Show Me the Word

Two Old Testament passages are regularly produced as proof that Scripture itself values the unborn less than the born. Both arguments dissolve on contact with the Hebrew, and both can be checked by any reader with an interlinear Bible. We have framed them so the test is one you can run yourself, not a claim to take on trust.

Exodus 21:22–25: the woman struck in a brawl

The claim: when men fighting strike a pregnant woman and she loses her child, the penalty is only a fine; therefore the unborn child’s death is not treated as a death.

Look at the verb. The Hebrew is yatsa, “to come out”, the ordinary word for a live birth. Hebrew has perfectly good words for miscarriage, shakol and nephel, and the Old Testament uses them elsewhere (Exodus 23:26; Job 3:16; Ecclesiastes 6:3). Moses did not use them here.

What the text describes is a premature delivery. The children come out, and the question that follows is whether harm resulted. And notice: the text does not say “harm to the mother”. It says, without qualification, “if there is harm”. So the law reads: if the child is delivered early and both survive, a fine for the endangerment; if either dies, “life for life”.

Far from proving the unborn worth less, this is the one place in the law of Moses where the unborn are named explicitly, and the penalty for the child’s death is capital. Calvin read it exactly so: the unborn child “is already a human being”, and it is “almost a monstrous crime” to rob him of the life he has not yet begun to enjoy.[1]

Numbers 5:11–31: the water of bitterness

The claim, now widespread, is that this passage describes a divinely commanded abortion for a wife who has been unfaithful.

Run the same test. The Hebrew says the guilty woman’s “belly shall swell” and her “thigh shall fall away” (naphal yarek); the older English versions render it “thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot”. In the entire passage there is no word for child, no word for foetus, no word for pregnancy, and no word for miscarriage. Every one of those must be imported by the translator, and in the modern versions that speak of miscarriage, it has been.

The passage itself tells you what the curse is, by stating its opposite. If the woman is innocent, “she shall be free and shall conceive seed” (Numbers 5:28). The blessing set against the curse is the ability to conceive. The curse, then, is barrenness, not the loss of an existing child. The abortifacient reading is recent and rests on a translator’s supplement rather than on anything Moses wrote.

The sufficient answer, when this passage is raised, is one sentence: show me the word.

What about “delayed ensoulment”?

One related objection reaches into church history: did not the medieval church teach that the soul enters only after forty days? It entertained such speculation, but the objection mistakes where it came from and what it changed. The idea entered Christian thought not from the Hebrew but from a Greek rendering of Exodus 21 shaped by Aristotle’s embryology. And even while the speculation ran, the church’s practical verdict never moved. Basil of Caesarea, in the fourth century: “with us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed”.[2] The destruction of the embryo was condemned at every stage.

Whatever one thinks of the soul’s timetable, it is God’s secret, and it is beside the point. Our ground is not the soul’s paperwork but the living human creature, made in the image of God. Humanity is the ground. It always was.

Sources

1. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses (Harmony of the Law), Vol. 3, on Exodus 21:22 (trans. C. W. Bingham, 1852–55). https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom05.ii.ii.v.ii.html
2. Basil of Caesarea, Letter 188, Canon 2 (c. AD 374). https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202188.htm

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version except where the underlying Hebrew is under discussion, in which case the Hebrew terms are given.