Abortion, the Bible, and Us: Conducting Abortions in the Ancient World

Posted on October 31, 2022October 31, 2022 by Eric Harvey

A silver coin from ancient Cyrene, dating from the 5th century BCE, which shows a fruit or pod from the silphium plant.

A 5th century BCE silver coin from Cyrene, showing part of a silphium plant. Photo from Expeditions Magazine 34 (1992).

In their accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion, all four of the canonical new Testament gospels include a scene in which Jesus stumbles under the weight of the cross and falls. In response, his Roman guards pull a man out of the crowd and compel him to carry it the rest of the way.

This may seem like a strange way to introduce a blog post on the practice of abortion in antiquity, but stay with me. I mention it more for the man than the story, and more specifically, for the man’s home town. His name was Simon, and he came from the North African town of Cyrene. Cyrene was not large, but it was famous throughout the Mediterranean world for its primary export—an herb called silphium that was reputed to be the safest and most effective contraceptive and abortifacient available. According to the Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus, drinking the juice from a chickpea-sized piece of silphium monthly would “not only prevent conception but destroys any already existing” (Riddle 1999).

Silphium grew only on the Mediterranean-facing hillsides surrounding Cyrene, and proved impossible to cultivate agriculturally. Demand outstripped supply, and by Jesus’s time silphium had been harvested almost to the point of extinction. Writing around the same time, Pliny the Elder said the price of silphium had surpassed its weight in silver, and by the 3rd or 4th century CE, it could no longer be found, making it the first species extinction caused by humans in recorded history.

Of course, mentioning a guy from the town made famous by silphium doesn’t mean the Gospels were taking a position one way or the other on its use, but it does offer us a nice entry point into the discussion of abortion in the ancient world. Silphium was the herb of choice for those who could get it, but it was far from the only option for preventing or ending pregnancies in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean world. Starting almost two millennia before Jesus’s time, texts and art witness to a diverse array of contraceptive and abortive medicines and practices.

some General Comments on Ancient Birth Control

People in ancient societies cherished, valued, and wanted children just like people do today, but there were also times when it was not right to bring a(nother) child into the world. To this end, women developed ways to regulate their fertility to ensure that they would be able to meet the sustenance and care needs of any new additions to their families. Women generally managed their reproductive lives and health care among themselves, with little involvement or interference from men. Most of the relevant knowledge was held by midwives and other learned women, whose traditions did not tend to be put down in text as often as men’s. We must assume, therefore, that the texts we do have represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of ancient contraception and abortion.

Why do I keep talking about contraception and abortion when this is a series on abortion? The line between the two is difficult to draw even today, and it was much more so in antiquity.

Today, the typical abortion is usually thought of as a highly medicalized surgical procedure, and this has been generally true for the past century or so. Recently, however, the identification of certain medications that cause abortions has revolutionized the practice (as described in this very helpful episode of Radiolab). This shift has brought the practice of abortion much more into line with the way it was conducted in the ancient world, where surgical abortions would have been dangerous and probably very rare. Instead, most abortion would have been handled early, through the use of pharmacological herbs and medicinal compounds. Because of how and when these worked, it’s not always clear whether we would classify them as contraceptives or abortifacients today—or how they would have been understood in antiquity. Basically, we call anything that prevents fertilization contraception and any intervention after conception abortion. This seems clear and tidy, except that the point of conception is hazy today and was far hazier in antiquity. Women in the ancient world may have begun to suspect pregnancy with a missed period, but they could not be sure until they detected fetal movement—sometime around the third month in most cases. This is where that divergence in ancient and modern concepts of conception becomes so crucial.

In his survey of premodern abortion methods, Eve’s Herbs, John Riddle covers a wide variety of birth control practices. Some are clearly contraceptive by anyone’s definition, including withdrawal during intercourse and lactation-induced amenorrhea (that is, a pause in ovulation caused by breastfeeding), while others are clearly abortive methods, such as late-term surgeries.

In the middle are a host of other methods that could have worked as contraceptives, abortifacients, or both depending on the case. Most of these involved herbal and/or other medicinal compounds, which could be prepared and administered in various combinations and forms. Some were taken orally—eaten, dissolved in water, beer, or wine, or brewed in teas. Others were used as pessaries (that is, vaginal suppositories). They could be used prophylactically or in response to suspected pregnancies.

