Exodus 22:18

This verse is part of a large section of Mosaic law — the legal code given to the Israelites as they formed a nation after escaping slavery in Egypt. The Hebrew word translated "sorceress" refers to someone who practices divination, sorcery, or occult rituals. In the ancient Near East, such practices were deeply intertwined with worship of other gods and were frequently used to exploit vulnerable people — the grieving, the desperate, the fearful — through deception and manipulation. This law functioned as civil legislation for ancient Israel as a theocratic nation-state, not as a universal command for all people across all time. That distinction matters enormously, because this verse carries a painful history: it was one of the primary texts cited to justify the torture and execution of thousands of people accused of witchcraft during the Inquisition and Salem witch trials, most of them women. Nearly all Christian theologians today agree that Old Testament civil laws applied to a specific covenant people in a specific era and cannot be lifted from that context and applied directly in a different world.

God, I confess that your Word has sometimes been twisted to hurt rather than heal. Give me the humility to hold difficult texts with care, the wisdom to understand context and history, and the courage to acknowledge where the church has caused harm. Let truth and love travel together, always. Amen.

Some verses are easy to sit with over morning coffee. This one is not. Exodus 22:18 has been weaponized — cited to justify the torture and killing of thousands of people, mostly women, across centuries of church history. That weight cannot be set aside while reading it. And yet looking away, or refusing to engage entirely, is its own kind of failure. Part of reading the Bible seriously means staying with the hard texts long enough to ask real questions — not just what does this mean for me, but what did it mean then, and what has been done with it, and what do I do with that history? In its ancient context, sorcery was not simply about magic — it was a competing religious system, often wielded as a tool of exploitation and fear against the most vulnerable. The Mosaic law addressed a specific people in a specific time. But the history of this verse calls us to something harder than historical analysis: an honest reckoning with what happens when Scripture is handled carelessly, or deliberately wielded as a weapon. If you believe the Bible is trustworthy, part of that trust involves sitting with its most difficult passages without flinching — and being willing to say plainly that this text has been misread, and people died. What does it mean to hold Scripture with both conviction and the kind of humility that protects the vulnerable?