Abortion & Exodus 21

Or more specifically... Exodus 21:22-25

"If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe."

Estase, commenting on "Roe v. Wade Soon to be Moot?", makes mention of Exodus 21. While I have read the Bible in its entirety, I was nonetheless unfamiliar with this passage, and so I felt compelled to spend some time researching this on the net. What I found were hordes of sites that look at Exodus 21:22-25 as conferring no special status as 'human' to the unborn child, therefore making abortion okey-dokey in God's eyes. Of course I disagree. I don't need 10,000 sites claiming it's okay when my spirit tells me it's not.

As Dan pointed out in comments at Mark's place, "Words have meaning", and a more than cursory look at the words and their relational implications is therefore required. On the surface words can say something entirely different than what they mean in relation to sentence structure, choice of words, and economy of language.

At ApologeticsPress.Org I found an article on Abortion and Exodus 21 which DOES weigh the sentence structure with word usage and economy of language in the NKJV, the NIV, AND the ASV. From the article:

"Third, consider the next phrase in the verse in question: "yet no lasting harm follows" (NKJV), "but there is no serious injury" (NIV), "and yet no harm follow" (ASV). These English renderings capture the Hebrew accurately. Absolutely no grammatical indication exists in the text by which one could assume the recipient of the injury to be either the mother or the child to the exclusion of the other. As Fishbane observed: "it is syntactically and grammatically unclear whether the object of the 'calamity' is the foetus or the pregnant mother" (1985, p. 93). In order to allow Scripture to stand on its own and speak for itself, one must conclude that to understand "injury" to refer exclusively to the mother is to narrow the meaning without textual justification.

"Hence, one is forced to conclude that the absence of specificity was deliberate on the part of the inspired writer and that he intended for the reader to conclude that the prescription applied to both mother and child. The wording is, therefore, the most appropriate and economical if the writer intended to convey all possible scenarios without having to go into tedious elaboration..."

It is obvious, even in the KJV, that no differentiation between mother and child is made. It is therefore no stretch at all to say that harming and/or killing an unborn child is NOT AT ALL okey-dokey in God's eyes.

Imagine that! Words do indeed have meaning!