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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
What do we do with a God who sanctions violence? Old Testament violence proves one of the most troubling topics in the Bible. Too often, the explanations for the brutality in Scripture fail to adequately illustrate why God would sanction such horrors on humanity. These unanswered questions leave readers frustrated and confused, leading some to even walk away from their faith. In Flood and Fury, Old Testament scholar Matthew Lynch approaches two of the most violent passages in the Old Testament – the Flood and the Canaanite conquest – and offers a way forward that doesn't require softening or ignoring the most troubling aspects of these stories. While acknowledging the persistent challenge of violence in Scripture, Flood and Fury contends that reading with the grain of the text yields surprising insights into the goodness and the mercy of God. Through his exploration of themes related to violence including misogyny, racism, and nationalism, Lynch shows that these violent stories illuminate significant theological insights that we might miss with a surface reading. Flood and Fury challenges us to let go of the need to rescue the Old Testament from itself and listen afresh to its own critiques on violence.
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For Abi,and for my WTC and Regent College students
Contents
LIST OF FIGURESAND TABLES
FIGURES
3.1. Assurbanipal hunting the lion, from the North Palace in Nineveh (ca. 645–635 BC)
7.1. A bronze sickle sword recovered from Late Bronze layers at Aphek
9.1. Early Israelite settlement and conquest regions
10.1. Comparison of “destroy” commands in Exodus and Deuteronomy
10.2. Comparison of reports
11.1. Second highlighted map of Israel following the conquest
12.1. Pharaoh Rameses II and opponents in the Battle of Kadesh
12.2. A relief of Ramses II from Memphis showing him capturing enemies: a Nubian, a Libyan, and a Syrian, circa 1250 BC, Cairo Museum
12.3. Victory Stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad (ca. 2230 BC), which depicts him slaying the Lullibi and their king
TABLES
9.1. Displacement vs. destruction
10.1. Deuteronomy 7:1-5
10.2. Deuteronomy 7:5 and 2 Kings 23
10.3. Deuteronomy 7:5 and 2 Chronicles 31
11.1. Report vs. Canaanite response
12.1. The defeat of kings
FOREWORD
HELEN PAYNTER
IT WAS IN 2004, just another ordinary school night, and I was making dinner for my husband and our three daughters. When the phone rang, there was nothing to suggest that I was about to be confronted with one of the hardest questions of my life.
“Hi Helen, it’s Clare. [Our church youth worker.] I wonder if you can help me. [Subtext: it’s a long shot.] One of the young people in our youth group has been reading the Old Testament properly for the first time. [That’s great! Isn’t it?] She’s finding loads of grim, violent stories there, and they’re really troubling her. I think she might be in danger of losing her faith. Can you tell me how to help her?”
What do we do with the violence in the Old Testament?
There are two classic responses to a question like that. One is to say, in effect, “God says it, you’ve got to believe it. Don’t question the Word of God.” The other is to reply like this: “Tell her not to bother with the Old Testament. It’s all horribly violent and out of date. Just focus on Jesus.”
Honesty prevented me from giving the first answer. Sometimes we have to take things on trust, but God gave us brains for a reason, and he is never honored by us dishonestly denying that problems exist. My deep commitment to Scripture as the revealed Word of God wouldn’t allow me to give the second response. So I went for a third option—my mouth flapped open and nothing came out.
I had nothing useful to say to help this young woman who was asking such important questions with real integrity, and a genuine desire to press deeper into God and his ways. Nothing that wouldn’t cause her to doubt the goodness of God or the faithfulness of his Word. I was disturbed and ashamed (and, incidentally, as a result of this conversation I went on to write an MA dissertation on the subject, undertake a PhD in the Old Testament, and founded a study center to tackle hard questions like this one1).
Because this is one of the most pressing questions facing the church today, it is important for several reasons. First, because—as with this young woman—people are in danger of losing their faith, or failing to come to faith in the first place. We are much less content than previous generations simply to accept the word of another (even of God) without questioning it. We want to understand. We need to know that the God who commands our obedience really deserves it. We have seen war on our TV screens (or more closely), and it troubles us to encounter it in our Bibles.
