Does the Bible Condone Cannibalism? What 2 Kings 6 Really Says
Updated: Aug 19
Sitting down at a Bible study, the last topic I expected to debate was cannibalism. But that is exactly where the evening went, and I suspect it won't be the last time a conversation catches me off guard like that.
It started with a gentleman who had questions. Somewhere along the way we landed on the subject of people eating people, and he shared that a former Evangelical church had taught him 2 Kings 6:28–29 as proof that God endorses it. Every jaw in the room hit the floor.
"Then the king asked her, “What is your problem?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ So we boiled my son and ate him; and I said to her on the next day, ‘Give up your son, that we may eat him;’ and she has hidden her son.”
To his credit, he is in the middle of tearing down what he was wrongly taught and rebuilding it on Scripture itself. That is precisely the work he should be doing: reading, questioning, and testing what he hears against the text. So we walked through that passage together, along with the other places cannibalism surfaces.
The point we kept returning to is simple. Scripture records these events because they actually occurred, not because God signs off on them. Sometimes the Bible is just reporting history, and sometimes it is exposing how far sin can drag a person. In 2 Kings 6, the horror unfolds during a brutal famine and siege. Reporting it is not the same as blessing it.
Wherever cannibalism shows up in the Bible, it is cast as pagan, monstrous, and a marker of judgment, never as faithfulness to God.
We got that settled. And then someone in the room aimed a comment at me that was meant to hurt my feelings, for no reason beyond my just being there and I highly suspect because I am a woman.
I had said that no level of hunger would ever drive me to eat another human being. The reply came fast: starvation changes the brain, so I supposedly can't claim I wouldn't. You can guess how that sat with me.
I granted the point that starvation does affect the mind. But I noted that untold millions of people across history have starved to death and never once turned on a brother or sister. It takes a heart profoundly severed from God to commit an act like that.
My heart is anchored in God, and I have no uncertainty about where my salvation rests. I know who I am. When a person's heart is not right with God, cannibalism becomes possible, and Scripture makes that painfully plain.
I'll be honest, the jab discouraged me, because it came from malice rather than love or truth. I answered politely, though with a little spice, because there are moments when rudeness has to be met head-on, especially in front of someone who has just realized that something he was taught about God was flatly wrong.
© 2025 Jane Isley
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I’m open to correction but I can find nothing in the Hebrew or Greek that indicates the respective sons were not alive when this negotiation began. So obviously both children would have to be killed and the carcass dressed for eating. A human is not in the list of clean animals so this was a big deal, as you said, in a multitude of ways. (It is the reason that Jephthah’s daughter could not be slaughtered as a Blood Offering. No Priest would go anywhere near that one.)
But what if they were already dead? Death is separation of the spirit from the body of flesh. Which is now just pile of fungible carbon.
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