Leviticus 26:29, Driven to Cannibalism

Posted on Thursday, June 5, 2014 in Bible Commentary | 1 comment

And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

//The book of Leviticus predicts that if Israel isn’t obedient, they will be put under siege, and the famine caused by the war will be so bad they they will be forced to eat their own children. Impossible, you say?

It happened … not once, not twice, but three times.

2 Kings 6 tells about a famine during the time of Elisha, when a woman is robbed of a meal. She appeals to the king:

And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.

Lamentations chapter 4 tells of the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem, and the famine then:

The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.

Finally, we have this warning in the gospels about the upcoming siege of Jerusalem:

How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! –Mark 13:17

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing about the war described by the gospels, tells of a woman from Bethezob who came to Jerusalem to worship and was trapped there by the Romans. She boiled and ate her own son. The Zealots (Jewish freedom fighters), smelling the meat, broke into her house and demanded their share, but when they saw what the poor woman ate, they left her alone.