, like, I wouldn't make the argument that the author of Exodus 21 fully approves of abortion would be pro-choice because they would have seen somebody's destruction of their own fetus as, I imagine it would have been seen as, as, you know, morally problematic. In fact, we have in, I think there is another West Asian law code. I'm not sure which one it is that actually condemns abortion, even though it also does not treat a fetus as a full legal and moral person. Right. So when it comes to degrees of, I wouldn't talk about different degrees of human life. I would talk about degrees of personhood. I think that's much

closer to how they would have considered this question. But with the enslaved person, there is this one law also in Exodus 21, where it says, if a master beats his enslaved person with a stick and he dies, then he will be avenged. And that's the one where it depends on whether it's a full Israelite or if it's a foreigner. But it says if they live for a day or two, then there is no punishment. And the idea is that if he beats him to death immediately, then obviously that was in anger, and obviously that's unjustified. But if he is disciplining, quote unquote, the enslaved person, and he lives for a couple days and then succumbs to his injuries, then that probably was accidental. It wasn't intentional. And the text says there will be no punishment because he

is his Kesef, which in Hebrew means silver, which is used. as a euphemism for, he is his property. And the idea there seems to be that he's lost his property, and that's punishment enough. There's no need for any further punishment. It was an accidental loss of property. And you have in Leviticus 25, 44 through 46, you have enslaved folks described as Ahuzah, which is also property.

And so on the spectrum from person to property, I think it's a spectrum and not a dichotomy. It's not a simple binary. I think it's definitely a spectrum. But when, and I think a fetus is further, is closer to property than even an enslaved person is, but is not fully non-human or non-person. So I would agree that there's a spectrum there. And how we transfer that spectrum to the debate today, I think that's open. for discussion, but the simple binary of, oh, it's a human life, therefore, it's murder,

that obviously did not hold for the authors of the biblical texts. In the case of that exodus 21 verse, anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but then not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two since the slave is their property. That's the translation of the NIV, is that, because you were talking about the slave dying after a few days or two, but the NIV at least has, if the slave recovers after a day or two, then they're not to be punished. Is that a mistake or is that?

Well, it's a mistranslation. Interesting. Okay, maybe we can, maybe we can look at the Hebrew here. Yeah, I'm trying to pull up the exact passage. There we go, 21, 21. So if yom or ima yamode, so literally it's, however, if a day or days he stands, there will be, he is not avenged or he's not punished. And so this is, it can't be open to interpretation. A day or days he stands could mean in a day or two he gets up or he lasts or he lasts for a day or two.

And the reason that most scholars agree that this is definitely referring to him only living for a couple of days is because we already have a reference just before this to what happens if someone recovers. Because in verses 18 and 19, when I'm reading from the NRSVUE, when individuals quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or fists so that the injured party, though not dead, is confined to bed, but recovers and walks around outside with the help of the staff, then the assailant shall be free of liability, except to pay for the loss of time and to arrange for full recovery. So there we have a completely different, we have imyakum, Vahit Halech, Bechuts. So if he rises up and walks around outside. So the verbal root, Qum, means to rise up. The verbal root Ahmad means to stand. And so in the next passage, we have a different set of, it talks about it in a completely different way, which suggests the idea is not if the person recovers, they would probably

use language similar to what they used in the previous discussion about what happens if someone is beaten but recovers. Here, the idea seems to be a day or two, they are able to stand or they remain or something like that. So the majority of scholars agree that is not talking about recovery in a day or two. That is so fascinating, because I haven't come across this before, but there is so much to be learned when looking at any kind of biblical verse to simply, you know, Google the words, like if it's New Testament, type in the verse and then put the word Greek, if it's Old Testament, put Hebrew or possibly Aramaic, I suppose,

and just look at the sort of crude translation. And it's, even if you don't speak these languages, I don't know any Hebrew at all, looking on Bible Hub is a great website for this. It will give you like either an interlinear, like parallel Hebrew or do like an analysis and yeah notwithstanding if a day or two and it has it here he remains alive and you can click on the word so here is yeah mod which is the word that we're talking about and you can look at every single other usage of that term in the hebrew bible and other examples of its translation are things like remain or or stand and it's not into or endure and so yeah like

that kind of changes everything because this is also used as an apologetical tool like this sort of this verse I've heard it said that well if the slave dies then to be punished is the death penalty so if the slave dies then you get killed whereas if he gets up after a few days then you're not to be punished that is you're not to be put to death but you might be punished in other ways right so the charitable reading for the for the Christian or the Jew might be if the slave dies after you beat them, then you get put to death. If they get up after a few days, then you're not put to death, but maybe you're punished in some other way. But looking here, I think you're right, it looks more like it's saying if the slave dies, then you're punished.

