There are so many ways to act sexually in a Biblically legitimate way without betraying one's spouse or dating partner, even when one's partner is not involved--of course, Deuteronomy 4:2 is a very relevant verse. Masturbation, some forms of erotic media, extramarital flirtation, polyamorous relationships, and sexual thoughts about certain other members of the opposite gender are all objectively nonsinful by Biblical standards, and I have addressed them all individually at length [1]. With so many Biblically valid options to choose from if a married person truly does wish to act on sexual attraction to someone beyond their spouse, it is not just sinful on the Christian worldview for someone to commit adultery, but so easily avoidable.
In spite of this, none of these various non-adulterous actions being nonsinful actually means that adultery itself is trivial, anything but a severe breach of a relationship. Adultery, after all, is still a capital offense by Biblical standards, as anyone who reads Deuteronomy 22:22 can see. Especially when it involves betrayal of a mutual commitment to monogamy, extramarital sex when a person is already married can be a psychologically devastating act that erodes the relationship. For a couple who have never discussed the Biblically permissible kind of polyamory or expressed interest in it beyond intellectual exploration, it is especially selfish and has the potential to be far more hurtful.
For those who subjectively feel as if execution for adultery is too severe even if they think adultery is immoral, the fact that values are not true or even likely to be obligatory based on how comfortable they make any particular person or group. In truth, you can never prove that an ideology is untrue by pointing to its values unless the values are contradictory; the broader ideology itself must otherwise be proven true or false to prove that its values are true or false. Whether Christianity is true or false, then, is what makes adultery deserving of execution or not--unless some other theistic moral system is true that also entails adultery being both immoral and deserving of death.
It can be easily proven by looking to reason for only several moments that adultery, while it is not right alongside something like rape in its injurious nature, can be immensely painful and destructive. Whether this makes it evil, much less worthy of criminal status, completely depends on whether certain more foundational philosophical ideas are true, but it is clear that the Bible does not condemn things like extramarital flirtation or sexual attraction as adulterous and that it does condemn adultery specifically as a capital offense. The fact that almost no Christians have recognized this across approximately two millennia shows how intellectually sluggish and inept most people truly are.
[1]. For example, see the following:
I think one of the most visceral and hard hitting demonstrations of adultery's consequences comes from one of the most noticeable results of David and Bathsheba's affair: the Lord strikes down their first child, conceived while Uriah was still alive and thus still Bathsheba's husband.
ReplyDeleteIn this case though, unlike many other consequences of it, this one involved a direct decision from God that the infant would die.
I've read/gone through a few explanations on this matter, but much if not all of them are, although not entirely incorrect, unsatisfying and unlikely to truly assuage how hard this can hit.
Indeed, it can be said that perhaps, considering all that transpired afterwards, the child was spared many worse things. It can be said that if God seeks to kill someone, they will die then and there, and that afflicting someone with an illness is giving the offender a chance to properly beg for mercy of the afflicted's behalf. The child was not "slowly killed" as an idiot skeptic would put it. The child was sick and then died. It can be said that any attempt David made to do so wasn't done properly, or wasn't done thoroughly. It can be said that because David was monarchy and thus in an elevated social status, he would have otherwise been immune to most other consequences of adultery and thus, this was something that the Lord needed to address directly. It is stupid to claim that David got off easy, for we see that the rest of his life after this was never as glorious as it was before it; it is he who is living with his mistake and it is he who is slowly being killed by the consequences.
As far as I now, this and the humbling of the pharaoh's divine reputation by the death of his heir are the only times God has directly struck down children to strike at their parents. Maybe there's a connection to be made here, but even I would think it was tenuous.
I know that this doesn't change the fact that God is just and is the only true arbiter of justice, that God cares for the well-being and proper treatment of children, and that the offspring's sins are not that of the parent's. None of that is in question, because all of that is prevalent throughout the rest of the Bible and is still evident today.
But it still hurts to think of and ponder. Regardless of what one asserts regarding the transmission of sin, original, ancestral, or otherwise, how that affects us even as newly born people and whether anyone can be considered innocent because of it, someone who didn't commit the sin died as a result of the one who did commit the sin, and the Lord our God, according to the text itself, made it happen directly.
Perhaps I can say that I like many today are idolatrous of the concept of childhood, blind to its darker aspects and to how to properly handle bad things involving children.
