Stone Your Children to Death

Exodus 21:12-36

This section is about personal property.  Mostly it is about slaves, but one section is about pregnancy and some of the other parts are about livestock.  The rest is about punishment for crimes.  These crimes include treatment of parents.  I will attempt to make this as organized as possible but these rules skip and jump from topic to topic.

The first section is about punishments that deserve being stoned to death.  This is very specific, they are not to be allowed to die in any other way except being stoned to death.  These crimes include: deliberate murder, attacking one’s own parents, kidnapping another person, selling another person into slavery, and cursing one’s own parents.  If an accident occurs that kills someone, then the person responsible for the accident is allowed a chance to make amends.

But the treatment of slaves is completely different.  An owner can beat his slaves with one limitation.  They must be able to get back to work in “a day or two”.  YHWH is perfectly fine with owners beating slaves.  He finds nothing wrong with this and does not even consider it a sin, unless the slave dies.  Even the punishment for killing a slave is not recorded.  We do not know if stoning is the appropriate punishment or if something less severe is acceptable.  We do know that when a slave owner beats his slave there are two conditions where the slave can go free.  These are if the owner damages the eye or the tooth of the slave.

The abortion rights groups love this one paragraph in this chapter.  In the case of a pregnant woman being hurt by a man, Hammurabi’s Code is invoked.  That is “eye for an eye, limb for limb, and life for life”.  So it would seem that YHWH does demand punishment for abortions.  What is so obviously overlooked from this chapter is all the other punishments!  How many children would be alive today if striking or cursing your parents was punished by stoning to death?  Why is slavery not still practiced, YHWH is perfectly accepting of this?  You have to take it all or none, one cannot pick and choice which Bible verse will be followed.

The rest of the chapter is about livestock.  Specifically three cases.  The first one is about bulls that gouge humans.  They must be stoned to death.  The owner is not responsible for the beast’s actions, unless he knows that this animal had a habit of attacking other creatures.  Guess what the punishment is in that case?  You guessed it, stone him to death.    Another case is about livestock and pits.  If livestock fall into a pit dug by someone else, the owner of the pit must pay for the injured/dead animal.  The pit owner does get to keep the animal.  The final case is about the death of a bull by another bull.  If this death occurs with no warnings, then both owners will split the profits from the living bull.  But, again, if one of the bulls is known to be aggressive, then ownership will switch.  The owner of the docile dead bull receives the aggressive bull in payment for the dead bull.  This does not seem quite as fair as it seems.  Now the owner must prevent the aggressive bull for doing harm!  And he had owned a bull that was completely docile.  Some of YHWH’s rules are not as logical or just as they may seem.   

This entry was posted on July 17, 2009, 8:01 am at 08:01 and is filed under Exodus, YHWH & slavery, Family Values?, Readings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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