Were Abortions Induced on Old Testament Adulteresses?

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Does Numbers 5:22 suggest that women guilty of adultery were punished with miscarriage? And if so, how does this passage speak to the pro-life position?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Many questions in our inbox are questions that I could never anticipate myself like this
0:10.0	one. Today, it's sent to us by a listener named Jessica. Here's what Jessica writes us.
0:15.6	Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast. I was recently confronted by an abortion
0:20.6	advocate about a chapter in the Bible. I was then and remain now quite perplexed about
0:26.9	its meaning. We read that suspicion of infidelity in the Old Testament triggered a potentially
0:32.6	dangerous ritual in which a woman was put on trial, made to drink a potion of sorts,
0:39.0	and if she was found guilty, the verdict was rendered in a physical consequence.
0:45.0	Verses are numbers 522 and 27, numbers chapter 5, verse 22 and 27 texts, which say that
0:52.3	the adulterous woman's quote, thigh shall fall away. That's the ESV translation. thigh shall
1:00.0	fall away, which doesn't make any sense to me. Other translations say the consequence is quote,
1:05.8	miscarriage and untimely birth. That's according to the N E B and R E B translations. Basically,
1:13.4	a guilty verdict was rendered by an induced abortion. In fact, that's the interpretation I found
1:19.1	in Old Testament scholar Norman Henry Snathes' commentary on Leviticus and numbers. On linguistic
1:24.4	grounds, he says quote, cause an abortion in quote is a possible interpretation here. I will
1:31.4	surprise Pastor John, how would you respond to this? My response is first to ask, was this abortion
1:40.1	advocate seriously willing to follow where the scriptures lead or was this simply a superficial
1:51.0	cheap shot because a text might picture God as a boarding a child? I don't know the answer to
1:59.7	that question, but it would make a difference personally in how I spoke to that person directly.
2:07.0	My second response is to say that I don't think we can have any confidence that this text describes
2:17.5	an abortion or a God-caused miscarriage. In fact, I think a good case can be made that this is not
2:26.2	what's happening, and I'll come back to that. And my third response is that even if God were
2:33.7	pictured here as bringing about the miscarriage as part of the punishment for adultery, that would
	...

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