But if he dies after a few days, then not. And why would that make a difference? Because it was likely an accident. That's fascinating. That's really, really interesting. I'm actually surprised that given all I've spoken, like spoken about slavery on the show and in debates and stuff before, that that hasn't come up, and that hasn't occurred to me. But I haven't done an in-depth analysis of the Hebrew versions of these verses, just because that is not exactly my forte. That's why I'm glad to bring people like you on to the show. Well, it's an interesting aspect of this because the translation you choose has an awful

lot to do with whether or not the Bible supports your position. Because a lot of people, when they, and the NIV, I imagine, if you look at the NIV down in verse 30, or excuse me, verse 22, it probably does not refer to a miscarriage in the first instance. It probably refers to premature birth. That's what it says, yeah. And then the second. It does have a, to be fair, it does have a footnote which says, or she has a miscarriage. Right. But the translation that they favor is premature birth.

Which if you're just reading that and you think, well, that's in the main body of text, so that's probably more likely than whatever they've relegated to the footnotes, then you're probably thinking, okay, I've got a case here. And actually, this passage changes throughout history, because when we go to the Septuagint, it doesn't say the same thing. In the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, probably translated in the late 3rd, early 2nd century BCE, at least Exodus. It says, if there is no body, then there's a fine. If there is a body, then it is life for life.

And what this is doing is, so in the Hebrew, there's this word Asone, which means tragedy. And so it says if her children go out, but there is no further tragedy, then there's a fine. If there is further tragedy, then it's life for life. And Asohn is very similar to the Greek Soma. And so some scholars think they may have chosen to misunderstand Asohn as something like Soma and interpreted as if there's no body, the idea being the fetus is not fully formed, then there is no punishment. But if there's the fine.

But if there is a body, in other words, the fetus has been fully formed, then it is life for life. And this would be suggestive of the translators operating under the influence of some Greek philosophical ideas. Specifically, the Aristotelian notion that personhood was the ensulment, the soul entered the body once the fetus had become fully formed. As you have debates, you have the stoics who say that the soul enters the body when the fetus makes contact with the outside air at birth. The Aristotelians say it happens when the fetus is fully formed. The Epicureans and the Pythagorean say it happens at conception. So you have different ideas about insolment and different ideas about personhood. And so the Septuagin seems to have taken a kind of Aristotelian approach to reinterpreting what's going on here.

So to be clear here, we're talking about Exodus chapter 21, verse 22, which is, we mentioned it earlier, if people are fighting, and this is the NIV again, sorry, if people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she, gives birth prematurely, or she has a miscarriage, but there is no serious injury, then the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands the court, and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. And you say that in the Septuagint, it instead says that if, not if there's no injury, but if there's no body, then it will be a fine. But if there is a body, then it's life for life. Yeah. And so there's a new English translation of the Septuagint came out in around 2010 that does a really good job. And here's the translation of this passage. Now, if two men fight and strike a pregnant woman and her child comes forth not fully formed, he shall be punished with a fine. According as the husband of the woman might impose, he shall pay with judicial assessment. But if it is fully formed, he shall pay life for life. so this would indicate then that at least in the septuagint's rendition of this verse

that what matters is not so much whether there is or is not a miscarriage or a premature birth but rather like how far along the fetus is and that's what determines which would therefore imply that early enough into a pregnancy the death of a fetus wouldn't be as bad as later into the pregnancy, right? That runs quite at odds with the most popular modern evangelical interpretation of the issue of abortion, I think. And granted, you know, this is based on the Septuagint, which is an ancient Greek translation of a Hebrew text, and clearly that's not the text that's favored in most translations

of the Bible, but it is interesting to note that this isn't as straightforward as you might think from reading the Bible. Yeah, and we have indications that early Christians were actually debating this idea of ensolment, and scholars suggest that the earliest Christians probably were aligning with the Epicureans and the Pythagorean's with insolment occurring at conception. But you have the influence of the Septuagint, which seems to suggest it's happening somewhere around the full formation of the fetus, or the quickening. The quickening becomes kind of the marker of this. The quickening being when a woman can feel the independent movement of the fetus in the womb. And in the end of the 4th century, beginning of the 5th century, C.E., you have Augustine, who basically says, here's how we're going to think about this, and endorses the Aristotelian perspective, and that becomes the majority position for Christianity until the 19th century.

