"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...

A significant bit of the Old Testament (I forget which books) was about
competition between tribes, and one standard way to grow one's tribe was
to conquer a neighboring tribe and steal their women, killing or
enslaving the men. Slaves fetch a good price.

And killing or enslaving any overly resistant women. This is probably
the evolutionary basis for the Stockholm Syndrome.

Wow, I haven't heard that connection before, but the principle could be much
the same. That's a very interesting link that you've drawn, Joe.


I would guess that the purpose of the shaved head, new clothes, and
month of grieving in solitude is to cause the woman to "readjust", so
that at the end of the month she will welcome her conquerer.

Well, biblical scholars mostly place Moses's life around 1200 - 1500 BC
or
so, and both physical and herbal (medicinal) methods for inducing
abortion
were recorded from before the time of Hippocrates. He wrote of it
himself.
So it's been around for a long time. It seems likely that it's been with
us
since Moses's time.

One assumes that these were oral traditions long before being written
down, but OK, let's say it's more like 3000-4000 years ago. It's still
millennia before the invention of modern medicine.

Some of those herbs are used to this day, but still the abortion debate
of 1500 BC would turn only on the practical issues of efficacy versus
risk of the few options then available. None were particularly
attractive.

Probably not efficacious, but I wonder if that would be part of an "abortion
debate" in 1500 BC. It more likely would have been all about religion or
philosophy, I would think.

--
Ed Huntress