Who do you think produces Bible translations? Translation committees and Biblical scholars and theologians well-versed in Ancient Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.
The translators of the RSV, AMPC, CEB, CJB, CEV, DRA, EXB, GNT, JUB, TLB, MSG, NABRE, NLV, NRSVA, NRSVACE, NRSVCE, RSVCE and WYC are the Biblical scholars I was referring to.
I already mentioned these translations which render it as miscarriage, which is no doubt why you glossed over them in your reply.
These people are not "armchair theologians", they are people with bachelor's and master's degrees in the Biblical fields they have studied, and are qualified.
These are other scholars.
Graham Spurgeon: "In other words, if you cause the death of the fetus, you merely pay a fine; if you cause the death of the woman, you lose your own life. Thus the Bible clearly shows that a fetus is not considered a person. If the fetus were considered to be a person, then the penalty for killing it would be the same as for killing the woman — death. Abortion, then, is not murder." The Religious Case for Abortion (ed H Gregory, Asheville Madison and Polk, 1983)
Daniel Sinclair: ""But one thing is clear: foeticide did not carry the death penalty, and only the death of the mother entailed the giving of 'a life in place of a life. In conclusion, it would appear that from both the critical and the historical dogmatic standpoints, the Biblical sanction of foeticide, whether intentional or unintentional, is a pecuniary one. Abortion is not homicide, and the foetus is not an independent life. It is paternal property, and any loss or damage gives rise to a claim for compensation." "The Legal Basis for the Prohibition on Abortion in Jewish Law," Israel Law Review 15/1 (January 1980)
Lloyd Kalland:"Interpreters who claim that the fetus should be treated as a person, in my opinion, have been unsuccessful in their attempt to square this
assumption with the interpretation most faithful to the text." "Fetal Life," Eternity (February 1971) 24
I recommend you spend some time reading this:
What Exodus 21:22 Says about Abortion | Stand to Reason
A word's meaning in any language is determined in two steps. We learn a word's range of meaning--its possible definitions--inductively by examining its general usage. We learn its specific meaning within that range by the immediate context.
The relevant phrase in the passage, "...she has a miscarriage...," reads
w?yase û ye ladêhâ in the Hebrew. It's a combination of a Hebrew noun,
yeled, and a verb,
yasa, and literally means "the child comes forth." The NASB makes note of this literal rendering in the margin.
The Hebrew noun translated "child" in this passage is
yeled[4] (
yeladim in the plural), and means "child, son, boy, or youth."
[5] It comes from the primary root word
yalad,
[6] meaning "to bear, bring forth, or beget." In the NASB
yalad is translated "childbirth" 10 times, some form of "gave birth" over 50 times, and either "bore," "born," or "borne" 180 times.
The verb
yasa[7] is a primary, primitive root that means "to go or come out." It is used over a thousand times in the Hebrew Scriptures and has been translated 165 different ways in the NASB--escape, exported, go forth, proceed, take out, to name a few. This gives us a rich source for exegetical comparison. It's translated with some form of "coming out" (e.g., "comes out," "came out," etc.) 103 times, and some form of "going" 445 times.
It's common for
yasa to describe the "coming forth" of something living, frequently a child. There is only one time
yasa is clearly used for a dead child. Numbers 12:12 says, "Oh, do not let her be like one dead, whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes from his mother's womb!"
Note here, that we don't infer the child's death from the word
yasa, but from explicit statements in the context. This is a still-birth, not a miscarriage. The child is dead before the birth ("whose flesh is half eaten away"), and doesn't die as a result of the untimely delivery, as in a miscarriage.
Yasa is used 1,061 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is never translated "miscarriage" in any other case. Why should the Exodus passage be any different?
Gleason Archer, Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, concludes:
"There is no ambiguity here, whatever. What is required is that if there should be an injury either to the mother or to her children, the injury shall be avenged by a like injury to the assailant. If it involves the life (nepes) of the premature baby, then the assailant shall pay for it with his life. There is no second-class status attached to the fetus under this rule; he is avenged just as if he were a normally delivered child or an older person: life for life. Or if the injury is less, but not serious enough to involve inflicting a like injury on the offender, then he may offer compensation in monetary damages...
Was this the only word that could be used to indicate a miscarriage? No. Two other words were available to convey this particular meaning, if that's what the writer had in mind: nepel and sakal. These are used seven times in the Hebrew text.
The noun nepel means "miscarriage" or "abortion," and is used three times
The verb
sakal means "to be bereaved" and is used four times, including one time when it's actually translated "abort"
Moses had words in his vocabulary that literally meant abortion or miscarriage, but he didn't use them in Exodus 21:22. Instead, he chose the same word he used in many other places to signify a living child being brought forth.
Yasa doesn't mean miscarriage in the sense we think of that word. Instead, the combination of
yeled with
yasa suggests a living child coming forth from the womb. Nowhere else is this word ever translated "miscarriage." Why? Because the word doesn't mean the baby is still-born. It simply means the child comes out.
Three Questions
First, why presume the child is dead? Though the English word "miscarriage" entails this notion, nothing in the Hebrew wording suggests it.
Yasa doesn't mean miscarriage; it means "to come forth." The word itself never suggests death.
[13] In fact, the word generally implies the opposite: live birth. If it's never translated elsewhere as miscarriage, why translate it that way here?
Second, what in the context itself implies the death of the child? There's nothing that does, nothing at all. The fine does not necessarily mean the child is dead, and even if it did this wouldn't indicate that the child wasn't fully human (as in the case of the slave in v. 32).
Third, ancient Hebrew had a specific word for miscarriage. It was used in other passages. Why not here? Because Moses didn't mean miscarriage. When his words are simply taken at face value, there is no confusion at all. The verse is clear and straight-forward. Everything falls into place.