So Augustine literally says, we don't like abortion at any point, but it's not murder until the quickening. He says that. He says that. And that's in city of God. And that is what the majority of Christians agree on until the 19th century. And what happens in the 19th century to change this view? Well, we have a couple of different things going on.

There are advances in medicine that allow people. to better understand the process of gestation, and the argument becomes nothing really changes at the quickening about the fetus. And so the notion that this is where installment takes place is not supported by medicine, but we're still going to presuppose there's a soul that is being imparted. And so there's an argument that, well, then we have to move this, we have to default to this happens at conception. That's one thing. Second thing that happens is there, are kind of anti-feminist movements that are pushing back against the push for more rights for women. And this is one good way to do that, is to push back against women advocating for

rights when it comes to abortion. We have Catholicism arriving at the conclusion that Mary was sinless from conception, therefore must have been a person at conception. Sure. That also is a pronunciation, a papal decision that is made in like 1839 or something like that. Yes, they build an entire, if you ever go to the Vatican, there's an entire room, which is called something like, you know, the room of the dogma of the immaculate conception. and it's just that the walls are covered in this huge mural of on one side it's it's all the all the bishops trying to sort of debate whether this is this is you know true or not and then

right in the middle is this huge picture and and as far as I remember it it's like an image of of like God the father and God the son and in between and slightly above them sits Mary you know right there at the top and they've got a trans facsimiles of all the translations of this dogma but you think that maybe this, and to be clear here, a lot of people have heard a papal infallibility. That's not the idea that the Pope can never be wrong about anything, but rather that there are instances in which he can invoke papal infallibility, and on those instances, he is correct, he can't be wrong. And that's only been done on a few occasions, and one of those occasions is to say that the Immaculate Conception is a dogma, that Mary was conceived as sinless. Do you think, are you implying that that had something to do with this shift in the view about abortion as being wrong from conception? Yeah, there was definitely discussion about the significance of Mary being conceived without sin and to the question of insolment and personhood.

And it's in the mid-19th century that Catholics arrive at that conclusion and say, therefore, all people are. Or all souls enter the body at conception. So that's, and that's somewhere in between 1839 and 1855. I don't remember the exact date off the top of my head. But it's, there are a combination of a bunch of things. The proclamation, it says it was December the 8th, 1854 that that happened. And also I'm looking at this fresco in the room. And it does look like maybe the Holy Spirit.

There's a dove above Mary. So maybe the Holy Spirit gets in just, just above. higher above Mary there which is which is probably a good thing but yeah okay so so is it really like when when do we begin to see like official church doctrine start to speak about abortion because as far as I know now the Catholic Church does have an official policy against abortion at some point it was deemed that procuring an abortion for Latin Catholics is automatically excommunicating for example and I'm pretty sure that's the case but that kind of have always been the case given everything we've spoken about. So when does that happen and why

does it take so long? I can't speak to the Catholic doctrines or their legality. However, there is a text. It was published in the 40s, 1942 by Roger John Heuser, and it's entitled The Crime of Abortion in Canon Law, an historical synopsis and commentary, which covers and this is a Catholic University of America canon law studies number 162. And that goes through and discusses what the church has said about abortion going all the way back to, they start with Greek laws, Jewish laws, Roman laws, and then patristic writings, and the Council of Elvira is the first on the list of conciliar legislation. So that's a text that's going to go into all the detail about when these things were discussed, at least within the Catholic Church. But

