The Spirit of the Lord has moved on me and I must now deliver.
I have wrangled over this with friends for a few days, making sure I had considered it from different angles. Perhaps you could consider that as the oral and written arguments before the court. That is, because I claim God has called me as prophet and elder, it is my duty to eventually render a judicial declaration. The limits to my authority (“this court”) is your conscience. If the Lord does not move you to hear my words, then those words are meaningless. If you and I do not share together the awareness of a covenant, I am just some random guy with some loud opinions. This is a critical point, an essential and unavoidable prerequisite for what follows.
Basic legal context: The Covenant of Noah is binding on all humanity, to include all human governments. All human activity is judged under that Law. The primary record of that Law in Genesis 8 & 9 leaves us with very few particulars. Rather, in typical Hebrew literary fashion, a brief statement represents a much larger common understanding. Much is presumed of the reader’s knowledge. We get some of the particulars in places like Acts 15. The Talmud presents what it calls the Seven Noachide Laws; we take that with a grain of salt because the Talmud is wholly suspect. For now, I find the list in the Talmud mostly plausible. See this study for details.
The Law of Moses comes to us as a particular implementation of Noah with several extra elements not at all applicable to the rest of humanity. What remains is the burden of reading Moses to gain some insight into how Noah works. Moses is not binding on anyone who doesn’t embrace it specifically, and the Cross made it in essence wholly voluntary. In Christ, it serves as a guide and we are all supposed to study it and abstract our own best understanding of how it applies. This is the meaning behind the passage about “rightly dividing the Word” — that passage applied specifically to the Old Testament as “the Word” of Scripture extant at the time. While you might want to confer with people who have studied it in depth, as I have, you are under no obligation to take their word for it. It is presumed you would study it in light of Jesus’ teaching along with the Apostles. The New Testament clarifies and corrects Moses. Still, you are obliged to read it all for yourself and pray for the Spirit’s enlightenment.
In that sense, hear now the Word of the Lord from this prophet and elder.
The current debate over abortion, particularly in America, is a false dichotomy. It is two lies pitted against each other. That there is some mixture of truth on both sides simply means we have to expend more verbiage explaining the truth.
Biblical Law says this: From the moment of coitus and conception, until the moment of weaning — typically marked by a ritual celebration somewhere around ages 3 to 5 — until that moment, the life of the child is entirely under the authority of the mother. She holds the principle authority from God for prospering or ending that life. In God’s Word, she is accountable first and foremost to God and His revealed Laws. Ending that child’s life must meet the justice requirements of Noah. That doesn’t give her much wiggle room, so we rightly expect killing that child is pretty hard to justify before God.
On this earth, the Bible says her accountability is first to the father of that child. Daddy also has authority to kill that baby, but he might have to fight the mama. She can resist as much as she is able. In God’s justice, daddy could theoretically execute mama for killing his baby. Normally he would take this matter before the one and only court with that authority to decide: the family elder(s). Yes, this whole thing assumes she is living under a covenant family household. Depending on how things are structured in her society, the matter of the baby’s murder can be appealed up to something akin to tribal-national level. But “national” has a meaning in the Bible not accepted by most modern people. A proper example would be taking the matter before the King of Israel as the final earthly court of appeal. I note that would have been wholly unlikely because the matter usually stops with the clan elder. That’s because the clan elder has the authority to execute the woman for murdering her baby, and King would hardly get involved. He would almost surely refuse to take case.
