WARNING: This piece is about abortion and miscarriage. If that upsets you—don’t read it.
Multiple personalities
I know that “Instructions for abortion. Numbers 5: 19-22.” is kind of a lengthy title but it conveys what I’m going to be talking about. I swear that I did not remember these passages in my readings of the bible. First I’m going to present the wording from Numbers 5: 19-22 from the New International Version (NIV). Different bibles use different words some being vaguer than others. The NIV provided straightforward language.
19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you.
20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”—
21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell.
22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
Next I’m going to provide one example of a biblical reference of God killing a child. It’s from 2 Samuel 12:14, NIV.
“But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the LORD, the son born to you will die.”
In the above verse David had an adulterous affair with Bathsheba so God punished them by killing the baby. (Without looking it up I think that the child was a week old when it was killed. Not an abortion or miscarriage.)
The Old Testament God would kill men women and children—lots of them. God would also kill pregnant women. (Hosea 13:16) We’re talking rip kids out of the womb killin’. So if the woman wasn’t killed before the baby was ripped from her womb does that count as abortion? It certainly would today.
New Testament Jesus God—not so much killin’. Loves kids.
Loves people.
Context is everything
Now you will find lots of commentary out there in World Wide Web saying this is completely wrong and that people have to know some really smart stuff to know what all these verses actually mean and how ‘other people’ have the translation completely wrong and those ‘other people’ are saying the same thing. Clear? You have to be really smart to read the bible and know what it means or hang out with smart people.
Or not.
No fault. No foul
There are interpretations that I kind of enjoyed reading. One such interpretation says that since curses aren’t real and the potion was powerless they couldn’t possible have caused an abortion. People at the time though kinda believed that they were real. The implication there is that the bible is make believe in places. Another explanation is that if the “curse” causes a miscarriage a miscarriage is not actually an abortion. There’s another example in the bible about God causing miscarriages but I’m not going to bother looking it up. I’ve written about this topic before here, here, and here.
Okay, here it is. “Give them, O LORD--what will You give? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that dry up!” Hosea 9:14, NIV
Several defenses offered up maintain that miscarriages aren’t actually abortions even if God causes them. In today’s climate a woman taking a morning after pill is considered wrong by Evangelicals even though it’s only to prevent conception.
However if a woman does anything to cause a miscarriage it’s considered an abortion unless what she does is an accident that causes a miscarriage if she didn’t know the accident would cause the miscarriage. So that wouldn’t be an abortion.
Or would it?