interestingly, you don't really have the leadership of evangelicalism being incredibly upset about abortion until the 1970s. Because in the U.S., we have this, there was this famous Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which was decided in 1972. And like the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and others came out and said, hey, we're all. all right with this. We think this should be between a woman and her doctor and God, and we're not going to get in the way of that. And then some folks like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weirich put their heads together. And they were upset with Brown v. Board of Education, which is what desegregated the schools, another Supreme Court decision from 1954. And they ran evangelical universities that

were having federal funding pulled because they wouldn't accept black students. And so they decided they were going to go on a national campaign to get evangelicals rallied around the cause of abortion because white supremacy wasn't as attractive, a rallying cry. Yeah, so in the book, you talk about how during Roe v. Wade, you say evangelical leaders around the nation condoned or even endorsed the ruling, but that would change before the 1970s were over. Jerry Falwell, Paul Wyrich, Wayrich, and others would spend the next several years traveling around the country. And you said of these people, scholars have unearthed documentation that seems to indicate the purpose of their campaign was at least initially to galvanize a movement

of right-wing religious folks that would become politically powerful and would help them then put pressure on the government to stop them from forcing evangelical universities to admit black students. So this kind of jumped off the page of me because, and there's a footnote, I think, which I didn't read, but like, the implication here is that these people caring about abortion and this making that the big issue, you said that there's been documentation unearthed that means that this was kind of really about segregation? Yeah, we have, and particularly Jerry Falwell and Paul Weirich were instrumental in this. They're, they're, they're, trying to galvanize a religious right, the silent majority. They want to see more evangelical

ideologies in government because government is coming down on them because, for instance, Bob Jones University and other universities and even Brigham Young University as well was infamous for trying to keep black students out. And government funding is no longer going to be offered. students are not going to be able to get grants to go to a school that does not admit black students. And so they're having pressure put on them to to admit black students, which they want to change. And the idea is if we can, we know we have a lot of people all around the country who are on our side religiously, but we need to get them in the voting booth to vote for these religious ideologies. And so in the 70s, we have a lot of, uh, uh, evangelicals trying to get people motivated to vote for right-wing ideologies, whether it's gun rights, which is something that takes place in 1977, where an extremist wing of the NRA takes over leadership of the NRA. You have Falwell and Wyrick going on this campaign to convince evangelicals that they need to vote out people who support abortion, and they need to vote for

anti-abortion candidates. And ultimately, you have... Jimmy Carter, who was the last progressive evangelical, run out of office so that Ronald Reagan can be put in office. And this is also what kind of overturns support for the Equal Rights Amendment that is moving along just fine until evangelicals gain enough power to be able to put a stop to that in the early 80s. So there's a lot going on under the surface within evangelicalism in the 70s that ends up turning evangelicals into a significant political power in the United States. And Jerry Falwell and Paul Weirich used abortion as their specific rally cry. That was the banner around which they marshaled all these evangelicals into the voting booth.

When you say scholars of unearthed documentation indicating, what's the like documentation? I wouldn't necessarily ask you to read it out or anything, but what kind of stuff are we talking about here? Communications, letters and things like that back and forth between some of these folks discussing this campaign and discussing the fact that they're identifying abortion as the issue that they're going to rally around in order to try to galvanize this movement. And yeah, I don't have the documentation in front of me, but the footnote does point to some books. The footnote in the forthcoming book available by the link in the description will allow people to follow that threat. There is one more thing I wanted to ask about before we wrap up here, which is, because

we were talking about abortion and fetuses and children and all of this kind of stuff. In Exodus 22, there is a very strange injunction at the end. From 28, from verse 28 onwards, we read, again, I'm afraid I had the NIV open, but we have, do not blaspheme God. or curse the ruler of your people do not hold back offerings from your granaries from your granaries or your vats you must give me the firstborn of your sons do the same with your cattle and sheep let them stay with their mothers for seven days but give them to me on the eighth day now if it were just the bit about the animals, I think it would probably be read as referring to sacrifice. Give me the firstborn of your animals. Let them be with their mothers for seven days, but then give them to me.