Where does that leave us now? The modern secular state has virtually zero authority under Noah. No, it’s not that simple, but I need to start shaking us loose from the abomination of modern political activism. Christians are playing a very dangerous game trying to use any modern civil government as leverage for much of anything. The New Testament pointedly directs Christians to settle everything they can in their own covenant courts among the church elders. (Pastors are not in on this; it’s a matter for governing elders.) Granted, civil governments tend to stick their noses in where they are not wanted, but we are supposed to avoid encouraging that imposition. The point should be made again: You cannot understand God’s justice outside the proper social structure, and the attendant governing structure, of a tribal society. Now, in Christ, the business of using blood kinship as the basis for your tribal society is unlikely, but ideal. Instead, the entire thing rests on the covenant tribe of kinship in His blood. That is, the local church body. And that local church body is entirely invalid unless it’s fundamental structure is not pretty much the tribal structure of the ancient Hebrew people. Modern corporate structures are invalid — period. Your church is your “clan.” You follow tribal customs on authority and so forth.
In a certain sense, no one has any business poking into your daily affairs unless they are related by blood or covenant. Under Noah, and by implication this applies to all Christians, no secular authority has any business poking their nose into a woman’s abortion. For the most part, she is answerable on this earth only to her family, which includes the daddy and his family, since there is the presumption she has joined his family by marriage covenant.
Christian, your yelling and screaming, trying to make your secular government outlaw abortion is itself an abomination to God. Your yelling and screaming trying to make the mother feel guilty for what an awful thing she did to that poor little baby is missing the point. If your sign says, “Your abortion kills me, too” then you are on the right track. Unfortunately, our cultural context will almost guarantee she’ll miss the point. That’s because Western secular government claims ownership of all human life, and that is simply evil. The basis for your claim against her crime is not some imaginary civil rights of the child (purely Western mythology) or some insult to the secular society at large. Your only claim against her is that baby’s murder punches a hole in your moral covering as someone who lives in geographical proximity. Otherwise, the Bible says it’s none of your business, because the Bible says she owns that child completely until weaning. She is virtually unanswerable to you; she owes you no explanation. If you have a complaint, you would take it to her clan elder. God forbids you harassing her except in the carefully structured setting of a shared covenant to which she has already agreed. If you are her friend, then use that leverage. Accosting her on the street is not simply rude; it’s immoral before God. Without that covenant link, it’s none of your business as a matter of human interaction.
Granted, our US Constitution is some horrific perversion of a covenant in a certain sense. Yes, God holds us accountable to it on a certain level. That is almost entirely outside the context for this discussion.
The way God says you should stop abortion is to dramatically change your society, to demand people live under the Covenant of Noah and grab back from civil government some 99% of its current enforcement authority. Stopping abortion means radically changing how it is people meet and have sex by instituting social controls that make it pretty hard. Better yet, you should seek God’s face and pray this government be destroyed, because we all know it will not surrender under any circumstances. That’s because the people running it are almost entirely — virtually every single individual — psychopaths already eternally damned from before the foundation of the earth.
Would you say then that the main difference between abortion and slavery is that the mother has a moral ownership of the child, and the slave owner did not have the equivalent? Did that difference justify the civil laws put in place to prevent it? Or to prevent rape, for that matter?
Can you help me understand which parts in particular point you to the understanding that the woman has the ownership of the child?
We end up stating things in shocking ways because our situation asks questions biblical law didn’t really anticipate. It was bad enough with Israel in the Wilderness when everyone was more or less on the same cultural foundation, but our modern society is so very far away from some of the most fundamental expectations, it’s not easy to find something clearly stated in the Bible. We are forced to deduce and extrapolate a lot of things.
I don’t think the Bible writers anticipated a society like ours. We learn that ANE people regarded children as property of the mother from history, archaeology, etc. It was the overwhelming viewpoint of that whole region of the world. The social and legal status of children would seem barbaric to us, but if we absorb the context of that status, it makes good sense. The family was largely inviolable in that ancient world. There most certainly were people with their nose in your daily business, but it was your kinfolks, and it was universally regarded as healthy and normal. You would have had little privacy from them and wouldn’t care. In such a society, everyone loves children dearly, but deeply respects the decisions of the one to whom God gave them. The underlying causes for abortion we see today were virtually non-existent then. To extrapolate that she could kill her infant is merely acknowledging it’s no one’s business what stupid and embarrassing act took her child’s life, just that it was a horrible tragedy. It was a loss to her and the whole extended family, and no one would dream of investigating how it died. Thus, we deduce she would have complete freedom to terminate that life for all sorts of wrong reasons, however unlikely, but it’s no one else’s business.
