Thursday, December 8, 2022

Under Noahide, non-Jews can be killed for causing a woman to lose her fetus, but never a Jew: Book Review, Rainbow Covenant

While either a Jew or a non-Jew can be punished for deliberately injuring a woman to the point that she loses her unborn child, a non-Jew can recieve the capital punishment for this while a Jew cannot. 

"Where the Noahide law and Israel's law in the matter seem to diverge most strongly is in an area, oddly, of clear Scriptural instruction. God declares to Israel, for Israel, in the Written Torah, that the murder of a living human constitutes a capital crime, but that feticide does not.

If a Gentile deliberately injures a pregnant woman, intentionally causing the fetus within her to die, is he guilty of murder? The Torah provides that a Jew guilty of the same act cannot be held liable by any Torah court for murder, but only for assaulting the woman. This is true even though he has killed the mother's unborn child by causing her to miscarry.


Possibly, as most Torah authorities believe, the Jew in this case will later inevitably be punished by "death at the hands of Heaven." But no Torah court could find him guilty of the unborn child's murder.

By God's will, a Torah court has only one — a capital — penalty for murder. Before it can impose that sentence the court must find, among other things, that the killer's victim was a genuine living person. A fetus is only potentially a living person. Noahide courts, on the other hand, have not just the right but the obligation to treat any such deliberate feticide as a criminal act — as an abomination that they have an obligation to forbid.

Everyone who studies the Noahide law must eventually agree on that point. But this doesn't mean that Noahides must treat every wrongful feticide as murder — that is, as the most despicable and destructive of all felonies. Neither does it suggest that Jews possess any right that Gentiles lack, either to perform abortions or to have them performed.

Noahides must determine the details of their own laws for themselves, including enforcement schemes, and schedules of penalties. Without punishing feticide as murder, they have the power to delegirimize it. So do the Jews. Feticide is a form of homicide that cheapens human life; it isn't ll that distantly related to plain murder. The absence, in Scripture, of a specific legal penalty for feticide doesn't mean that Israel must tolerate wholesale fetus-slaughter in its midst. It just means that Jews, like Noahides, have the freedom to legislate their own enforcement schemes against it. It also means that Israel's Torah courts, unlike Noahide courts, lack even the hypothetical power to impose any capital penalty for feticide." (Dallen, 2003, pp. 196-197)

SOURCE: Dallen, Michael E. (2003). The Rainbow Covenant. Light Catcher Books & The Rainbow Covenant Foundation.  


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