It would have to be something hugely serious to justify putting a child to death. Exodus 21 provides that justification: it’s when a child “attacks” or “curses” one of his parents (15, 17). So this wasn’t a young child, it was a child fully capable of carrying out a violent physical or brutal verbal assault on an adult, but worse still, on his very own parents.
Deuteronomy 21:18 also explains that this wasn’t an occasional thing that happened, or a moment of rage that blew over. It speaks of “a stubborn and rebellious son who won’t do a thing his mother and father tell him, and even though they discipline him he still won’t obey.” So this is a child, maybe in late teenage while still at home, whose attitude toward his parents has become one of total and constant defiance and contempt. In front of his parents or behind their backs he is always – in Jesus’ own words about such a child in Matthew 15:4 – “speaking evil” of them. He hates his parents so much it would only be a small step to “striking” them or “attacking” them with intent to injure, or even kill.
He’s also of an age, according to Deuteronomy 21:20, that he’d become “a glutton and a drunk.” And also of an age, according to Leviticus 20:9, that because of his constant, unchanging evil attitude, “his blood will be on his own head.” He’d brought this on himself, not only by deliberately flouting his parents’ teaching, dishonouring the family name and making life utterly miserable for them, but also by making light of Yahweh’s clear command in Exodus 20:12 to hold one’s parents in high regard at all times, and especially into the parents’ old age when, in that society, aged parents were hugely dependent on their adult children to care for them.
Imagine, therefore, being a parent and in Deuteronomy 21:19-20, having to “forcibly bring their son before the leaders at the city gate and say to the city fathers, ‘This son of ours is a stubborn rebel; he won’t listen to a thing we say. He’s a glutton and a drunk.’ Then all the men of his city (21) shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel will hear of it and fear.”
So, what justified the killing of a child was removing an evil that could not be removed otherwise. Even the people who loved him the most couldn’t make a dent in his attitude. What purpose did it serve, then, in allowing such an incurable menace to live? But Yahweh was very much into “Holiness in practical terms”….(next blog)
