If suicide is a sin, why didn’t the Bible state it?

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Seven people commit suicide in the Bible, six in the Old Testament and one in the New. It is stated for exactly zero of them what happened to them after they die.

The Bible didn’t really concern itself in what we today call world-building. The little world-building it does do is almost laughably wrong and is clearly meant to be allegorical in nature. It is only through theological wizardry that people ever manage to actually believe in the Bible literally.

You might be surprised to discover that most of what we believe about the world comes from theologians who just extrapolated based on what the Bible actually does say. Even the idea that we have of Christians going to Heaven after they die and what can cause people to go to Heaven or Hell is practically unsupported by the Bible.

Biblical narrative has those who sin against the Lord, pay for those sins while they’re still living. Jesus offers a new twist on this state of affairs, placing the forgiving nature of God first and foremost.

You have to make a decision pretty early on when you study the Bible. Are you going to accept theological understandings of the Bible as truth, or are you going to read the Bible for yourself and make up your own mind? If you make up your own mind then the main thing you need to understand about the Bible is that it makes a sharp distinction between deeds that hurt yourself and others, and deeds that only really affect yourself. Acts that only hurt yourself are rarely punished directly by God. God only gets involved in the latter type of act.

God sets out moral codes by which He expects humans to abide, and, again, if you just go by the narrative, it’s fairly clear that these codes are prescriptive rather than absolute. You can use your brain, you’re not expected to abide by them blindly. For example, David steals Bathsheba from her husband, but it wasn’t the adultery that God punished him for, it was the gluttony of doing wrong by a brother when you had no real need to. David pulled some very sneaky, ugly shit to take her for himself. Today, polygamy is very much looked down upon, but kings in the Bible did not have this restriction. The restriction is theological, not Biblical.

So while you might construe this answer as clear guidance to avoid theology, I don’t really think you should, lest you end up in the same boat that the Jews found themselves in. The Bible contains certain dietary prohibitions that just don’t make sense anymore, and I personally would have a really hard time having a romantic relationship with someone who refused to eat pork. The Bible clearly states that you shouldn’t eat pork, so you have to engage in the same sort of theological wranglings to justify pork eating as Christians did to forbid suicide.

If you want my own moral opinion as to what I think the Bible says about suicide, I would hearken back to the distinction that the Bible makes between acts that affect only yourself vs. those that affect more than just yourself. Also realize that the seven suicides in the Bible did not run afoul of this law and that life in those times was rather cheap.

Life is not so cheap now, and taking your own life can gravely injure those that you’re close to. So don’t commit suicide unless you truly have no family and friends that would be seriously hurt by your decision.