Neither Draconian toward Women, Nor Prescriptive of Abortion
A Defense of the Test for Adultery in Numbers 5:11-31
Numbers 5:11-31 comes under attack by skeptics on a number of fronts. If it is not one thing, it is another, and very often one person will shift in their objections once the previous one has been answered. The context is the discovery of adultery in a wife, specifically if “there is no witness against her” (v. 13).
By the time the text runs its course, we have:
(1) a priest conducting some sort of examination—not a medical examiner or private detective, as a modern man might turn to;
(2) some kind of liquid taken by the woman;
(3) the woman’s womb sentenced to swell and “thigh fall away” (v. 22).
Predictably, objections will canvas everything from it being barbaric and sexist and superstitious to being a prescription for abortion, or at least a contradiction to other passages upholding life in the womb. Are such criticisms of the text warranted? We will divide these into two general categories: the suspicions of primitivism of one sort or another (i.e., barbarism, sexism, superstition) and then the abortion issue (whether the one committing the abortion is man or even God).
The Primitive Objection in the Balance
While this may appear to be Draconian punishment at first, we need to consider its fittingness. Sexual relations were used by the guilty without regard to its design. Consequently, when it comes to the woman who violates this law, the whole design and function will be removed. The “falling away” of the thigh is a difficult translation and may only be figurative speech for the curse of barrenness, though may certainly include other ailments.
What seems to bother some people is how the woman is on trial here. It took two to commit the sin. That is true. However, this rule is specific to the offended husband’s remedy. One cannot make everything about equal weights and measures without opening up other kinds of inequity. There are other portions of the law of Moses dealing with a man who commits adultery.
One may then say that the test itself is the sort of “magic” typical of ancient religion and myth. Just look at what this priest is told to use as his test—a magic potion! It says,
“And the priest shall take holy water in an earthenware vessel and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water … the water of bitterness that brings the curse” (vv. 17, 18).
This drink will hit her one way or the other, depending on how morally pure she has been. Surely that is out of step with modern medicine! And of course it is, because it is not meant to be a primitive pharmaceutical drug at all, but an element in which the ceremonial and civil laws intersect for a unique typological people. A clue as to the type involved comes from an earlier narrative.
“He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it” (Ex. 32:20).
Gordon Wenham comments,
“Indeed, early Jewish exegesis linked the drink made from the ashes of the golden calf to the draught administered to suspect women. This law and the golden calf episode may lie behind prophetic references to the cup which the LORD will make faithless Israel drink (Is. 51:17, 22; Ezk. 23:30-34).”1
This is the first thing we must understand about the Scripture’s use of adultery as a type. It is compared to idolatry. Simply read the first three chapters of Hosea to have that driven home. But that makes it fitting that the ash-blended drink should serve as a type for its exposure, and by its bitterness bring to nothing the function of the original design.
The bottom line is that this particular test promises that God Himself will show innocence or guilt. Thus, however extraordinary the material used, and granting that the woman is being brought to the priest, ultimately God Himself presides and reveals here. Any objection against this finally reduces to an anti-supernatural presupposition. To come before the priest was to come before the Lord as judge. We see the same with property cases, where no one witnessed the crime (Ex. 22:7-13).
Moreover, any argument that says, “This sounds like a pagan practice,” might be criticized from a number of fronts. Perhaps the most important, initially, is that all pagans come from cultural lines that were once from that of the one true religion. This knowledge descended from Adam and his generations, or subsequently, from Noah and his generations. That being the case, we should not be surprised to find any number of similarities (among the Jews) and perversions of those similarities (among the pagans). The same can be said of altars, priests, method of sacrifice, religious motive, and so forth.
The Abortion Objection in the Balance
As to the prescriptive argument, we need only consider the many examples in the Bible (or any other book) where imperatives are given and where it simply does not follow that the audience is “whoever” or “everyone.” This bit of common sense and charity that we apply to all other writings must be particularly observed within the Mosaic law. One must make distinctions between moral, civil, and ceremonial law, and study out which have passed away with the coming of Christ. While adultery per se is a violation of the moral law (cf. Ex. 20:14), the prescriptions of this exact court belonged to the ceremonial; and “when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well” (Heb. 7:12).
