One weekend recently I was up in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, and there was a group of zealots on the sidewalk, with a megaphone, declaiming against abortion, among other things. It was a nice day, and there was a plainclothes police officer there, nattily dressed with a necktie but no suit jacket, so we all got a good view of his simply enormous pistol. He was politely begging us not to engage. And so, respectful of authority as I always am, I did not engage.
One of the protesters was holding a large sign indicating that Exodus 20:13 clearly showed that abortion was murder, and that anyone connected with the act was surely going to hell, and possibly to jail as well. (I just made that last part up, but things do seem headed that way.)
As a happily lapsed Episcopalian, I confess I didn't recall Exodus 20:13, so when I got home, and after we put away the vegetables from the farmer's market, I got down my Bible and looked it up. Sure enough, it was the ten commandments. Verse 13 says, "Thou shalt not kill."
George Foreman tells a story about fighting Muhammad Ali. It was the famous Rumble in the Jungle, and Foreman thought things were going pretty well for him until, in a clinch, Ali whispered in his ear, "That all you got, George?" And things went downhill from there.
And that's how I feel about the earnest young person holding the poster sending me to Exodus 20:13. This verse does not say Thou shalt not commit abortion. It says don't kill.
Which is an admirable admonition, but one that in the Christian world, as elsewhere, has been shown to be primarily aspirational.
Let's just say there are a few loopholes.
Jericho
Here's one that comes along fairly early in the Bible. It's in the book of Joshua, who has recently taken over leadership from Moses, who died, and is beginning the process of conquering the promised land. He comes to the city of Jericho, and many people are familiar with the old spiritual, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." And the walls came tumbling down.
Here's a closer look at what happened. My quotations are from the King James version. Please forgive me if you prefer another translation. Some preferences get fixed in childhood.
Jericho was a strategically important city, controlling the valley of the lower Jordan River. God gave Joshua specific instructions to walk around the city for seven days, and Joshua carried them out to the letter, with priests blowing trumpets made out of rams' horns and other priests carrying the ark of the covenant (which of course contained the tablets on which were written the ten commandments, including the one about not killing). On the seventh day, on cue, all the people gave out a great shout, and the walls came tumbling down, and "the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (Josh. 6:20-21.)
All this is in chapter six of the Book of Joshua. In fact, a few people were spared. The harlot Rahab, who owns chapter two of the Book of Joshua, had hidden two spies Joshua had sent into the city, and in return she and her family got to live.
I find this whole narrative highly suspect. If the Lord is going to come down on the seventh day and destroy the city's walls, why are we spending all this time talking about spies and prostitutes? I do have a thought. Rahab's house was actually built on the wall of the city, and here's how she helped the spies to escape from Jericho: "Then she let them down by a cord through the window: for her house was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall." (Josh. 2:15.)
And the spies told her: "Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by." (Josh. 2:18.)
Was the fall of Jericho actually an inside job, with a select squad of commandos entering by Rahab's window and opening a gate for the rest of the army? I have no idea.
And, for our purposes, it doesn't matter. The Bible says the walls came down on the seventh day, so let's just go with that.
About all the killing. I should observe in Joshua's defense that, until modern times, this is just the way these things were done. Kill everybody, or kill the men and enslave the women and children. For another example, we need look no further than the sack of Troy.
Deuteronomy 20 recommends, as a general case, that only the men be killed; killing everybody was reserved for the inhabitants of the promised land, who were about to be displaced. All on God's orders.
One last thing. The Bible does not record this, but surely at least one of the women who died at Jericho was pregnant.
Stonewall Jackson
You can say that this was all a long time ago, and now we have the new testament as well as the old testament. Now, when we sing "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," it's really all about faith, hope, and charity.
But let's not forget that the old testament has not gone away. Let's switch for a minute to the American Civil War. One of the war's most able generals was Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Historian Douglas Southall Freeman had this to say about Jackson: "He lives by the New Testament and fights by the Old." (Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, v. 1, 1945, p. xlii. Many thanks to my brother, John West, who kindly ran down this citation in his home library.)
Clearly General Jackson has not been alone in the course of history. Let's dial back to the time of the First Crusade.
Ma'arra
The culmination of the First Crusade came when the crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, but I would like to direct your attention to the earlier attack on Ma'arra, a small town of no great strategic importance. Its population was probably less than 10,000, and it had no army, just an urban militia of several hundred young men whose military training was sketchy and whose military experience was nonexistent. They did improvise the tactic of throwing occupied beehives down on the attackers. Soon though, under pressure from the crusaders, the defenders made the mistake of abandoning the city walls and retreating into redoubts in some of the stronger buildings in the city.
The attackers were soon firmly atop the walls - this is much easier to do if the walls are undefended. It was the night of December 11, 1098. The future didn't look very good for the inhabitants of Ma'arra. They contacted the invaders' commander, whose name was Bohemond, and asked to have their lives spared. He agreed. At dawn the crusaders spread out through the town and, over the next three days, killed just about everybody. (See Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 1984, pp. 38-40. See also the account of of Ibn al-Athir, a twelfth-century Arab historian, in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, 1993, p. 9. Thanks to Emily Marston for lending me these books.)
This much is kind of par for the course, but something else happened. To understand it we need to go back to the epic siege of Antioch, a large city just north of Ma'arra, where the crusaders raised their already formidable game in the art of psychological warfare.
The troops encamped under the walls of Antioch had been bedeviled by enemy spies. Bohemond (here he is again) had some prisoners of war executed; their bodies were then publicly roasted on spits, as if the crusaders were preparing to eat them. Word went out that, in the future, captured spies would be roasted and eaten. As historian Jay Rubenstein puts it, "All spies, naturally, fled the camp and spread word to Antioch and all over the region." (Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, 2011, p. 151.)
The soldiers, who were very hungry at this point (logistics was not a strong point for the crusading army), may in fact have taken a cue from their leaders and actually cooked and eaten some of the dead enemy.
Among the chroniclers, only William of Malmesbury directly reports that crusaders besieging Antioch had eaten human flesh. (Rubenstein p. 365, fn. 13.) When it came to Ma'arra, there was no such reticence.
The crusaders at Ma'arra openly engaged in cannibalism, "hoping to terrify the enemy - a step beyond desecrating Saracen graves or using Saracen heads as saddle ornaments." (Rubenstein, p. 240. For a detailed examination of the sources and their meaning, see Jay Rubenstein, "Cannibals and Crusaders," French Historical Studies, 31:4, fall 2008, pp. 525-552.)
This was the face that Christianity showed to the Muslim world in the year 1098.
Back to Exodus 20:13
The people who oppose abortion like to talk about the sanctity of human life, but the history of Christianity and western culture often belies these platitudes. I don't mind having a discussion about the merits of abortion, but to suggest that the Bible forbids abortion because the Lord said "Thou shalt not kill" in Exodus 20:13 is just silly.
See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Submerged Narratives, Where Have All the Grownups Gone?
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