Second, it is important because we need to be able to trust that God’s Word is true and dependable, and that it testifies faithfully to the character of God, the nature of humanity, the dealings that God has had and will have in the world, and to the great historical claims it makes, most particularly the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If God’s Word is not reliable, what are we to believe? If we construct a picture of a benign, teddy-bear God that is derived from our imaginations, not from his Word, how reliable is our construction?
Third, the question is important because taking one of the standard approaches to it (just ditch the Old Testament) is not only unwise and unhelpful, but it is in danger of being antisemitic. Of course, Christians believe that God did something new in Jesus Christ, but that new thing was not wholly different from what he had done before. There is much continuity between the Testaments, as well as some discontinuity. If we read carefully, we will discover that the character of the God revealed in the New Testament is exactly the same as the God we meet in the Old Testament. The narrative of Old Testament bad, Jesus good, is not only based on a misreading of both Testaments, but fuels a nasty strand of antisemitic theology that has caused untold harm over the centuries.
And fourth, the question is important because we need to understand the way that God’s purposes bend toward peace. If we fail to read the great narrative of Scripture properly, if we extract verses or stories from their meaning and context and drop them into the twenty-first century, we are in danger of using God’s good Word in ways that harm people. No, the indigenous peoples of the Americas weren’t the Canaanites to be annihilated by the new Israel of the settlers. No, you can’t justify bearing arms by claiming that the bullet is the natural evolution of Old Testament stoning. No, the Bible doesn’t endorse the abuse of wives by their husbands. (These are all true examples of things that have been declared by people claiming to take the Bible seriously.)
So this is an important question. And it needs a reply from someone who is thoughtful, pastorally sensitive, honest, and learned. Let me introduce you to Matt Lynch.
Matt has been grappling with these questions for years. He is a hugely respected Old Testament scholar with a love for God and his people, and a commitment to struggling faithfully with God’s Word for the sake of God’s people. This book has emerged from some of that struggling.
Here are some things that you won’t find in this book: casuistry, easy answers, tub-thumping fundamentalism.
Here are some other things that you won’t find: a carelessness toward Scripture, a prioritizing of human ideas over divine revelation, bleeding-heart liberalism.
This is what you will find: a lively, engaging, delightfully human and honest exploration of the subject, deeply rooted in prayerful study, but wearing its learning lightly. You’ll even find a sprinkle of humor. (Yes, really!)
So, if you struggle with the violence that you find in the pages of the Old Testament (like the young woman whose story we started with), or if you want to be useful to others who are struggling (as Clare and I desired to be), read on. You are in safe hands. Now turn the page.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN FOR STUDENTS and for those in the church who seek to engage Scripture in all its diverse challenges and wonders. That this book stems from my own challenges as a student and by the many questions that my students posed about God’s association with violence in the Old Testament. I couldn’t have written a book for those individuals without the help of many friends, colleagues, and students over the years. I mention just a few here.
First, I’m grateful to Anna Gissing, who helped steer this book through its early stages at IVP, and then to Rachel Hastings, who guided this book to completion with thoughtful feedback and keen editorial oversight. I’m also grateful to the rest of the IVP team for their collaboration, including the feedback provided by their blind peer reviewer, copyeditor, and marketing team.
I’m also grateful to my previous institution, WTC (UK), for giving me a sabbatical during which I began this book. Regent College has also been immensely generous in providing space and time to research and write.
I owe an immense amount to the following individuals for reading all or portions of earlier drafts of this book. Tanya Marrow read an early draft, and provided very helpful input. Thanks also to Abi Lynch, Lucy Peppiatt, Mark Glanville, Brad Jersak, Matt Bates, Dru Johnson, Chris McKinny, Jonathan Greer, Kyle Keimer, and Michael Rhodes for their many helpful comments. Special appreciation is also due to my research assistant Parker Arnold for his careful feedback on the entire book.
I’m grateful to Brad Jersak, Andrew Klager, and students in sessions I taught at the Institute for Religion, Peace and Justice at St. Stephen’s University. Thanks also to Helen Paynter for her generous foreword, and for her leadership and scholarship at the Centre for the Study of the Bible and Violence in the UK. This book wouldn’t have happened without the rich and engaging environment at WTC, where I taught from 2012–2020. Students and colleagues constantly prompted me to engage Scripture more deeply and prayerfully. Students at Regent College (Vancouver) have taught me so much over the past two years alone. I’m filled with gratitude for them, and am constantly awed by their creativity and insights. Special thanks to students in my Advanced Old Testament Exegesis course and in my Wrestling with Old Testament Wrath and Violence class.