They also worked by various biological mechanisms. Most common were emmenagogues, a term for any substance that stimulates menstruation. These can be used to ensure regular periods on an ongoing basis, but they also impede the implantation of fertilized eggs. Some 40–60% of fertilized eggs do not implant naturally and leave the uterus with the next menstrual cycle anyway, according to UCSF Medical Center and the Gutmacher Institute. Emmenagogues simply ensure this result when pregnancy is not wanted. Other treatments may have worked as spermicides or by forcing the uterine muscles to contract.

The herbs and other substances used varied depending on local availability and pharmacological practices, and many mentioned in texts have been discovered to have abortifacient properties when tested in modern laboratories. Riddle’s list includes silphium, of course, along with pomegranate skin, pennyroyal, artemisia, rue, Queen Anne’s lace, myrrh, squirting cucumber, juniper, aloe, dittany, chaste tree, birthwort, asarum, willow, cypress, and various mints.

Let’s look at a few specific texts for examples.

Egypt

The earliest textual evidence for pregnancy prevention comes from Egypt. The Ebers Papyrus, dating from around 1550 BCE but based on earlier texts, is a 20 meter long medical compendium with cases, treatments, and medical theory discussed under some 877 section headings. It covers every part of the body, including several aspects of gynecology and reproductive care. It contains instructions for a pregnancy test as well as an abortion in the “first, second, or third period” (the time frame is not entirely certain). The prescription involves applying a paste of acacia, dates, and honey to a pessary of moistened plant fibers. In modern laboratories, some species of acacia have been found to decrease fertility substantially in rats.

Recipes for contraceptive pessaries also appear in the Kahun Papyrus, which was written sometime around 1900 BCE. These utilize acacia as well as colocynth, which was also described as an abortifacient in medieval texts. It is potent, but also quite toxic if taken in too large quantities, meaning that some knowledge and experience would have been necessary to prepare it safely.

Mesopotamia

Evidence from Mesopotamia is rarer, but there is at least one medical text with a prescription to “cause a pregnant woman to drop her fetus” (BAM 246). The tablet is broken and much of the process is lost, but it seems to consist of three different concoctions that are ingested on subsequent days. They involve mixing herbs and crushed lizards into beer and wine and are meant to be taken on an empty stomach. None of the herbs in question can be identified with any certainty, but one is mentioned as a drug that promotes easy birthing in other medical texts. Thus, it may have worked by stimulating the uterine muscles to contract, expelling the fetus.

Mesopotamian law collections also contain stipulations for cases of spontaneous, unintentional, and intentional miscarriages like the biblical ones discussed in the last post. These differ by time period and ruling polity, but most do not treat a fetus as equivalent to a child or adult person. However, one law collection from the Middle Assyrian period (15th–13th century BCE) commands the death penalty for any woman who procures or causes her own abortion (Middle Assyrian Law A 53). Further, her corpse must be impaled on a stake and never buried. This was not the majority position among ancient Mesopotamian polities, but it does demonstrate that they could clearly articulate bans on abortion when they wanted to.

Greece and Rome

Greece and Rome provide much more textual evidence for all areas of reproductive medicine, but they are way out of my wheelhouse, disciplinarily speaking. Nevertheless, I can sketch out some characteristics in broad strokes.

Greek and Roman writers held different positions on abortion, but it is clear they were regularly practiced and well-known. Aristotle, for example, supports the use of induced abortion as a means of limiting family size, while Pliny the Elder opposes it as a rule.

The herbal and pharmacological treatments mentioned above occur often in medical texts, identified as contraceptives, abortifacients, or “menstrual regulators.” In addition, physicians including Hippocrates and Galen recommend strenuous exertion or jumping up and down to cause abortion by inducing premature labor. The Hippocratic work Nature of the Child says that a woman early in pregnancy should “jump up and down, touching her buttocks with her heels at each leap, for seven times,” at which point the seed should fall out onto the ground.

Perhaps the most famous example of a ban on abortion, the Hippocratic Oath, turns out not to be one on closer investigation. The Latin translation of the oath that predominated for centuries in Europe included a blanket prohibition on abortion. The original Greek, however, especially in the earliest manuscripts, read differently: “I will not give a woman a pessary for the purpose of inducing an abortion.” Hippocrates and his followers knew both oral and vaginal methods of birth control, so why the distinction? A likely explanation comes from Soranus’s treatise on gynecology, written in the 2nd century CE, where he says that the side effects and potential risks of pessaries are simply too great to support their use. thus, the oath seems to have been originally about the safety of abortions rather than their permissibility.

