“When men get in a fight and hit a pregnant woman so that her children are born prematurely but there is no injury, the one who hit her must be fined as the woman’s husband demands from him, and he must pay according to judicial assessment. If there is an injury, then you must give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, bruise for bruise, wound for wound.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There are not many topics hotter in our culture right now than abortion. It was burning pretty hot before the Dobbs Supreme Court decision last year overturning the infamous Roe v Wade decision. In the wild, wild west world created in the aftermath of Dobbs, things have gotten even more intense. As followers of Jesus, our thinking on this matter must be informed by the Scriptures. In that effort, this passage matters a great deal. Let’s talk about what we see here, what it means, and why it matters.

This is yet another Hebrew law that very obviously came out of an actual case Moses had to adjudicate. And the situation probably unfolded about like we see here. Two men were fighting for some reason and there was a pregnant woman nearby. Why they were fighting doesn’t matter for these purposes. Why there was a pregnant woman nearby doesn’t matter either. The fact is that she was. Likely, she was the wife or perhaps the daughter of one of the men. Whatever the reason for the conflict, one of the men (the one who wasn’t related to her at all) hit the woman. He didn’t just hit her, though, he hit her hard enough that it caused her to go into preterm labor.

Preterm labor is never a good thing. God designed the development process of babies on the inside of the womb to last for a certain amount of time. When things deviate from that clock for some reason, especially on the earlier side, things get dicey. They are dicey now with all the medical technology available to us. In the ancient world they were exceptionally more dangerous for the child (and the mom for that matter as preterm labor means something has gone wrong with her body too). I know some of the fears associated with that. Our youngest tried to kick his way out almost five months early and did arrive a month early. This was after we lost a baby. It was a stressful season. Thankfully, he is a healthy, active delight all these years later.

Well, when a woman is caused to deliver her baby early like this, one of two things is going to happen. These are the same two things that are the outcome of every pregnancy. Either the baby was going to live, or the baby was going to die. The difference in this situation is that the preterm delivery was happening not because of something that went wrong with her body that was outside of anybody’s control, but because these two idiots were fighting near her, things got even more out of control than just the two of them fighting, and one of them hit her hard enough to cause her to go into labor. She wouldn’t have been in this position had they not been fighting and she not been struck.

The regulations God directed Moses to give to the Israelites were twofold. The first instance was if the baby lived. In that case, the man who hit the woman was to be assessed with a fine. Why a fine? Because caring for a preemie is expensive. The effort was going to mean the woman couldn’t make her normal contributions to the household at all, and her husband was going to be pulled away from his normal work to help care for her and their baby. The husband was to figure out how much compensation it was going to require to make up for all the lost work time, this figure was to be brought before a judge, and the judge was to issue the final ruling on the amount of the fine.

In the second instance, “there is an injury.” That statement by itself could mean all kinds of things, but we have to understand it through the lens of the context. The conditional statement, ” if there is an injury,” comes in the context of the baby’s being born prematurely. In other words, the question of injury here is primarily focused on the baby. The physical condition of the woman is part of the equation here, of course, but so is the physical condition of the baby. And if there was an injury, the punishment was to be assessed according to the law of the tooth.

This is the first time the lex talionis is introduced in the Hebrew Scriptures. This was not the first time the idea appeared in a legal system from an historical standpoint. That credit goes to the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. All that means, though, is that people who were all equally made in God’s image were able to recognize the justice of God with the wisdom of God even if they didn’t fully know what the source of those things ultimately was. It is also a good reminder that our natural instinct as human beings is not to carefully limit our response to an offense to the scale of the offense itself. It is to take a more vengeful approach that leaves the offender convinced the offense should not happen again. If you know I might hold you to a life-for-an-eye sort of standard, you might think twice about offending me. The trouble is, that’s not justice, it’s vengeance. And vengeance like that is not reflective of the character of God creates a mess in a big hurry. The Babylonians recognized this and did something about it. Moses recognized the same thing here, also at God’s direction, and incorporated it into Hebrew law.