Finally, I’m grateful to my wife, Abi Lynch, for conversations about this book, her critical and constructive feedback on the manuscript, and for filling our family and community with many joyful times as this book took shape.
MY FAMILY HAD JUST MOVED into a new place in Cheltenham, England. It was our third move in four years. I was home alone, listening to a podcast, some boxes still unpacked. The podcast host lamented the fact that many Christians don’t know their neighbors, sounding a timely theme for me. I made a mental note to at least learn our neighbors’ names.
Not more than two minutes later I walked by our front door and saw that the postman slipped an Amazon notice through our door, letting me know that our package sat with our neighbor. Point taken!
As I went outside and turned left toward no. 18, I ran into a neighbor. I’ll call him James. After some light conversation, he asked what I did for work.
“I teach the Old Testament.”
“Oh! Could I come speak with you some time? I have some questions,” he answered.
“Of course!” I responded.
I thought this was a divinely appointed evangelism opportunity. His conversion and education in the Old Testament were only a matter of time.
But that’s not what happened. As we talked, it became evident that James was in the middle of a faith crisis. He attended a very restrictive church that rebuffed any of his searching questions or expressions of doubt. He asked his questions anyway, and they shut him down. And so we talked . . . for many hours over multiple evenings, mostly about the Bible and the fallout with his family. His problems with the Bible ranged widely but boiled down to two main things: (1) God permitted Israel to enslave foreigners (Lev 25:44-46). (2) God condoned extreme violence against innocent men, women, and children in books like Joshua. For James, the first issue was personal. He’s from Ghana. Texts like Leviticus 25 were used to condone the oppression of his ancestors. The land-conquest in Joshua only magnified the extreme violence embodied in his more personal connection to a history of enslavement.
I wish I could say that the fog lifted, and James walked away with restored faith as I wheeled out different ways of looking at these problems.
It didn’t go that way. James ended up leaving the faith. He said he was too far down the road to turn back. He now makes YouTube videos that confront people with the problems of violence in the Bible. We still have frank conversations, and our friendship endures.
My conversations with James left me wondering why some leave the faith over such issues while others hang on. And for those barely hanging on, what resources do they have? While there are certainly good books on violence in the Old Testament, I felt a need for something that confronts hard issues but that also gives the Old Testament a greater voice and pans out to see the beautiful images of God that also weave their way through Israel’s Scripture. You can end up seriously injured if you continually bang your head against the “problem of violence in the Old Testament.” But equally so, you can end up brewing a crisis if you continually delay the hard questions.
As I speak with James, here’s why I hold out hope. First, everyone is on a journey, and so James’s story isn’t finished. But also, James told me that if he had been part of a church that talked about the Bible in the ways we had—that wrestled openly about the problem of violence—he probably never would’ve left. Perhaps through a different kind of conversation, sustained by the work of the Spirit, there’s a way for James to inch his chair back up to the table. Sometimes those we’ve written off can surprise us as well. In a recent visit to his old church, a pastor surprised him by listening patiently to his concerns with Scripture.
So, this book is for (1) those in the church who have persistent concerns about violent texts, (2) people who disciple those with such concerns, (3) and those who have friends on the fringes of the faith who can’t get past the problem of violence.
If you think that no one around you is dealing with vexed questions about violence in Scripture, I suggest you start asking around. There’s a good chance that someone like James is in your church, workplace, or neighborhood.
This book isn’t designed to help you refute the skeptic, take down the New Atheists, or win over the unbeliever. Its aims are more focused, but hopefully, more durable. I hope it leaves you saying things like, There’s far more good in these troublesome texts than I thought! Or, I’m not alone. Or, The Old Testament critiques our violence! I hope it helps you relate to a Bible, and ultimately a world, that is rife with violence, but also full of beauty and life. Most importantly, I hope the book helps you discover a God full of tender mercy and compassion at the heart of the hardest texts.
SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL
Once James started down the road with his questions about Scripture, he felt he couldn’t turn back. He’d finally given voice to his nagging concerns, and they just kept flowing. In fact, they weren’t nagging anymore. They were clawing at him no matter which way he turned. He told me that they occupied his mind all day.