Ancient Israel

We do not have any explicit medical or pharmacological evidence of contraception or abortion from ancient Israel itself, except for one biblical text that indicates knowledge of withdrawal as a means of preventing pregnancy (genesis 38:8–10).

Aside from that, there is also one biblical ritual that can result in the termination of a pregnancy in some circumstances, although it is not clear that it should be understood as an abortion text in the same way as the medical writings referenced above. There is no identifiable mechanism by which the ritual could cause a miscarriage or abortion medically, and within the logic of the ritual the power that determines the result is magical or miraculous, depending on how you want to define it.

The ritual, Numbers 5:11–31, is known as the Sotah, after the Hebrew term for a “wayward woman.” It is intended as a means of divining whether a woman has had sexual intercourse with anyone other than her husband, and to initiate it he need only suspect her of infidelity (in biblical language, when “a spirit of jealousy comes over him,” Numbers 5:13–14).

The jealous husband brings his wife to the tabernacle courtyard, where a priest conducts the ritual test. First, he makes an offering of grain provided by the husband. Then he adds dust from the ground to a bowl of sanctified water. He makes the woman swear an oath of her fidelity, writes its words on a scroll, and then scrapes them off into the bowl of dust and water. He gives the woman this “water of bitterness” to drink, and its effects provide a judgment on her guilt or innocence.

If she has been faithful, the potion will have no effect and she may go free. If she has had sex with another man, however, the “water of bitterness” will cause bitterness within her and “her stomach will distend and her thigh will drop” (5:27).

This is not the same wording as the accidental miscarriage law in Exodus 21:22–25, which says “if…her baby comes out,” and some have suggested that it refers literally to symptoms of the intestines and legs. In context, however, termination of the pregnancy is the only viable interpretation.

The term translated ‘belly” (Hebrew בטן) is anatomically imprecise, but every time it occurs in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) it refers specifically to the womb. Likewise, the term translated “thigh” (Hebrew ירך) is a common euphemism for the genitals, as when all of Jacob’s descendants are called יצאי ירכו “those who came out of his ‘thighs’” (Genesis 46:26). And finally, if she is innocent the text states that “she will be able to retain seed” (ונזרעה זרע; i.e., become pregnant, Numbers 5:28). The implication, of course, is that the physical symptoms described in the opposite case would entail not being able to retain seed—that is, infertility.

This is unlike the previous examples of abortion texts for some obvious reasons. It is not primarily intended to induce an abortion; rather, the abortion results from being found guilty of adultery. Second, there is no identifiable abortifacient involved in the process. Within the logic of the text, the thing that makes it work is the incantation (or the god invoked in the incantation).

As with other ancient Middle Eastern and biblical texts, the concern was not for the fetus’s rights for their own sake, Neither was it for the health, wellbeing, or autonomy of the woman. The concern was for the paternity rights of the father, whose patrilineage was threatened by the prospect that his wife had become pregnant by another man. This is why this particular ritual doesn’t come up much in modern abortion debates: the moral justification for the abortion is unsympathetic, if not entirely abhorrent, to both sides of the contemporary struggle over abortion rights. Literally no one today would argue that doubts about paternity provide sufficient reason for a husband to unilaterally procure an abortion for his wife.

Final Thoughts

Abortion is not a new phenomenon, and neither is the demand for it. There are times when people want to have (more) children, and times when they do not. Ancient texts show us that people have devised many ways to regulate their fertility and reproductive rates throughout history, and that they have debated the ethics of these practices for just as long. The Bible speaks less of contraception and abortion than do texts that have been found in the areas surrounding ancient Israel, and in different terms. Its ethical concerns are foreign in many ways to the lines of the contemporary debate, yet they also circle around key issues that still drive political discourse and activity today: the roles of women in society, the purpose of reproduction, and who gets to make decisions about it.

On our next stop: the modern political fight over abortion inlight of the Bible’s extreme unclarity about it.

Bibliography/Further Reading:

Biggs, Robert D. “Conception, Contraception, and Abortion in Ancient Mesopotamia.”

Kapparis, K. A. Abortion in the ancient world. Duckworth classical essays. London: Duckworth Academic, 2002.

