Why did God strike an infant with disease for 7 days until it died?

tonychanyt said:

Why did God strike an infant with disease for 7 days until it died?

I don't know. However, I trust that the eternal God will make everything right in the end from the eternal point of view.

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God, in his wisdom, has put people to death -- for example Uzzah when he touched the Ark of the Covenent. But it does feel different when it is a baby and not a sinful adult.

My personal belief is that human life was viewed differently in the past. In modern thinking, a baby has the full rights, legal protections and value as an adult. In fact, I suspect a legal settlement where an infant suffered a loss of limb in an accident, the settlement cost would be determined for the number of years the infant (soon to grow up) would have to deal with the injury. But an 90 yr old man similarly injured might be given less settlement.

But in the Mosaic law, a fight that led to the miscarriage of a pregnant woman (and the death of the unborn) would result in just a monetary fine. But actions that lead to the death of an adult were typically considered a capital crime, punishable by the death penalty. Thus the societal value of adult life was much higher than that of an infant. If a person can be compared to a tree, then a seedling first bursting up from the ground has the potential to provide nourishing food, but it is not the same as a fully-grown fruit tree ready for the harvest.

So David and Bathsheeba's infant, who had not had time to live and grow and develop, was not considered the same as a full-grown person. From the time David had Uriah killed, which was likely early in Bathseeba's pregnancy, the fetus was apparently judged by God to not be allowed to live. And what if the child had lived to grow up? Would it become king? And how would the circumstances of his birth affect his life's course? How would the entire nation be affected by this corruption at the very top of the government? So, instead, God stopped the infant's life, with it's near-zero societal value, to teach a stern lesson about how a should-be-righteous king can NOT be allowed to get away with murder. God gave them another son (Solomon), and richly blessed him. And in the age to come, who knows? Perhaps God will restore that baby to them and he will be allowed to grow up in a better world.

If the questions is why God caused the entire process to last 7 days, I would say that it gave time for David to demonstrate to all around him how the punishment was affecting him.

Just my 2 cents.

KT

tonychanyt said:

I don't know.

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Why did God take the first born of everyone that did not have blood on the doorpost?

Ace777 said:

Why did God take the first born of everyone that did not have blood on the doorpost?

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Yeah, this is a hard one....

My take is that the OT seems to be full of the idea of corporate guilt. I.e. an entire country can be guilty of something, and therefore everyone in the country suffers. Egypt was guilty of enslaving people, and likely much else. So when it came to punishment, God applied this to the firstborn -- including the young firstborn. Today, we tend to think about everything on an individual basis, so it seems harsh to punish an infant that has not had time to do anything right or wrong. But I think there was a understanding then that consequences were not always directed exactly at the person. If one aims to kill in infestation of snakes, then one has to kill not only the adults, but also the baby snakes.

I just got done reading through the book of Jeremiah. Not a fun time there... Lots of prophecies of the horrors that were to come with the coming Babylonian invasion. In Jeremiah's message to the Ammonites, it says:

Jer 49: 12-13 Indeed. God says, “I tell you, if there are people who have to drink the cup of God’s wrath even though they don’t deserve it, why would you think you’d get off? You won’t get off. You’ll drink it. Oh yes, you’ll drink every drop. And as for Bozrah, your capital, I swear by all that I am”—God’s Decree—“that that city will end up a pile of charred ruins, a stinking garbage dump, an obscenity—and all her daughter-cities with her.” (Message Bible versions)

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So here God directly says that sometimes undeserving people will get caught in the crossfire. The punishment of Egypt had a purpose of punishing those people. But it also served as a means of establishing God's reputation as powerful among all the all the countless other 'gods' in countries. And that reputation was ultimately to be for the benefit of humanity. God had to establish a people, to plant them so to speak. And to plant them in a garden, first the soil had to be tilled up. The goal was to drive out the people of Palestine rather than kill them. Having a powerful God with a fearsome reputation was needed for that.

So all that was a bit of a tenuous argument, but it helps me accept it all.

KT

KevinT said:

So here God directly says that sometimes undeserving people will get caught in the crossfire.

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God is a God of absolute Justice. But it is through us He is redeeming creation because we were given dominion and control.