Biblical association jumps the ...killer whale?

I regularly point out that taking clues about modern-day life from a Bronze Age book is not really well-advised. And it sometimes comes off rather awkwardly, which is why this post from American Family Association's Bryan Fischer on how ignoring the Bible led to the death of a SeaWorld trainer seems to be making the rounds of the whole internets:

If the counsel of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed, Tillikum would have been put out of everyone's misery back in 1991 and would not have had the opportunity to claim two more human lives.

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, "When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable." (Exodus 21:28)

So, your animal kills somebody, your moral responsibility is to put that animal to death. You have no moral culpability in the death, because you didn't know the animal was going to go postal on somebody.

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn't kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, "the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death." (Exodus 21:29)

If I were the family of Dawn Brancheau, I'd sue the pants off SeaWorld for allowing this killer whale to kill again after they were well aware of its violent history.

For what it's worth, I definitely agree that more precautions needed to be taken with this animal--but I draw the line at death for it. They call the orca a "killer whale", not a "huggy whale", and I think the main rule of thumb when dealing with a natural predator (like lions, tigers, bears, etc.) is to always keep in mind that they are wild, and you are made of meat. That being said, a killer whale attack is a part of a killer whale's natural instincts, and the decision to continue to work with the animal even after it displayed unpredictable behavior, although a little dubious in my opinion, doesn't merit death for the animal or for anyone at SeaWorld.

The image of stoning a killer whale to death is also....quaint. It's a sea mammal. It doesn't really have a grasp of morality. And death by stoning is really, really grisly. I'm of the mind that killer whales don't so much kill people as people who don't practice "safe swimming" around them bear a risk of getting killed. There's a distinction to be made between predator animals in a zoo or aquarium setting and domesticated animals.

Truth be told, we do treat pit bull attacks, for example, rather in the way that the Bible describes. We don't stone the pit bulls because our society has become more humane, but we do put "repeat offenders" down and hold their owners liable. But I just don't know that that can hold for a situation like this, which is, after all, a relationship between man and beast completely unknown to the authors of the Bible. While they spent plenty of time around domesticated animals, and both respected and understood those creatures' limitations with the lack of sentimentality that comes from knowing where your meat comes from, they would have gone out of their way to avoid the kind of predator animals that we modern folks are so bold as to sometimes think we've tamed. We don't have to live side-by-side with killer whales in the way our ancestors did with dogs and horses and cattle. If we chose to, though, it's we humans that have to do the adapting.

It's an interesting thing to think about--how civilization and ethics have changed even on a topic like this over the years. But it points out how, if things do change, the unchanging word of the Bible might not always meet our needs.