Riddle, John M. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Abortion, the Bible, and Us: On Personhood

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Eric Harvey

Photograph of an angry bull in a pasture. It's not a goring ox like the laws mention but hey, close enough.

(Photo Wikimedia Creative Commons 2.0)

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the major ethical questions surrounding abortion is that of when life begins, or better, when a developing embryo or fetus acquires the right to life. In the last one, I showed how biblical descriptions of pregnancy—metaphorical though they are—tend to frame the formation of a new child as a process rather than an instantaneous event. But does this processual understanding extend to ethical considerations and the right to life as well?

There aren’t many relevant biblical texts to consult—again, there’s no biblical passage that comes right out with a direct statement on fetal personhood—but what little evidence there is suggests that it was also treated as something that develops over time.

For this discussion, I’m indebted to the work of Tracy Lemos in her recent book Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts. Lemos examines the practice and punishment of violence as it relates to the social status of individuals. In particular, who is viewed as a person and who a non-person? To her, being recognized as a person in society means being recognized “as having value, not as a commodity but as a participant in social relations.” Importantly for this post, personhood is characterized by “the attribution of agency, rights, or protections—particularly protection from physical harm—and/or by public rituals that convey or reaffirm that individual’s value.” In other words, being seen as a person protects an individual from violence or makes violence a more serious crime.

Lemos conducts a holistic study, dealing in turn with personhood as it relates to gender, nationality, enslavement, and childhood. You can (and should!) read the whole chapter on children, “Visiting the Iniquity of the Father on the Son: Violence and the Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel,” at her academia.edu page. It deals mostly with children post birth, but discusses also the status of fetuses in Israelite society.

We can learn a lot by comparing legal penalties for violent acts, because these often link life and health directly with monetary payments and/or other punishments. The most relevant law relating to fetal personhood (and the most relevant biblical text, period) comes from a legal collection in Exodus 20–23 known as the Covenant Collection. Before we get to it , though, I’ll illustrate the point with reference to a few other laws. Since the Bible contains multiple collections of laws that don’t always agree with one another, choosing laws from the same collection has benefits as well as drawbacks. It allows us to expect some degree of internal consistency that does not characterize the Bible as a whole, but it also limits the discussion to just one of the Bible’s many and varied voices. We also know that the Covenant collection was not wholly a native Israelite creation, since it seems to have been based in large part upon the Code of Hammurabi for its overall structure and the content of many of its laws (there is A good book by my dissertation advisor on just that topic!).

Personhood and the Valuation of Life in the Covenant Collection

The Covenant Collection contains laws on a lot of different topics. It’s far from comprehensive, but its laws touch on altars, sacrifice, property, enslavement, liability, legal procedure, sexuality, and violence.

Often it presents illuminating variations on a legal scenario. Consider the Ten Commandments’ prohibition against murder:

You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)

Sweet. Good start. But what does that mean in practice. A little bit later, we get more legal detail:

Someone who strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death. (Exodus 21:12)

This sets the standard penalty for taking a life as losing your own, according to the talionic principle (that is, an eye for an eye, etc.). But this doesn’t apply to every case. What if the killing wasn’t on purpose? What if it was in self defense or defense of property?

In the case of accidental manslaughter, the killer can flee to a place of refuge to avoid punishment (Ex. 21:13). Similarly, if someone beats a thief to death during a break-in, they incur no guilt or legal penalty (Ex. 22:1).

Punishments can also vary based on the identity of the victim. So, for example, if someone killed a person they had enslaved. If the victim died immediately from the wounds, the law prescribes that נקום ינקם “it shall be punished” (Ex. 21:20). This is different wording from the original law regarding murder: מות יומת “he shall be put to death.” Though of course punishment could be imagined to refer to the death penalty, that does not seem to be the intent. If the purpose of writing a separate law for the murder of enslaved people was to underscore that the punishment was identical to the murder of a free citizen, why choose a looser and more general word? More likely, laws concerning violence against enslaved people were written separately because they were conceived of differently.

The difference is even clearer when the enslaved person lives a few days after the attack, and then dies. In this case, the attacker incurs no penalty, because כספו הוא “he (the enslaved) was his (the enslaver’s) property” (Ex. 21:21).

Thus, it seems that an individual’s personhood could be mitigated by their enslavement, and that a crime against an enslaved person was not viewed in the same way as a crime against a free citizen.