It reminds me of what happened to me when I was driving my car once in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver doesn’t get much snow in the city, but one winter we had about five inches. I was driving my ’82 Volvo DL down the street. I merely tapped my brakes, and the car went into a flat spin.
I braced myself for impact. Fortunately, no other cars were around. I finally stopped spinning, only to slide backward down the street until my car came to a gentle rest against a curb. Phew! After drawing breath, I took a bow. No one was hurt, and my car wasn’t damaged.
But many people don’t stop spinning until they hit something solid, like a tree, another car perhaps, or even a pedestrian. They don’t stop gently. They crash violently.
How do we stabilize the spin before we crash? In snow and on wet surfaces, you’re supposed to act counterintuitively. Turn gently into the spin, and don’t brake . . . or at least brake lightly (Disclaimer: This is not professional driving advice!). This requires the delicate coordination of steering and letting go. But when it comes to addressing the ethical challenge of violence in the Old Testament, some people pull a hard right. They try to justify every violent text. God says it. That settles it. Others pull a hard left. Violent texts in the Old Testament are just the wishful projections of a violent and barbaric people. We must resist its teachings at all costs or re-interpret them until they look nice and clean!
But these aren’t our only options. The challenge for many is that responding to violence in Scripture is counterintuitive to both impulses. It requires turning into the spin while maintaining gentle responsiveness. Part of turning into the spin is facing the problem itself. Yet pretending that your spinning car is fine is not the same as avoiding panic. We need to look at the problem(s) of violence. But as we move forward, we’ll also see that there are ways to avoid a car wreck.
1
Facing the Problem (Without Burning DownYour House)
KEN ESAU TELLS THE STORY that illustrates the danger of trying to “solve” a problem like violence in the Old Testament.1 Ken had a neighbor who wanted to remove a grease stain from his garage floor. So he doused the floor with gasoline and scrubbed it clean with a wire brush. Gasoline dissolves grease and oil, so it was the perfect solution for the problem. The combination of gasoline and scrubbing rid him of that ugly grease stain. Having eliminated the problem, he shut the garage door. Problem solved!
So it seemed.
Inside the garage burned the pilot light of his hot water heater. Once the gasoline fumes filled the garage, and kaboom! The garage blew up like a bomb, his house caught fire, and everything burned to the ground.
These rather dramatic events provide a cautionary tale. Only use gasoline in well ventilated areas, well away from any active flame. Yes. But for our purposes, we’re reminded to be wary of solutions that too easily resolve all difficulties. We may rid ourselves of one problem only to find ourselves stuck with far more destructive consequences than we ever anticipated!
The warning from this story applies to all sorts of issues encountered in the Christian life, and none more than the problem of violence in the Old Testament. For many, divine anger, violent stories, and violent prayers, look like ugly grease stains on the pages of Scripture. But before declaring, “This kind can only come out with much gasoline!” let’s consider the hidden costs that might lurk in the back corner. They’re not always out in the open.
But we can’t ignore the grease stains in the process.
THE PROBLEMSOF VIOLENCE
At first glance, the stains will certainly arrest our attention. They may appear worthy of a gasoline dousing! For instance, God commanded Moses to do the following, which Joshua later enacted: “You must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy” (Deut 7:2, italics added;2 cf. Deut 20:16-17).
The call to “destroy them totally” (Hebrew herem) involved annihilating the Canaanites and then dedicating their wealth to God as a sacred offering. It sounds like a bizarre mix of violence and worship. Destroying Canaanites as an offering? Most disturbingly, God commanded them to take great care to deny these nations mercy. Several texts in Joshua suggest that the people dutifully obeyed down to this merciless detail (Josh 6:21; 10:40; 11:11-15). As Joshua and the people entered the land, they struck down entire peoples, “devoting them to destruction.” Look at Joshua 6:21: “They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” Killing children and animals puts to rest any argument that this was only about the moral degeneracy of the Canaanites. How could children and animals be held morally responsible? Surprisingly, Joshua doesn’t mention Canaanite immorality as a justification for killing the Canaanites, as do other Old Testament passages (e.g., Gen 15:16).3 They were simply in the land and needed to go. As if to sharpen the point, Joshua tells us the following: “For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (Josh 11:20).
Ouch! God ensured this merciless horror show!
