Stoning Children

 

Here's your daily dose of the Mosaic Law and why it is evidence that ancient Israel was being led by a loving God and not a wrathful lunatic, as some have claimed.

Let's look at Deuteronomy 21:18-21. This is a law stating that if a child is unruly towards their parents (implication is an older child, an adolescent) they may take the child/youth before the elders and make their case that the child is beyond discipline. If the elders agree, the youth is to be taken outside the city and stoned to death.

Many people today read this and flinch at this "obvious barbarity" of a law, but they fail to see it in the context of the Bronze Age. In ancient times…even as late as the Iron Age (and to a lesser extent even in the early Roman period), a father had property rights over his children. They were not people, they were his property until they came of age. He was legally entitled to do whatever he wanted with his own offspring. If they disobeyed him, he could sell them as slaves or even kill them at his pleasure.

In short, they were already stoning children before Yahweh gave this law to the people. The law did not tell the people to stone their children, but restricted the practice and put regulations around how it could be done.

Yahweh told his people, "No, you can't just kill your children for disobeying you. If you think your child is beyond discipline, you must take them to court and give them a fair trial before the judges, who will determine if their crimes rise to the level of execution or not."

The Law protected children in an age where children had NO such protections. Rather than reinforcing the Patriarchy of that age, this law placed boundaries and restrictions upon how far a father's will could go. It still went really far, compared to today, but it was not absolute. There is a higher authority, and that is God, who watches over the vulnerable, including children.

What is interesting is that historians have searched Jewish records and found that, as far as we know, no children were ever executed under this law. The law God created did its job - it protected the children from harm.

Today we have rights for children, and that's a great thing. But that is fairly new. Even 100 years ago children barely had any rights at all. Go back a few more hundred years and those rights start to disappear completely.

But the Law of Moses is one of the foundations of our modern understanding that children should have rights, and this is evident when we look at non-Western cultures, many of which have little to no Judaeo-Christian influences. Even today some cultures practice "honor killings" which is when a father decides one of his kids who has disobeyed him to the point of dishonoring the family must die. These "honor killings" are so part of those cultures that they even carry them out in countries like the US where they know it is illegal to do so.

This same logic can be applied to many of the so-called "barbaric" laws of the Old Testament. Any historian worth their salt will tell you that to properly understand something from the past you must understand it in the context of its Age. If you try to judge a thing by the circumstances of today, you will create what we call an anachronism which will distort the truth.

As God moved human civilization towards the Gospel and maturity (as the Apostle Paul would put it) He began to reveal a "more excellent way" to live through Christ. The Law of Love. To love your neighbors as you do yourself. This includes women, children, foreigners, and anyone else you might look down upon. God cares about everyone, especially the vulnerable.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that this royal Law of Love was already present in the Old Testament. "Love your neighbor" was in the Torah. This is why the New Testament calls it a "new commandment that is not really new." God had not hidden this "most excellent way" from the ancients, He just knew many of them would not be up to the task. But if you read the Old Testament carefully, you will see some, like Boaz, who did.