This distinction between the free and the enslaved appears throughout the Covenant Collection. For example, the owner of a habitually aggressive ox that gores a free person—no matter their age or gender—is put to death (Ex. 21:29–31). If that same ox, with the same negligent owner, kills someone who has been enslaved, the owner must only pay a fine to the victim’s owner—remuneration for lost property rather than for lost life )Ex. 21:32).

In the same way, the law of “an eye for an eye” only applies to free citizens. If an enslaver puts out the eye or tooth of someone they enslave, they are not subject to the loss of their own eyes or teeth. Rather, they have to free their victim from slavery.

This case is especially striking. In the case of free-on-free violence, the appropriate restitution for one harm is an equivalent harm enacted upon the perpetrator. In free-on-enslaved violence, the injustice is rectified by conveying a benefit upon—or, more accurately, removing an oppression from—the victim.

While enslaved people were not treated as complete non-persons in all biblical texts, as Lemos argues elsewhere, it is clear from these laws and others that they were not treated as persons in the same way or as consistently as free people. Their position allowed for mitigation of their rights in ways that were truly brutal and dehumanizing. Morally abhorrent as they are, these laws illustrate the principle that levels of personhood can be embedded in legal discourse, particularly in the permissibility and punishment of violence. This sets us up for the main event:

The Case of Collateral Miscarriage

After all that intro, here it is at last: the closest thing we get to a biblical pronouncement on fetal personhood, in the context of a law about collateral damage during a brawl.

“When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.

If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22–25)

Here we have two variations on a common scenario: in both cases the brawl causes the end of a pregnancy, but the penalties differ based on whether “harm” (Hebrew אסון) occurs or not. There has been some debate over the nature of this harm and who experiences it, but the general consensus is that the pregnancy is terminated and the fetus is lost, and the harm that may or may not occur refers to the mother. In this case, the first variation imagines a situation where the blow causes a miscarriage but the woman remains healthy. The second a scenario in which the pregnant woman experiences physical harm beyond the loss of her pregnancy.

A minority position holds that the additional harm is done to the infant—that is, that the scenario describes an early birth rather than a miscarriage, and the additional penalties result from further injury to the child. The earliest Greek translation actually misunderstood the term for “harm” entirely and translated it “if the fetus is not fully formed” vs. “if the fetus is fully formed.” Due to our better understanding of biblical Hebrew and our knowledge of Hammurabi, however, most scholars find the first interpretation much more likely.

In the first scenario, where the pregnancy is terminated but the woman is unhurt, the penalty characterizes it as a property crime against the father. As such, it does not seem that the fetus was understood to be a person with social and legal standing of its own. Further, it characterizes the loss of the potential child primarily as a loss of the father rather than the expectant mother.

As Lemos writes, “In Exod 21:22–5, a hierarchy is thus established in which a fetus has much lower standing than its mother, harms against whom require talionic punishment rather than monetary compensation, but who also has less legal standing than her husband.19 If we examine these different sections of Exodus 21 together, then, children’s standing appears to be higher than that of either slaves or fetuses… While slaves are offered some legal protections, the fetus occupies an extremely subordinated position and has no apparent legal standing separate from its father.” Fellow biblical scholar Naomi Steinberg states it plainly: “The fetus is a nonperson.””

This is scant evidence, and perhaps it is unwarranted to discover a universal cultural belief about fetal non-personhood in one group of laws among several within a literary anthology of many voices and perspectives, but this conclusion does align with the processual view of fetal development implied in pregnancy texts and with the subordination of fetal and maternal rights under the father in texts I will discuss later.

And again, there is the question for those who see opposition to abortion as an eternal, God-given absolute: if an omniscient deity were using a sacred text to communicate abhorrence for abortion, why would this be all we get?

Abortion, the Bible, and Us: How Ancient babies were Made

Posted on October 3, 2022 by Eric Harvey

A bunch of plump green grapes ripening with great fertility on the vine.

Photo credit Lynn Greyling, Public Domain license

This is the third in my series on the Bible and abortion. Here are Part One and Part Two. This one’s a long one, so settle in!

***

“Remember that you fashioned me like clay,

and will you turn me to dust again?

Did you not pour me out like milk

and curdle me like cheese?

You clothed me with skin and flesh

and knit me together with bones and sinews.”