Maybe the only real answer to this is the one Elihu gave Job, the only answer that God validates: God is greater than man. God is just and loving, and any other sense of justice and love we have separate from God is little more than empty delusion and false prattling. If something God does shocks us, then we must think of why He is right to do as He has done and why we are wrong to think otherwise and then have the results of that thinking be the answer we give. Failing that, we must then know that God is just and loving and that we simply do not know what that truly entails, only that it is true and that our explanations are insufficient. God has done what it right, and that is that.
And perhaps ultimately, this is hitting me hard enough that I can admit that my rational faculties are at less than full competence.
So I'll trust the answer you give in regards to this: what would you say about the death of David and Bathsheba's first son?
First of all, I am so sorry I am just now replying. I meant to do so hours after you first commented on this post, but various family things and other matters kept coming up.
DeleteThis is by far one of the more genuinely weighty aspects of the Bible that is either not fully obvious at first in light of other things or very emotionally challenging even for committed Christians. Being honest with oneself, as you are doing, is always part of the rational thing to do when it comes to struggling with such matters. I would imagine that many explanations do not both really grapple with both the various moral/epistemological factors here AND not dismiss the strong emotions this story could invoke, as if feeling emotions means you must be basing your beliefs and actions around subjective feelings. A deity whose nature is justice cannot be in the wrong, but this is still a very serious issue that is emotionally complex for many people even if they were to understand the relevant philosophical truths or ideas.
When God predicted that he would destroy Ninevah, there is no indication that he was misleading Jonah, yet he really did refrain from destroying the city after the king repented. It is not only logically possible for some of God's promises to be conditional, but there is also already a key example in the book of Jonah of what this might look like. Your own suggestion about how David might not have properly or fully repented are entirely possible, just like the other possible factors you stated. If anything, it is surprising that God relented enough so that Nathan did not call for David and Bathsheba to be executed for adultery as Deuteronomy 22:22 says, especially since Deuteronomy 17 already addresses how monarchs are not exempt from the moral obligations that all other humans are, men, women, and children alike.
It might also be worth mentioning that not all death is morally charged. When animals or plants died before or after the Fall (for humans to eat anything at all besides inorganic materials, something must die, even if only microorganisms or plants), there was nothing morally flawed or broken about this. Even when it comes to the death of humans, while human death is said to have not become part of reality until the first humans sinned, not everyone who dies right now dies because God is directly killing them. Natural causes can kill without direct divine or human causes and thus without moral ramifications for what someone did leading up to that moment. Perhaps the child of Bathsheba was going to die for some other reason shortly after this anyway, and God merely accelerated its death by making it sick as a punishment for the parents--something that could also have been kind to the child.
Whether that idea is true or not, it is still true that God never treats humans as nothing but pawns for his amusement throughout the Bible. It is always the case that even the worst of people, which are surprisingly rare in the many Biblical stories (there are far worse things than murder or adultery that are in some of the stories, but never are the more cruel kinds of abuses really given much focus until the New Testament Roman executions), have moral rights rooted in their being as the bearers of God's image that Genesis calls us, and God is never shown to regard them as if they are without value. This would of course extend to young children who have not necessarily committed any particular sin yet.
DeleteAt the same time, there is no basis for anyone criticizing any truly divine being, for an uncaused cause with a moral nature is the only possible anchor for moral obligations to begin with, without which there would be no basis to condemn anything at all as more than personal inconveniences or dislikes. The Bible agrees with this while affirming that God does not think one person is guilty because of the actions of another. Not that this verse is necessary to understand from other Biblical commands why this would be problematic on the Christian worldview, but Deuteronomy 24:16 even specifically condemns humans punishing other humans as if they are guilty for their parent's or child's sins. Of course, there is also the irony of Christ's voluntary death on behalf of others that is somewhat related to this whole set of issues and sub-issues.
It is indeed true that there are possible motivations God had in killing this child that do not in any way contradict other Biblical ideas or extra-Biblical philosophical truths. The factors you had already brought up are perfect examples. However, there is still some ambiguity as to which possibilities or how many of them were really a part of these events with David and Bathsheba. In that sense, one could not fully know the factors or lack of certain factors here from a brief story in a single chapter of the Bible. What we can do is, one one hand, realize that there is genuine evidence in favor of Christianity even though various people do not prefer parts of it, and, on the other hand, understand the genuine possibilities as to how the death of Bathsheba's son is not in conflict with other parts of Christianity. That is all, unfortunately, but it is in one sense enough.