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Subject: Re: more questions....
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O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the
stones.
Reply:
While there are different translations possible for the last line (alolayikh,
translated here as "thy little ones" can also mean "your first grapes"), I
think the context makes it clear that it is a description of infanticide.
However, the first word of the line (ashrey = Happy) has several different
meanings. I would translate the last two verses as "I will feel avenged when
someone dashes your children against the rocks, like you did to our children."
This is an honest expression of emotion, which includes the hyperbole normal
for the topic.
The real question is, does *describing* infanticide *advocate* it? The easy
answer is to point out that Jewish law derives only from the Five Books of
Moses (Khumash), so no legal precedent can be set by a psalm. The psalmist
does not name the killer of Babylon's children, so it is not reasonable to say
that he expects to carry out the deed himself; but would he expect the killer
to be Jewish? Historically, it was the Persians who defeated the Babylonians,
reestablished Jewish autonomy and permitted the rebuilding of the Temple.
Isaiah goes so far as to call King Kerosh (Cyrus) of Persia a moshiakh
(annointed one). The psalmist could have realized that some other nation would
be the architect of Babylon's destruction, and may have assumed that they would
be just as ruthless in battle as the Babylonians (I don't know Persian history
too well, but I don't think they were nearly as cruel as the Babylonians and
Assyrians).
Now, on the subject of infanticide, there *are* other references to it in the
Khumash. The charge to destory Amalek, and the account of the destruction of
the Midianites, to name two. There is also the passage in Dvorim (Deuteronomy)
which allows parents to kill their son, if he is a no-good drunkard, but only
if they do it through the courts. However, in all of these cases, the rabbis
were careful to make these events unique (in the case of Deuteronomy, there are
no records of anyone being tried under this law, and the rabbis added so many
restrictions that there never could be). No one can justify killing today by
citing these passages. However, in all but the Deuteronomy case, these are
descriptions of warfare, and today, just as millennia ago, there are civilian
casualties in war. The Bible treats war as a necessary evil with different
laws than those that operate within a country.
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