Shawna Dolansky last week came down from the mountain of TheTorah and delivered to all of us, Semitic Law. I'll leave aside how this might affect the Christian tradition; I'll also leave aside "Natural Law" or "The Tao", for the Randians amongst us. I'm here to consider the Bronze Age. Yea even unto the Neolithic.
I assume that my-body-my-choice has deep roots in the human condition. The village, of course, exists to suppress the individual who is - by him/her self - a savage. The Near East, villagers for millennia before we Orientalists received their legends in [clay] print, had a consistent ideology on the Sanctity Of Human Life. This sanctity was subject to the Sanctifiers. Human life exists, in Near Eastern thought, to feed sacrifice to the gods. This is the whole reason the gods repented of the Flood which they sent upon us.
I have deliberately not picked upon the Semites in the preceding paragraph. The Flood might be a memory of the Black Sea which was not Semitic, but... I still don't know. Hattic? Kartveli? Hurrian? ... "Euphratic"? Even the proto-Indo-Europeans were here. And downstream, floods happened to the Sumerians as well. I'll assume a common Neolithic experience where peoples had to live near the waters in order to live.
On topic of abortion, a Bronze Age girl in Trouble could probably find a solution. It was unlikely to be a safe solution. I must wonder if the Biblical take upon this practice - which, as Dolansky points out, deals with "accidental" violence - is a roundabout way to express how unsafe this solution was, through legal-fiction.
Near Eastern societies, seeing too many dead (fertile) girls, banned the practice. I expect that Moloch's devotees banned it too. ... at first.
The ideology that the gods like to eat and that humans are providing the food, a misanthrope might propose, could be corrupted. The mother of her unexpected child lives; her child, also, lives. The mother tells herself she loves her god. Then... the mother feeds her god - directly.
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