Boiled Mother's Milk

"When, in the course of a brawl, a man knocks against a pregnant woman so that she has a miscarriage but suffers no further hurt, then the offender must pay whatever fine the woman's husband demands after assessment." --Exod. 21:22

Old Testament
Book Two: Exodus
Israel at Mount Sinai
Chapter 21: More Comprehensive Laws
Chapter 22: More Laws
Chapter 23: More Laws
Chapter 24: Moses goes up the mountain for forty days to get the tablets

It must be because I am a law student now, but I found these chapters fascinating. The ten commandments are not the basis for our morality; as Christopher Hitchens said, they are hardly moral at all, ranging from obvious to irrelevant. These next chapters, however, contain laws that are not nearly so obvious, and they reveal a particular system of tort and criminal law. There are many striking similarities between modern common law torts and the rules presented here. I found most interesting the "wild beast" provisions. If an ox suddenly goes crazy and gores someone, the owner is not responsible. However, if the owner has had previous warning that the ox has problems, then he is responsible. One could fairly convincingly spin the rules of tort law from the provisions presented here.

Of course that in no way means our common law is derived from this biblical law. (And of course squared, it doesn't mean these laws came from god.) What it does mean is that there is something deeply obvious about the laws we have. I think that is fascinating, because when it comes to apportioning liability when no one is to blame, the rules are far from obvious, and are indeed quite debatable. Yet humans seem frequently to come to the same conclusion no matter the time period or context. It would be interesting to compare western law to Arab law or east Asian law--I wonder if their tort law is the same as ours? These are fascinating questions, because there is a fundamental divide between the aggressive individualism of western culture and the eastern "part of nature" philosophy. Well, if I were going to live 200 more years, I might read a book about it!

This discussion raises a question for me. Where did the Romans and Greeks come from? I mean in bible terms? What "tribe" are they from? It's interesting that historically there is such a large break between the old and new testament. Enormous leaps in technology and sophistication were achieved between the two testaments, and the Jews went from being a tribe moving around as one to just being a minority in these other cultures. I wonder what happened to the tribe of Israel between the old testament and the new? Well, I guess we'll find out! I'm only on page 76--still have over 900 to go just in the old testament. This is also interesting: I really have no idea what happens in the rest of the bible! I know a handful of scattered stories--David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, the Wisdom of Solomon--but I don't know the narrative in the slightest way. Well, let's get to it! (I have half a guess that there is hardly a narrative at all, and the book continues to be as repetitive as it has been to this point. The footnotes have ominous portents to that effect, they have made repeated mentions along the line that "in Numbers, this rule is formulated differently." I am afraid the next 200 pages might be nothing but rules. We'll see.

I must point out one more important aspect of these rules. Exodus 21:22 states quite clearly that a fetus's "life" has no value. If there's a fight and a pregnant woman is struck and she loses her baby, the only punishment is a fine. If on the other hand, a human being is killed, the punishment is death. (It's slightly more complicated than that, because there's a distinction between accidental and purposeful actions, but that distinction isn't important here.) The bible simply does not value a fetus as a human.

There's a concept in science called Occam's Razor. "All things being equal, the simplest solution is best." Something I have found entertaining as I read the bible for the first time, with an un-jaundiced eye, is how these inconsistencies and absurdities LEAP off the page. And the observations I'm making are not original--they have been observed repeatedly by everyone who has simply read the text. It's amazing that every independent reading of the text comes up with the same complaints. Consequently, every earth-shattering passage I come across, such as "fetus's are not worth the life of a human," has already been debated ad infinitum by religious apologists trying to fit the square peg of their beliefs into the obvious round hole of a simple reading of the text itself. So, of course, if you search for Exod. 21:22 on google, you'll find a million pages explaining why the text that so obviously says one thing in fact says the opposite.

You can gauge how devastating your observation is by how tortured is the explanation why you are wrong. Exod. 21:22 is a big one. Here is the first page I came across purporting to explain the true meaning of Exod. 21:22. I don't feel right now like going into all the fallacious tactics they use to defend their positions. Suffice it to say for now that Occam's Razor goes against the Christian reading of the passage in almost every instance.

In a larger sense, the old testament view of life itself was dramatically different than ours. There was no sense of equality. The chapters in question here go on at great length about slaves, which are clearly okay, and just as clearly a slave is not valued as much as a human being--indeed a slave is property not human life. More importantly, women too are valued less than men. I want to make one point that the article I cited above fails to notice. Even if the baby were born alive, the injury then would be to the woman, right? She suffers a miscarriage but no other harm--the injury is to her. The retribution goes not to her but to her husband! It's not important that she was injured; what's important is that the man's property was harmed. In such a value system it is impossible to imagine that a fetus was given the value of an adult male, when women were not, slaves were not, and children were not.


--bibletoenail