Job 10:10 (NRSVUE)

In my last post, I wrote about the things biblical writers and readers could not have known about the process of conception. But what did they know and how did they think and talk about not only conception but pregnancy and birth?

This is a tough question to answer. There’s no biblical text that offers a treatise on human reproduction. Most of the time, what mention we do get is euphemistic, metaphorical, or just too brief to tell us much of anything. It’s like asking whether the saying “a bun in the oven” tells us anything meaningful about 21st century American ideas about pregnancy, or if telling my kids that someone has a baby in her tummy means I don’t know what a uterus is or how it differs from a stomach. At some point, the sayings don’t tell us much about the underlying biological model.

Sometimes, we can get more information from the nations and societies that surrounded ancient Israel, including Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. These all differed from Israel and one another in important ways, but they shared common cultural elements and shared ideas through trade, contact, and conquest.

How did Pregnancies Begin?

All societies, ancient and modern, understand that pregnancy cannot occur without specific types of sexual intercourse. Scholars like to quote an ancient Sumerian proverb here: “Has she become pregnant without intercourse? Has she become fat without eating?”🗡 But honestly, do we really need textual support for this point? Just to be clear, though, biblical texts also often precede accounts of pregnancy with statements that a man “knew,” “went in to,” or “lay with” a woman—all of these implying sexual intercourse.

Yet it’s also clear that sex doesn’t always cause pregnancy. In the Bible, there seems to be an idea that God must “open the womb” of a young woman to allow for pregnancy to occur. As we shall see, this reflects a general theme that the deity plays an active role in pregnancy and gestation at every stage.

We find more descriptions and metaphors once we move on to prenatal development. The passage from Job at the top of this post contains three distinct metaphors that work together.

Metaphor One: babies are Sculptures

In the first line of the quote above, Job describes his formation as an act of fashioning from clay. This calls back to the second biblical creation story (Genesis 2:7), where God sculpts the first human—presumably as an adult—literally from a clod of earth. In that story, the sculpting was completed before the earthen form was given life. It only became a living being when the “breath of life” was breathed in to it. Note that in both Job and the creation story (genesis 3:19) death is also described as a return to dust. Thus, the idea that humans were basically earthen creatures may have been deeper than a mere figure of speech.

The most striking feature of this metaphor is that it casts God as the only active agent in the process of development. Clearly this sculpting is happening within the mother’s womb, but the active role in shaping belongs only to the deity.

Metaphor Two: Babies are Cheese

This is a weird one to modern ears, but it was not uncommon and it was actually developed in more detail in later texts. For example, the following discussion occurs in Leviticus Rabbah, a homiletic midrash on the book of Leviticus from around the fifth century CE (=AD):

“A woman’s womb is full of blood, some of which goes out by way of her menstrual flow, and by the favor of the Holy One, blessed be He, a drop of white matter goes and falls into it and immediately the fetus begins to form. It may be compared to milk in a basin; if one puts rennet into it, it congeals and becomes consistent; if not, it continues to ‘tremble.’” — Leviticus Rabbah 14:9

Here we have the relevant parts of the analogy drawn out in terms of their relationship to the process as it was understood by one particular rabbi. Like the milk that forms the base material for cheese, it is the menstrual blood that forms the material basis for a developing child. The white matter (a clear reference to semen) is characterized as a catalyst or reagent that begins the process of fetal coagulation.

This metaphor complements the prior one, as it relates to the production of the material from which a baby is created but does not specify how individual features are determined or developed.

Metaphor Three: Babies are Textiles

Job also says that God clothed him in skin and flesh and knit his bones and sinews together. This is reminiscent of perhaps the most famous biblical text on prenatal development, from Psalm 139:

For it was you who formed my inward parts

You knit me together in my mother’s womb

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

(Psalm 139: 13–15, NRSVUE)

Again, forming a fetus is compared to an act of artisanship., and God is the one doing the forming. The mother provides the cave (the “depths of the Earth”—i.e., the womb), but God weaves the tapestry that is a new human being.

That covers the metaphors in the above selection from Job, but there is another one that plays a central role throughout the Bible:

Metaphor Four: Babies are Fruit

Right from the beginning, the Hebrew Bible employs agricultural language for human reproduction. In the first creation story, God commands the newly created people to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” The horticultural resonance of “fruitful” is not just a product of translation, but appears in the Hebrew as well, where the verb used in the command (פרו) comes from the same root as the noun for “fruit” (פרי).

