Abortion And Human Life In Canaan by slaveofone
In my previous post New Thoughts On Abortion, I explored an authoritative, ancient Hebrew perspective about the beginning of human life by looking not only at the Hebrew Bible, but at the ordinances of the Pharisees/Rabbis preserved in the Oral Law and its commentary. In that post, we saw that breath was the foundation of human life according to an ancient and authoritative Israelite perspective. This was represented even in the very Hebrew word (nephesh) traditionally translated soul in the Hebrew Bible. We therefore were able to see that abortion was a legal and Torah-abiding activity because until a baby breathed, it was not considered human life.
Ancient Israel didn’t exist alone in history. Its concepts, ideas, values, and world-views were not sui generis. We know that Israel’s perception was in some ways very much like the Canaanites and that, in fact, trying to retain her own purity of tradition, ancestry, and religion instead of being absorbed into the Canaanite life and religion was a recurring problem. One of the ways, therefore, to come to an adequate understanding of ancient Israel is to make a comparison of it to its neighbors—particularly its closest neighbors whom Israel drank with, married amongst, cursed, and slaughtered.
In order to further solidify the proposition that human life began and ended with breath in the Israelite perspective, it would benefit us greatly to look to the Canaanites to see if they had any similar concept. If there is evidence that they thought in the same manner, then this lends a great deal of support to the proposition that Israel would have thought in such a manner. And in the matter of abortion, it would further the claim that abortion could not technically or even morally be considered the taking of human life if one respects the beliefs of the ancient Hebrew people.
To this end, I turn my attention to one of the great archaeological finds of the last century—the capital city of an ancient Canaanite kingdom called Ugarit, sitting under the long shadow of the Mountain of Baal himself. The archeology and artifacts of Ugarit have dramatically changed the way we think about the ancient world, ancient languages, and indeed about ancient Israel herself. Among all the texts found at Ugarit, there were several popular epics which were known as far away as Babylon. One of these is Aqhat. It is the story of how an ancient patriarchal hero asks Baal for a son. Baal turns to El, the supreme God, who grants the request and gives him a son: Aqhat. At a crucial point of his life, Aqhat is given a special bow which the goddess Anat desires. Anat asks for the bow, but Aqhat refuses to give it to her. Anat then gathers her forces and attacks Aqhat to kill him. In the description of Anat’s attack, we can see this same concept of life coming from breath (and conversely a lack of life meaning an absence of breath) in the ancient Canaanite perspective spelled out for us. The death of Aqhat is described thusly:
Let his life go like a breath…
From his nose like smoke…
I shall take his life.[His] life went off like a breath…
from [his nose] like smoke.Aqhat, Tablet 2, Column IV, lines 24, 26-27, 36-37, translation by Simon Parker
Aqhat’s life passes out of his mouth and nose as he ceases to breathe. Were breath to enter him again, he would return to life. However, unlike Baal in another Ugaritic epic, Aqhat isn’t so lucky as to have breath (i.e. life) returned to him.
As I was looking at the transliteration of the Ugaritic, I noticed something even more interesting. The word translated breath—the thing that leaves him and renders him non-living—is spelled NPSH. Add vowels to that and you have the Hebrew word “nephesh,” which occurs through the Hebrew Bible, and which as discussed previously is also the thing (meaning breath) which gives life in Hebrew literature. (Another example of breath being the thing that makes people living from the Hebrew Bible is Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. YHWH resurrects the people, putting their bones back together, sewing flesh and sinews back together, and making their bodies whole and complete. But it is not until breath comes and enters them at last that they live.)