In that ancient world, the greatest treasure of any man was people. Not just control of their bodies, but their loyalty. People morally free to do any number of things contrary to that man’s will, but who wouldn’t dream of it, was more valuable than any physical assets. Sure, they’ll guess wrong, but that’s expected. That bond of love and loyalty was precious. If he had a slave, he would try to cultivate the same loyalty, but his obligations were vastly reduced. This wasn’t family; it was likely a former enemy, but rarely ever one of your own kind. I could blather on at length, but a child is potential loyal family, whereas a slave is one step above a domestic animal. Still a person for whom God laid strong obligations on the owner, but not family because not free to make that powerful moral commitment of loyalty. The people with the power to decide were expected to carry a heavy weight of moral obligation to care for their people in varying gradations of duty based on the specific relative roles.
To your original question: Slavery was repugnant, but keeping them alive was a duty. Tort liabilities varied based on that ancient scale of value we struggle to imagine, but the loss of life itself was a separate moral issue. It wasn’t the matter of the death itself, but the issue of justice. Those people in that time saw demons behind every bush; injustice had all sorts of unpredictable consequences in yours and everyone else’s life. Things were already complicated enough without injustice stirring up creation, empowering demons to mess with you. We disparage that kind of “superstition” today. And while the people back then realized not everyone believed that way, and that you couldn’t force someone to change their minds about it, you could warn others they were dealing with a moral fool and keep your distance. Slavery was an unfortunate fact of life; abortion was murder. A mother having total control over her child’s welfare was not slavery, but an absolute necessity if there was going to be any kind of social stability at all.
It does appear on the surface slavery and childhood minority were very much the same. Tort liabilities were comparable in some ways. The difference was the child was your inheritance in a way we can scarcely understand. The slave had no future; the child had vast potential. No one could imagine then a world today where a woman would be so wrapped up in her petty comforts that she would have sex on such a casual basis, and would regard her mighty gift from God an inconvenience that could be disposed of without much thought. You and I know abortion hammers a woman’s moral consciousness, but we also know our whole society militates against even the slightest awareness of such a consciousness. God says it’s part of our nature that we are fundamentally wired to recognize the moral fabric, but it’s all too easy to raise up a society that dismisses the whole thing with prejudice.
Preventing rape and abortion were both the responsibility of the woman’s family. The biblical laws about rape seem pretty cavalier when it comes to the woman’s feelings. We miss the context: If virtually every human you encountered was some kin, then rape would be a totally different matter from what happens today. How likely would that rape be brutal violence versus stupidly jumping the gun on social processes? Almost no woman faced predatory rape, and those few rare cases of it were likely invading soldiers intent on humiliating the whole nation. To them, the local gal was two-legged cattle, plunder in sandals. In our world, you have precious few allies and nearly everyone you encounter is a potential enemy. A vague sense of “we are one nation” isn’t a very powerful deterrent against taking advantage of each other, and nothing like a whole nation bathed in the sense of moral responsibility and the genuine threat of angels and demons standing around waiting to pounce on you.
This is why I keep hammering away at the optimal social structure, because however bad it may have been, everything else is far, far worse. That our social structure is an abomination does not change fundamental moral structure. The woman owns her baby and is largely unaccountable until at least weaning age (actual weaning wasn’t the point), which varied between 3 and 5 years. This matches some of what we know about human development scientifically, but our science comes bathed in a different moral structure. Still, her ownership is only superficially similar to slavery. Our entire legal system struggles mightily to discount the moral aspect by replacing it with something artificial and far cheaper. Jesus would not have died on the Cross to pay the penalty for our civil laws. It was all about God’s Laws and so much more.