Maternal Instinct

We are taught, generally from a fairly young age, that mothers have a natural instinct to take care of their children. Of course, there are ways to suppress it; in today's society the obvious way would be with drugs: A strung out mother will sell her baby to get money to buy drugs. In this time of year, when we always think of Mary and the Baby, I thought I would share a little bit about what the Bible says.

In First Samuel chapter 1, we are told about a woman named Hannah, who very much wanted children, but couldn't have any. She went to temple and prayed, and ended up later giving birth to Samuel, the prophet for whom the book is named. In Genesis 30, Rachel became distraught that she didn't have children. Now, in both of these cases, the woman in question was one of two wives, who had no children, while the other wife bare children. Interestingly enough, in both cases, the barren wife was actually the favored of her husband; I'm not sure if there's any significance to that.

In Judges 11, Jephthah's daughter bewailed her virginity. Of course, I should point out that she was in trouble for celebrating her father's return from a victorious war (it's complicated); but, if she had not been a virgin, she would not have been celebrating her father's return, she would have been celebrating her husband's return, and would not have gotten into trouble. The end of this story has been interpreted many different ways, but, my reading is that she died, still a virgin.

I think that we are all familiar with King Solomon's famous exercise in wisdom in First Kings 3: He had to rule in a case where two mothers both claimed the same child, and he depended on the the maternal instinct to determine which woman was the child's mother (the other woman was willing to let the king kill the child).

In Second Kings chapter 6, there is a rather gruesome story that shows that it doesn't take drugs to override maternal instinct, just a very desperate situation. It's hard for me to imagine such a situation, but that may just be because I'm spoiled.