On Killing Children and Ambiguity in Exodus

Last updated on: May 9, 2013 at 6:06 am by Faithful Democrats

On Killing Children and Ambiguity in Exodus 2013-05-09T06:06:50-06:00 Faithful Democrats

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In this second part of my five-part series-in which I look at abortion through the lens of each of the five books of the Pentateuch-I want to focus on the two well-known passages in Exodus that have to do with the killing of children. (See the first essay in the series for some explanations of my intentions as well as some disclaimers.)

The first passage is found in Exodus 1. The scene is being set for the Israelites’ divinely ordained and assisted departure from Egypt, and the narrator is explaining the extreme disfavor in which the Hebrews have found themselves. In just a few generations after the original children of Israel came to Egypt to be with their brother Joseph, a Pharaoh who does not know of Joseph’s fame comes to power. This Pharaoh wishes to stop the spread of the Israelites, and despite the craftiness of two Israelite midwives, Pharaoh ends up having his way: "Pharaoh commanded all his people, ‘Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live’" (Exodus 1:22). We do not know the extent to which Pharaoh’s orders were carried out, but it was enough of a reality that Moses’ mother feared for the child and put him into a basket to float to a life in which he would not die. Pharaoh’s act is surely one of the most heinous acts found in the Bible-particularly on a mass scale-and it has rightfully received just that reputation throughout the Judeo-Christian history of biblical interpretation.

God, of course, responds by lifting Moses up as a leader for the Israelites, and then going through the arduous and plague-ridden process of convincing Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. The ongoing battle between God and Pharaoh in the opening chapters of Exodus was once indelicately called-by my Old Testament professor in divinity school-a "divine pissing contest." His point was that because Pharaoh was assumed to be divine in ancient Egypt (just as the emperor was in ancient Rome), the story of God’s ten plagues and Pharaoh’s response to them is essentially the story of one god trying to outdo the other.

By Exodus’ telling, though, one of the gods is truly God, and one is merely a man known as the Pharaoh. And this is definitively proven in Exodus 12 and 14, first when God delivers the plague that gets Pharaoh finally to let the Israelites leave Egypt (Exodus 12), and then when God drowns Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea when they try to pursue the Israelites across it (Exodus 14). It is the first of these two stories I want to focus on, the tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn: "At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead" (Exodus 12:29-30).

Isn’t this equally as terrible a story as the story of Exodus 1? How are these two texts different? More to the point, why is it that we hear the first story-the story of Pharaoh ordering that all male children be thrown into the Nile-and shudder with disgust, but hear the second and (even with some discomfort) accept the tradition that pictures God’s slaying of the firstborn as divine retribution to Egypt and salvation to Israel?

Our acceptance of that tradition, I think, has a lot to do with how we interpret scripture for our modern context. In other words (as I have said before), many Christian readers of Exodus-particularly within the Christian right-read the United States into the role of Israel and assume that God is on our side when we hear the stories of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and conquest of the land of Canaan. That mapping of the anyone’s contemporary nation onto Israel is dangerous-even if natural and/or unintentional-and allows us to accept a certain level of death so long as death does not involve the "good guys," or, more accurately, the "chosen nation."

Given all of this, it is time to reveal my general argument in this essay: the "pro-life" Christian right has no business arguing against abortion by claiming that God is a God who respects, cherishes, nourishes and promotes life. Indeed, they should be ashamed to do so in the light of these passages from Exodus.

Let me explain. (And for those of you who may think I’m attacking the right unfairly here, the left will be critiqued in part four of this series.) To the Christian right, abortion is equivalent to killing children, because even the tiniest embryo is considered a child. For that reason, the parallel between these passages from Exodus and abortion is apt. And because that is true, we simply cannot argue, given the passage from Exodus 12, that God is a protector of all life. In the contest between two deities-even when one is more clearly God than another-our God also uses is just as likely to use horrific, death-dealing tactics as Pharaoh. Scripture-as evidenced by these Exodus passages-is highly ambiguous about God’s view of human life.

One Christian right response to this-which has been their answer to why a "pro-life" view doesn’t equal an "anti-death penalty" view-is that we need to make distinctions between innocent and guilty lives. I suppose I could begin to make sense of that argument if God had struck down Pharaoh’s firstborn alone, or perhaps the firstborn of Pharaoh’s entire court. But every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from Pharaoh down to the most unimportant prisoner, and including the livestock? Surely every Egyptian was not responsible for Israel’s oppression, and yet all suffered alike. There is simply no way to make an argument about innocent versus guilty lives here.

And that is why it is far more responsible to accept scriptural ambiguity on the divine view of life than to claim that God is always and everywhere a protector of human life. If we want to argue against abortion because we have problems with it personally or because somehow our faith tells us it is wrong, that is our prerogative. But shame on us when we first say that abortion is against Christianity because God is a God of life, and then fail to take the whole of our tradition (including texts like Exodus 12) into account in terms of what claims they make about how God treats human life. Mind you, I am not saying that God is not a God of life-such an argument is well beyond the scope of this essay. Rather, I want us to recognize that when we ignore the ambiguity of texts like Exodus 1 and 12 and claim that God is the protector of all human life, we are creating a god simply that does not exist within the pages of our Bible, and certainly not in the book of Exodus.

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Next week: Looking at the Real Issues: Jubilee as a Cultural and Economic Model

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