Okay, fine. But God's saying that about human children too. Is this God commanding human sacrifice? A child sacrifice at that? I think so. And I don't know if it's the majority of critical scholars, but an awful lot of critical scholars out there agree with this. I'm actually working on a large-scale survey because I want actual numbers on how many scholars agree with this. But this, I mean, verse 30, you shall do the same with your oxen and your sheep. Seven days, it shall remain with its mother, and on the eighth day, you shall give it to me. That's indisputably about a sacrificial offering, and it is parallel to giving up your firstborn children. And there are a bunch of other indications that that seems to be what's going on here. Because in all your other law codes,

and by the way, we have a different law code in Exodus 13. We have a different law code in Exodus 34. Both of them make reference to this, but then follow up to say, but you shall redeem the firstborn of your children. And I have always found it bizarre the notion that these laws would be, you know, you should sacrifice your child. Sike, just kidding, you're not going to do that unless at some point there was a law that required that. And you have a few different interpretations. One is that this is actually about consecration of your first born to the priesthood.

Another is that this is a pretend requirement that you then, you have to sacrifice something else in their place. You have to redeem them. but if you go to Ezekiel chapter 20 we have in verse 25 and 26 where Ezekiel talks about Adonai the god of Israel giving them commandments that were not good including commandments that caused them to pass their children through the fire which is a reference to child sacrifice and there there are other ways that other texts have handled this like Jeremiah seems to reference this passage, but just has Adonai take the shaggy route. It wasn't me. Says, I never, I never demanded

any such thing. But throughout the Hebrew Bible, human sacrifice and particularly child sacrifice is not far from the surface. And when it bubbles to the surface, it's always in these expectations that you're supposed to start to offer your child, but then not really. We were just kidding the whole time. And I think, and I've talked with, there's a scholar named Heath Durel, who published a book in 2017 called Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel that goes into a lot of detail about this commandment. I recorded a discussion with Heath as well as Kip Davis about what's going on here. And we all came to the conclusion that this seems clearly to be an early command for child sacrifice. That was immediately renegotiated in these other iterations where it says,

psych, you're actually supposed to redeem them. And this is something that we know took place anciently. We have examples of it in Carthage from around the 8th, 7th century BCE, a bunch of the burnt remains of infants along with inscriptions, saying this is a mulk offering to Balchamim or something like that. we know this kind of thing was taking place and I think this is probably a very, very early command for child sacrifice that was preserved for whatever reason, even though in most other places authors tried to negotiate it away. I've heard the suggestion, you bring it up

in your book that when he says give the first bond to me, this is an indication that you should bring them to the temple, because sometimes, you know, to give someone to, to Yahweh might mean to put them in the temple, sort of like giving them an audience with Yahweh, in the same as like presenting them to him, like you might present someone to the king inside the palace. Is that maybe what's been being gotten at with this verse? I think that's a reinterpretation that people will assert when they don't want to accept that it um refers to uh sacrifice and i and i think the clearest indication of that is that whatever the sense of give it is parallel it must be interpreted as parallel to the sense

that is used for the animals now if if you want to kind of uh conceptually genericize this and say okay you're giving them you're given the animals let's imagine what's going to happen here you're going to have to take both of them across the threshold of the temple, therefore, we could interpret this just to mean you have to bring both of them to the temple. And I think that's going to great lengths to try to skirt around what the data would suggest. And I think the other references elsewhere, X's 13, X's 34, Ezekiel 20, even Jeremiah, all these references indicate that it clearly was understood quite widely to refer to child sacrifice. Whether they're accepting it, whether they're rejecting it, whether they're renegotiating

it, they all seem to acknowledge, it kind of sounds an awful lot like child sacrifice. And so I don't think those other interpretations become more likely than the straightforward surface reading. Well, there is so much more to cover, but I think we can leave it on that rather somber note, at least for now. The upcoming book, again, a link is in the description, is it's cool. the Bible says so and it sort of goes issue by issue through a lot of the kind of things that we've been talking about. So slavery and abortion, but also things like the Bible saying that you should beat your kids, the Bible saying that homosexuality is an abomination, the Bible talking about women covering up, the Messiah being born of a virgin. And of course, the Bible saying

that Jesus is God, as well as Bible saying that people are punished in hell, lots of really interesting topic. So if people have liked this conversation as a preview, then go and click that link down below. But I'll have you back on hopefully at some point soon, maybe around the time of the publication of the book, to talk about some more of these issues, because they are endlessly fascinating, even if troubling or disturbing at times, it's hard to deny that this is an interesting conversation. So thanks for your time. Thank you. I appreciate it.