So, what does any of this have to do with abortion? Directly, not a whole lot. As with the rest of the Scriptures, the word “abortion” isn’t used. Contrary to what a couple of translations, one old and one new, as well as what some rabbinical scholarship on the passage suggests, the relevant Hebrew word here doesn’t imply that the strike to the pregnant woman causes her to have a miscarriage either. There was another Hebrew word that is specifically talking about a miscarriage. That word wasn’t used here. The word here implies a live birth. Helping point us toward this conclusion is the fact that the phrase “there is no injury” in v. 22 is modifying the baby, not the woman. This passage is showing concern for the health and well-being of two individuals, a mother and her baby.

That fact has a great deal to do with how a follower of Jesus should think about the question of abortion. When the word “child” or “baby” first appears in v. 22, that little bundle of joy is on the inside of the mother’s womb. In other words, as far as God was concerned, the life that was developing inside a mother’s womb was a baby, that is, a human life. If something happened to that baby that was the fault of another person, that person was going to be held to account for it just as if it had happened to a fully grown person. Why? Because as a wise elephant once said, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

I have long thought this to be true, but in the last few weeks I have become even more convinced of the matter. The whole of Christianity hangs on the question of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. All of it, honestly, even down to the existence of God. If Jesus rose from the dead, then there is a supernatural God presiding over this world just like Jesus taught us there is. And if there is a supernatural God presiding over this world, then the whole of Christianity becomes a live option. Everything we see in the Scriptures can indeed be true and historical. Squabbling about various wild stories in other parts of the Scriptures, especially in the Old Testament is irrelevant if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. If He did, all the options are on the table.

In the same sort of way, the issue of the morality of abortion (which is a prior issue to the legality of abortion) comes down to a single question: What is the unborn? If the unborn is something other than a human person, then of course abortion is a fine thing to pursue. I mean, from the standpoint of sustaining the human population on Earth, abortion shouldn’t be something we pursue very often, but it’s not morally problematic. If, on the other hand, the unborn is a human person, then in order to justify abortion under any circumstances, we have to be able to justify the intentional killing of an innocent human person. Now, when that person is outside the womb, we call such an act either murder or capital punishment. The first case is often punished by the second. Well, abortion in this sense can’t be capital punishment because the person in question is innocent of any crime. Therefore, it must be murder.

Well, the position of at least the Hebrew law here seems to be that the unborn is a person. That should weigh pretty heavily on our thinking on the matter. If there are circumstances in which the intentional killing of an innocent person are justified, then so is abortion. But if there are not such circumstances, then abortion isn’t ever a justified action. We can seek to rationalize it in all sorts of different ways, but it is not ever just. It is not ever moral. It is not ever good. And a cultural movement that is absolutely insistent that it should be legal up until the moment of delivery and even perhaps for a window on the other side of that momentous event (an act which has historically been referred to as infanticide) is sick to the point of being suicidal.

Now, does this mean that mothers who seek abortions should be treated as murderers? Absolutely not. The fact is, a great many of the mothers who seek abortions are pressured into making that decision in the first place. That pressure can come directly as when a friend or family member or partner or even a trusted doctor encourages or even coerces her in that direction for some reason. It can also come simply when none of the people in her life who should be giving her support during what is unfailingly a trying season in a woman’s life (most especially the father) fail to do so. There are unfortunately some anti-abortion voices arguing for such an end, but I disagree with them rather stridently on that matter. Women who are facing that terrible choice deserve the love and support of a caring community because without that the likelihood of her choosing to abort goes way, way up. Women who have made that terrible choice need the love and support of a caring community because post-abortive guilt in women is a real thing and they need help navigating through those intense emotions with grace and the assurance of forgiveness and hope.

Like all of the other laws we have encountered and will yet encounter, this law itself doesn’t apply to us. Besides, this is such a unique situation that even if we were still under the authority of this law as it is written, we probably wouldn’t find very many opportunities to exercise it. But what does matter for us today is the framing out of the question of just what the unborn is. From what we can see here (as well as in several other places in the Scriptures), the thinking of God as expressed through these various authors is that the unborn is a human person. We need to make sure we are acting accordingly, living out the Gospel of grace and truth as we approach the issue.