Plant metaphors far predate the Hebrew Bible, and are probably the oldest reproductive metaphors in written history.

“Farmer, plow my field!” says one woman to her partner in an early Sumerian erotic Poem.‡ As this suggests, the man is usually characterized as farmer or plow, the woman as field, and the child as the fruit or crop that results from successful cultivation.

For this reason, it is not surprising that semen is often referred to as a man’s “seed” (Hebrew זרע), as in the famous case of Onan’s coitus interruptus in Genesis 38. It is also continued in later texts, such as a Dead Sea Scroll known as the Genesis Apocryphon, a rewriting of certain narrative parts of the book of Genesis, When Noah’s father, Lamech, doubts that he is truly the wondrous child’s father, his wife Bitenosh tells him “this seed is from you, and this pregnancy is from you, and the planting of this fruit is from you” ((column ii, line 15).

Yet the woman is not always the passive recipient of seed. Leviticus 12:2 begins “A woman who brings forth seed and gives birth…” Though the first verb is often translated “conceives” (see NRSV, etc.), the Hebrew word is not the usual one for a woman getting pregnant (הרה), but the same verb in the same form as is used for plants that bring forth seed in the creation story of Genesis 1 (תזריע = Hifil of זרע). suggesting that (for some biblical writers at least) men are not the only ones whose seed contributes to the formation of a child.

This debate shows up in different ways all over the ancient world. Is it only the male who provides the “seed” that generates a new child, or do both the mother and father provide genetic material? In the 5th century BCE(=BC), Aristotle argued forcefully that only the male provides seed, since each person can produce only semen or menstrual blood, not both. The Hippocratic medical writings (3rd century BCE) and the famous Roman Physician Galen (1st century CE) take the position that both male and female provide seed.

The Hebrew Bible is more ambiguous and may not be all of the same mind on the topic. Some texts imply male seed, others imply male and female seed. It is worth asking as well just what the seed does in this context. Does it, as we consider genetic material today, contribute the plan for specific characteristics of appearance and personality? In this case, many biblical texts also make these the responsibility of active divine formation throughout the course of the pregnancy. Is it, like a plant seed, an object that grows by drawing in matter and nutrients from its surroundings? Or is it, like the cheesy metaphor above implies, some kind of catalyst or reagent?

So what?

As I hope I’ve shown, many details of the ancient Israelites’ understanding of pregnancy and birth have been lost and will likely remain uncertain and mysterious forever. The texts are fascinating in their own right, but at this point it’s worth asking what we can glean from these metaphors. Are there any common threads that might be useful for understanding biblical views on reproduction and abortion?

First, and importantly, we have to acknowledge that the Bible is not clear or straightforward. Beyond that, its various descriptions and metaphors suggest that different models may be at play in different books and different texts. There may not be one biblical view on the mechanics of reproduction at all.

In terms of commonalities, all of the descriptions communicate an active role for the deity at every stage of development. From the opening of the womb through the formation of the developing fetus, biblical texts situate God right there in the mix, curdling, shaping, knitting and stitching the fetus together. It’s important not to gloss over just how different this is from our scientific modern view of pregnancy. Many people, of course, still understand God to have an active role in maintaining the health of both the mother and the fetus during pregnancy, but we now know that individual characteristics are largely determined by genetics, which are more or less fixed from the moment of recombination. We do not believe that the fashioning of physical traits or features is an open-ended process that depends on moment-by-moment choices made by God during the course of the pregnancy.

Speaking of which, this focus on process is also common among the texts. None of them compares a developing fetus to an object that gains all of its final attributes or qualities in an instant. Milk does not become cheese the instant a culture is added. A lump of clay is not immediately a sculpture. A line of knitting or single woven thread is not a garment. And of course, a seed does not become a crop until it has grown and fruited.

All of these things take time. They change and transform across the span of the process, and none of them is the same at the end as it was at the beginning. Thus, biblical texts do not lend themselves easily to the interpretation that fetuses at every stage of development are morally equivalent to an adult, a child, or a fully developed, birthed baby.

I will develop this more in the next post, on development and personhood.

Footnotes

🗡 Lambert, W. G. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1960. 241, lines 40–42.

‡ Sjöberg, Å. W. “Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 27 (1977), 24.

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Personal Blog of Eric J Harvey

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