At the very least, we must concede the deep tension between these texts and what we learn of God from other places in the Bible:
The LORD, the LORD,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (Ex 34:6, NRSV)4
Or consider Jesus’ healing of the two blind men who cried out: “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” (Mt 9:27). “Grant them mercy” seems to be God’s heart in other texts.
The tensions build as we look at the full range of problems in the Old Testament. Violence is not a single problem. It’s like one of those old Whac-A-Mole arcade games where moles would pop up randomly from their holes and you had to whack them on the head. No sooner did you hit one mole than another appeared. The problems of violence in the Bible are the same way. No sooner do you address one problem than another appears.
Here are some of the big problems. As you look at this list, consider what you or your friends consider to be some of the main challenges of violence in the Old Testament.
Divinely enacted violence. Some struggle with the problem of divine violence in the flood, where God drowns 99.44 percent of the world’s population (animals included) to wipe it clean from sin, only to discover that humanity hadn’t really changed.
Divinely commanded violence. Others look with astonished bewilderment at the problem of violence in books like Joshua, where Yahweh commands the people to wipe out the indigenous population of Canaan.
Divinely sanctioned violence. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy permit the people to take women in war and hold slaves. Sons who dishonor parents are to be stoned, adulterers burned, and the like. Laws like these rubber-stamp acts of violence against other Israelites.5
Gruesome stories. Not all problems of violence directly involve God, though God certainly is part of the bigger picture. In Judges, for instance, well . . . let me give you a rundown of the highlights:
Judges 1:6-7: Israel mutilates the Canaanite king Adoni-Bezek.
Judges 1:1–3:6: Numerous battles, three of which involve the complete destruction of a civilian population, and all done with Yahweh’s help.
Judges 3: King Eglon of Moab disemboweled; Shamgar slaughters six hundred Philistines with an ox goad.
Judges 4–5: Jael kills Sisera by driving a tent peg through his head.
Judges 9: Abimelech killed his seventy brothers and then one thousand people in the tower of Shechem. He was then mortally wounded when a woman dropped a millstone on his head, before asking his arms bearer to finish him off (so he wasn’t killed by a woman).
Judges 11: Jephthah burns his daughter as a sacrifice to fulfill a vow.
Judges 13–16: Samson murders thirty men from Ashkelon for their clothes and sets fire to the tails of three hundred foxes to torch their fields. The Philistines retaliate by burning Samson’s wife and father-in-law, whose death Samson avenges by killing one thousand men with a donkey’s jawbone. Eventually, after his capture, Samson topples the pillars of a Philistine temple, killing three thousand men, women, and children.
Judges 19–21: A Levite’s concubine is raped and dismembered, followed by a brutal war in which the rest of the tribes perform a conquest on Benjamin, to the point where there are no women left. Violence against women thus features as a central feature of this story. So, the rest of Israel destroyed Jabesh-Gilead, killing all but four hundred virgins, which they traffic to the tribe of Benjamin as “wives” for the six hundred surviving men. Then, they steal two hundred women from Shiloh to provide wives for the rest.
These stories raise questions about the apparent silence of God in the face of such rampant violence.
Violent prayers. Imagine a prayer meeting that starts with these words:
May his [an unnamed enemy] children be orphans,
and his wife a widow.
May his children wander about and beg;
may they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit.
May the creditor seize all that he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil.
May there be no one to do him a kindness,
nor anyone to pity his orphaned children. (Ps 109:9-12, NRSV)
Amen? Should we pray such Psalms? Should they be part of the church’s prayerbook or songbook?
Violent prophecies. The prophets knew divine wrath. They felt it in their bones. They prophesied the destruction of Samaria, Jerusalem, the nations, the earth, the skies, and if they had known about galaxies, I don’t doubt they’d have gone there too. They were keen to make sure their listeners knew that Yahweh was behind these events. He moved the nations and acted in history. Many wrestle long and hard with this brutal and sometimes sexually violent prophetic language.6
End-times cataclysms. This is the world imagined in the postapocalyptic video game Fallout.7 While lacking the nuclear specifics, some parts of the Old Testament include visions of destruction and violence that engulf and destroy the earth (Is 34). God is involved. Humans are involved. And even the stars and moon are involved. The precise problem here is the sheer scope of violence. While God promised not to flood the earth again, it seems from some parts of the Old Testament that God reserved rights to destroy through every other possible means.