As always, immediate context is also crucial. The text is situated within a section of the law concerned with the purity of the people considered as a unit. In addition to be used as a type of faithlessness to God, adultery is also viewed in Scripture as a social contagion. Think of where Paul speaks of metaphorically joining “the body,” that is, a people group, to this sin by joining a literal body to it. “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?” (1 Cor. 6:15). Such an ethic was solidly rooted in the history of Israel receiving the law in the wilderness (cf. Lev. 18:20, 25, 27).
This is a divine punishment for unfaithfulness, having nothing to do with abortion’s causes or motives. Notice, for example, that pregnancy is not mentioned even once in the entire passage.
Some knowledge of Hebrew is important. In the first place, the already mentioned “thigh” (יָרֵךְ) may be translated as loins, thigh, or side. There are a great many Hebrew words that have many more meanings than just three. This is true of English words as well, which we tend to admit more readily when our emotions are not involved in the subject matter.
The other relevant Hebrew word, rendered by some translations as “womb” (בֶּטֶן), is all the more general. When it is used throughout the Old Testament, it is used of the bellies of men and women. Consider that in a premodern society, its use for women will be more strictly tied to the bearing of children for the same reason that the whole of a woman’s being would have. The word is neutral in the context of discovering whether or not her womb was occupied. Today we hear of the absurdity of the “birthing person,” as if this could be a stand-in for the woman. Ironically, the woman of antiquity would have been inseparable from a birthing person, and not coincidentally so would the meaning of her womb be inseparable from the meaning of her belly.
Culture and etymology aside, let us say, for the sake of argument, that this test did terminate pregnancies. In fact, let us go all the way and assume that this results in the death of the unborn child in each and every case. What then? The skeptic still has two basic problems. The first is that God is ultimately the one delivering the judgment. I would remind the skeptic that he himself takes this “potion” to be nothing but magic. The priest is not engaging in chemical warfare but priestcraft. As with every allegedly harsh punishment in the Old Testament, we must remember that the original arrangement was instant and total judgment for a single act of disobedience (cf. Gen. 2:17). Everything else is a relaxing of that just sentence.
That a human is involved in the “administration” phase is no more problematic than that the armies of Israel (or any secular magistrate for that matter: cf. Romans 13:1-7) were God’s avenging agents upon entering the land of Canaan. In this case, the human involvement of the priest has only to do with the test and the one pronouncing the curse.
He is God’s rod of justice, as surely as the Assyrian armies were to disobedient Israel (Isa. 10:5). Supposing that God did sentence by taking away this life in the womb on rare, on many, or on all occasions, things would be as they were with the loss of David’s child whom Bathsheba had born to him. It would not constitute a prescription for abortion by human hands. It would be the same prerogative of the Lord’s as in any other case:
“The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (1 Sam. 2:6).
“See now that I am He; there is no God besides Me. I bring death and I give life; I wound and I heal, and there is no one who can deliver from My hand” (Deut. 32:39).
Having said that, we must still bear in mind the Hebrew tradition and many commentators who have good reason to view the phrase about the thigh “falling away” as an idiomatic expression for barrenness.
Now as to this rule being somehow inconsistent with the upholding the life of the unborn in other places (e.g., Gen. 1:26-27, 9:5-6, 25:23, Ex. 20:13, 21:22-25, Ps. 139:13, Prov. 24:11-12, Jer. 1:5, Job 10:8, 9, 11, Lk. 1:44), I must first express my admiration for the skeptic’s sudden candor about the Bible teaching this elsewhere when he ordinarily claims that it does not. But hypocrisy or amazing leap in learning aside, the first difficulty is that this new path begs the whole question. A contradiction only emerges if indeed this is a divine injunction for abortion. Consequently, one cannot propose a contradiction without settling that question first. One must have two identical terms, related by one affirming and the other denying, in order for said terms to contradict.
Whether or not the individual Christian is aware of the wide range of contexts that offer a better explanation for this judgment, it should be remembered that the skeptic’s wider context is only moral relativism. He himself does not believe that abortion is murder. Yet the prospects of the Christian’s dual commitment to a conviction that it is murder and to an inerrant Bible that allows it in this text is what excites him to this new tactic. In the end, that is all this dual nit-picking at a text amounts to, a tantalizing opportunity for another rebel against heaven to trouble God’s children with a more shallow potion.
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1. Gordon J. Wenham, Numbers: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester, UK: InterVarsity Press, 1981), 80.
