JU11-12: How The Ancients Would Have Viewed Abortion

“Yiftach made a vow to Adonai: ‘If you will hand the people of ‘Amon over to me, then whoever comes out the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the people of ‘Amon will belong to Adonai; I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.‘”-Judges 11:30-31

Following on the heels of yesterdays post, we’re in the process of analyzing verses 30-31 of Judges Chapter 11.

Yesterday we established that the word ASHER which is usually translated into the English words “whatever” or “whatsoever” really means “whoever”.

When Bible translators translate ASHER into “whatever”, they’re projecting their own biases onto the text.

Now let’s take a look at the next part of the phrase.

Jephthah said that whoever came out to greet him (remember he had a human in mind here), he would offer to God as a “burnt offering”.

If you’ve studied the Book of Leviticus with me in the past, you know that the “burnt offering” is OLAH in Hebrew and is one of the five categories of sacrifices that are made to the Lord.

Among them, the OLAH is considered to be the chief sacrifice.

While it’s accurate to describe the OLAH as a “burnt offering”, literally it doesn’t actually mean a “burnt” offering.

A more accurate and literal translation would be to call a “near offering”.

Why?

Because this offering is something you give to God in order to make yourself more acceptable to Him.

In other words, it’s a sacrifice that enables you to be declared holy enough to come close to the Lord.

However, the general understanding of OLAH is that it involved offering up ritually CLEAN animals as spelled out in the Torah AND then burning them up on the altar.

By Jephthah offering up this gift to the Lord, the idea was that the worshipper (or even the nation of Israel) would be made more acceptable to God.

And for the sake of maintaining honesty and integrity, I need to let you know it wasn’t technically required that the OLAH or “near offering” be put to flames and burned up.

But, and this is a big, huge whopping BUT, in the context of the Scriptures, the OLAH is a very well defined type of sacrifice.

It wasn’t just some willy nilly general offer that was given to the Lord.

It was culturally understood in those days that this was a type of sacrifice that was burnt up on the Altar.

Got it?

So if we’re going to interpret the verse not only based on the original Hebrew but also from the cultural perspective of the times, what Yiftach had in mind was that whichever PERSON came out to greet him (he most likely assumed it would be a household slave), he would put him (or her) to death and offer that person up as a human OLAH or burnt offering.

Now I know a lot of you folks can’t stomach the idea that’s really what was going on in Yiftach’s mind when he made his vow.

In order to have things align with your own modern day sense of what is right and wrong, you have to force the interpretation that Jephthah really had an animal in mind when he made his vow.

But remember, in those days, human sacrifice was quite a common practice.

Heck, even some of the Israelite kings who came after King David and King Solomon engaged in the practice.

Check out this description of what King Ahaz did in the second book of Chronicles.

“Achaz was twenty years old
when he began his reign,
and he ruled sixteen
years in Yerushalayim.
But he did not do what was right
from the perspective of Adonai,
as David his ancestor had done.
Rather, he lived in the manner
of the kings of Israel and made
cast metal images for the ba‘alim.
Moreover, he made offerings in
the Ben-Hinnom Valley
and even burned up his own
children as sacrifices,
in keeping with the horrible
practices of the pagans,
whom Adonai had thrown out
ahead of the people of Israel.”
-2 Chronicles 28:1-3

And come to think of it, we do have a commonly accepted modern day practice that anyone living in the Biblical age would have considered an abomination.

It’s called ABORTION.

From the Biblical perspective, this would be considered nothing less than murder to go in and manually destroy a growing child in a woman’s womb.

Especially in light of the commandment to “go forth and multiply”.

Because you obviously can’t go forth and multiply if you’re killing all the children inside a women’s womb because you only wanted sexual pleasure without having to take on the responsibility of raising kids.

Anyways, I digress.

My whole point is in our own sadistic ways, we’re not too far removed from what we judge as being primitive and an abomination back in the ancient era.

We’ll continue our discussion the next time we meet.