This list is not exhaustive, but it makes the point that the problems of violence in Scripture are many and varied. The moles keep popping up.
REASONS FOR THE TURN TOWARD VIOLENT TEXTS
Increasingly, I find that Christians want to face up to the Bible’s violent texts. There’s a veritable cottage industry of “Is God a violent monster?” books. This uptick in attention to the Bible’s violent texts has several sources.
Within the church, there is an increasing emphasis on authenticity as an ideal, or even a virtue. This applies to the way we relate to one another and our sacred texts. We desire to honestly face the Bible we have, and not the one that we’d like to have or that tradition has told us we have.
American evangelicalism has also been facing its own day of reckoning. It has been turning inward to interrogate its own history of complicity in violence and cultures of violence. From violence against women exposed in the wake of the #MeToo movement, to the downfall of major evangelical leaders because of abuse, to the problems of racial injustice and violence foregrounded in the Black Lives Matter movement, evangelicals have only just begun some much-needed soul searching. Part of that inward work includes coming to grips with ways Scripture has been used to legitimate violence against the perceived “other.” For these and other reasons, there’s a need to continue the work of wrestling with violence in Scripture. Not only does it help us address the problem of violence out there. It also provides a way of talking about the problem of violence in here.
In addition, many evangelicals have recognized the need to turn outward. Increasing awareness of social and economic injustice has helped us grapple with the appropriate place for wrath—divine and otherwise! Those who have privilege and status often take issue with wrath as “unseemly” or “inappropriate,” especially when expressed by those on the margins. Divine wrath challenges us to ask with whom or about what is God wrathful? Answers to this question are not easy for those of us who don’t regularly worry about injustice.8
Also, the turn toward the problem of biblical violence arises from an awareness that biblical writers were not unbiased. Isn’t it convenient, many would suggest, that Israel’s claim to the land is commanded by God and morally justified by the horrific practices of Canaan’s previous inhabitants? To some ears, it sounds like a setup. Readers also recognize the yawning gap between how ancient cultures thought about God and violence, and how we do. Whether or not this is the case, it is a perception. For example, some claim that Joshua offers a “primitive” view of Israel’s deity. Ancient people were violent—so the story goes—and so of course they thought God was also violent.9
Within an increasingly post-Christian culture many feel that Scripture is “on trial,” so to speak, needing to answer for its complicity in crimes against humanity. From the days of Constantine to the colonialist exploits of the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, Christians have solicited help from Scripture to provide religious backing for violence.10 In American, Canadian, Palestinian, and many other contexts, Christians wrestle with the church’s complicity in religiously based land claims and histories of exterminating indigenous people.11 Faced with such challenges, Christians often feel morally bound to take these accusations of criminal activity seriously. Perhaps the Bible is dangerous and needs to be stripped of its privileges. Though only a few might put things in such stark terms, some may feel that we’d be better off letting certain Old Testament texts lie dormant. The Old Testament offers a great deal of raw material out of which to construct a hateful ideology, after all, whether it be allegedly “cautious” xenophobia or decisive violence: “You must purge the evil from your midst” (nine times in Deuteronomy).12
This leads to yet another reason for the recent anxiety over Scripture’s violence: Violent texts are easily misunderstood in a culture that favors sound bites and Tweets. Violent texts are easily misunderstood if taken out of context and created into a meme. Even Jesus’ words are susceptible to such misunderstandings. Take his words in Matthew 10:34 as an example: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” These texts provide easy targets for those who want to see Christianity crumble and they provide confusion for others.
NOT BURNING DOWN YOUR HOUSE
With all these difficulties facing us as we read the Old Testament, we might be tempted to take radical measures to purge Scripture of such violent stains and residue. We might want to unhitch our faith from the Old Testament, as one prominent church leader suggested—and many imply.13
Before rushing toward that stain-removing solution, however, we might take a cautionary cue from early church father Tertullian (ca. 150–220 CE). He wrote a multivolume work to refute a man named Marcion (ca. 85–150 CE), who doused the problem of Old Testament violence with gasoline (or its ancient equivalent) and set it ablaze.
Marcion wanted to excise divine wrath from the Christian faith, and with it, the Old Testament. He found it unbecoming of God’s goodness. He suggested that the God of the Old Testament was a different God than the God and Father of Jesus. So he sought to rid the church of the Old Testament and, consequently, most of the New! It turns out that the two are deeply connected.
