I found this in Ecclesiastes 6

[EC]

3 If a man fathers a hundred, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, and his soul is not filled with good, and also is for him no burial; I say, a miscarriage is better than he.


So is this a case endorsing the death of a fetus?

[patrice]

1. Hmmmmmmm . . . . . .

Gotta go read that.

[Wilms]

2. If it said, "an abortion is better than he", then you'd have somethin' n/t

[EC]

3. would there had been such a word as abortion

back then? And many of the fundies around here equate miscarriage with abortion. They feel miscarriages should be investigated to see if the mother caused it...

[CountAllVotes]

5. my thoughts

The way I read this is this: If you are a man and an SOB, no matter how many kids you are father to, nor how long you might live, and you have died and you were not buried that you'd have been better off if you were never born and that you were miscarried by the mother. This way the SOB would never have been born.

It mentions "burial", the ultimate restitution I suggest, a belief shared by many religions.

So yes, I would say the this part of this passage (and I'll have to look it up in a couple of very different bibles I have around here).

I also agree, maybe they did not have the word "abortion" during these times. However, be assured, abortions have been going on since time began, and nothing, no law, nothing, will ever change that FACT.

I've read that approx. 80% of all pregnancies result in miscarriage; only 20% actually become an actual fetus. Most times, the woman herself doesn't even know she is pregnant.

So I suppose the next step will be that several trillions of $ are now needed to find out why the 60% of all conceptions result in miscarriage. :sarcasm: :grr:


:dem: :kick:

[Crunchy Frog]

4. I found this in Job.

1: After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.
2: And Job spake, and said,
3: Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
4: Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.
5: Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
6: As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months.
7: Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.
8: Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning.
9: Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day:
10: Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
11: Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
12: Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?
13: For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
14: With kings and counsellers of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
15: Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:
16: Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.

It at least seems to be suggesting that there are times when it is better to be a dead newborn or fetus than it is to be a live adult. There also seems to be an implication of unwanted infants being disposed of.

[davidwparker]

6. No. There are times when someone is in such sorrow that they say it

would be better had they not been born. Jesus made such a statement. This does not mean they are talking about abortion.

[Sammy Pepys]

7. That's what it sounds like to me...

I'm no Bible scholar, but isn't that verse describing the time where Job finally broke down afetr being tested so, and wished he had just never been born rather than go through all that?

[Crunchy Frog]

9. Not talking about abortion as such

but he does seem to be wishing that he had had died at birth which seems to me to be kind of in the same ballpark.

Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?

I'm not a Bible scholar, but I don't think that abortion, as we understand the term today, is discussed in there at all. Expressing a feeling that one would have been better off dying at birth seems to deal with some of the same underlying issues though.

I've seen far more flimsey Bible passages used by anti-choicers to try to demonstrate that the Bible condemns abortion.

[Inland]

10. But where does the Book of Job end up?

I think the moral of the story is that Job's wish that he had never been born was misplaced. He said it, he meant it, but at the end of the story he is wiser and praises God's plan for him. I think. Job doesnt' have the grip on people it used to have.

[Crunchy Frog]

11. I realize that the story has a "happy" ending

and I'm not here to get into an entire theological discussion over the meaning of the entire story. Just that some lines in it appear to advance the notion that some people might be better off dying before they have a chance to be born, and what that means in the context of the contemporary debate about abortion.

[Inland]

12. My point being that the lines state the notion, which is then discarded.

The position is advanced, acknowledged but ultimately discarded. It's the LOSING proposition. So in the context of the contemporary debate about abortion, it could only be cited as the initial impression that turns out to be false. Just saying.

[Crunchy Frog]

14. I didn't read it that way

but then, I don't know how to read and interpret the Bible properly, so I'll defer to your reading of it. :hi:

[TallahasseeGrannie]

8. Translated might mean it would have been better if he wasn't born

[grumpy old fart]

13. Pretty far off the mark here. But thanks for playing.

The meaning is obvious, as pointed out by everyone here. Some people, looking at their lives, would have been better off never having been born. I'm Pro-Choice, but you are making an obvious overreach here.

[Igel]

15. BAR--not exactly a left-leaning,

progressive source, back in the '80s had a nifty article on ritual child murder in OT times.

That such things occurred seems pretty much indisputable. Dead infants were routinely jarred and buried at the foundation of sites of pagan worship. And, from time to time, places presumably of Yah-worship, although that gets into the squirrelly question of whether Yah-worship is definable without regard to what people claim to be practicing. Moving on ...

The BAR claim was that the incidence of burial was variable: in times of drought, war, pestilence, and the like, the rate increased. This, obviously, can be taken two ways. The traditional interpretation is that the believers sacrificed their infants or newborns in order to avert the impending or on-going disaster. Kill the infant, and placate the venging gods' wrath: the drought is averted, the rains will come, and food will be plentiful.

The second, which was grist for BAR's polemical mill in '84 or '85, was that the women didn't dispose of the tykes in order to avert the wrath of a nasty Ba'al or other deity, but to simply reduce the economic and emotional fall-out of having a newborn in turbulent and difficult times. The drought may not be averted, but there'll be fewer mouths for the little food that does come in to be shared with. In other words, child sacrifice was a surrogate for abortion when abortifacients were harder to come by and less reliable, a thoroughly rational decision cloaked in religious garb. Think of it as post-partum abortion. This doesn't seem unreasonable, to be honest. (The polemical point they pressed on to make: Yah condemns such practice; if child sacrifice wasn't primarily a religious practice, but de facto abortion, then it's not the religious practice that's condemned, but the practice of abortion itself. This point of polemic can be parried so easily that it's left as an exercise to whoever cares.)