In his sarcastic critique of Marcion, Tertullian writes: “A better god has been discovered, who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness! He is purely and simply good.”14 Sounds good, right?
Hardly. Here’s Tertullian’s warning. There are always hidden costs to pictures of God that eliminate challenging tensions. Tertullian would direct our attention to the pilot light burning in the garage corner. Specifically, Tertullian points out that Marcion eliminates God’s ability to act as judge: “You allow indeed that God is a judge, but at the same time destroy those operations and dispositions by which He discharges His judicial functions.”15 For Tertullian (and many biblical texts), wrath is the emotion that animates God’s active concern for justice. Criticizing his wrath was like criticizing the instruments of a doctor. Wrath, in Tertullian’s formulation—and arguably in the Bible itself—is tied intimately to God’s exercise of justice.
Tertullian is highlighting the danger of separating God’s wrath and justice. Separating the two would be like taking the scalpel from the surgeon’s hand and saying, “You’re here to do healing work, and not cut people open!” But the Bible sees wrath in different terms. It’s the emotion that moves God to bring justice and is ultimately animated by his compassion. In Exodus 22:21-24, for instance, God warns Israel that if anyone caused the orphan or widow to cry out, “my anger will blaze” (my translation). God’s anger would blaze against Israelite oppressors like it blazed against Egypt. The point of these verses is not to be precise about the exact penalty for oppressing the weak but to express the pathos of God in the face of injustice.
For Israel, God’s wrath was bound up in the idea that he was the protective father of the vulnerable—whether the oppressors be foreigners or his people Israel. Wrath—like jealousy—was a sign of concern for the weak against any who would put them at risk or threaten God’s legitimate claim as parent. In this sense, God’s wrath toward the nations (e.g., for their mistreatment of Israel) was a deep expression of God’s love for Israel and their land.16
For many of us, love with wrath sounds as comforting as a warm blanket of fiberglass insulation! But the Old Testament grounds love in the idea of Israel as God’s covenant people (Deut 6:4-5). Love was the relational glue between covenant partners. And if we think of covenant in terms of “family substitute,”17 love was the trusting loyalty required for healthy family cohesion. God’s wrath was the protective rage he aimed at threats to that family.
But we can’t swing the pendulum away from mercy toward wrath, as if wrath is always an unmitigated good. Many women, for example, experience the language of protective divine wrath against the backdrop of male wrath and violence in the church or in toxic relationships. They have been encouraged to stay in abusive relationships or churches and to shun those who challenge the party line or expose abuse.18
Abraham and Moses certainly recognized the problem of divine wrath—and even pleaded with God to exercise mercy! In another part of his critique of Marcion, Tertullian urges us to weigh God’s “severity” against his gentleness and observe the imbalance.19 God’s character is wildly imbalanced. The coexistence of wrath and mercy is not that of equals. If we take the language of mercy versus wrath in Exodus 34:6-7 in strictly mathematical terms (love to thousands of generations versus three to four generations of judgment),20 God’s mercy outweighs by at least five hundred to one! We’ll discuss this in chapter fourteen.
For important reasons, these verses—which are central to an Old Testament portrait of God—hold God’s mercy and judgment together, even if they are imbalanced. Perhaps we lose something important when we avoid God’s judgment and wrath; and perhaps we lose out by tossing aside violent texts. Maybe there is an understanding of God’s character that only comes by exploring the revelatory value of the most troublesome texts and by teasing out the rich picture of God that the Old Testament offers.
The subjects of wrath and violence are uncomfortable and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But I suggest that how we handle them, and not just the topics themselves, poses the greatest danger and opportunity. We will not all land in the same place on these matters, but let’s at least stop and count the cost of doing business with easy resolutions. Let’s keep the roof over our heads.
But how do we address the problems of violence in the Old Testament without burning down our house? What options are available to us? The next chapter will suggest some strategies that will help us avoid a fatal combustion.
2
Finding Our Way
WHEN I TURNED TEN, my parents’ friend showed up uninvited to my birthday party. Wrapped in her jacket was an eight-week-old puppy. It was a gift for me. The black and brown furball was so cute and cuddly I could barely contain my warm affection.
There’s more to the story of Brownie, as she came to be named. First, our friend didn’t tell my parents she was coming or that she was giving me a puppy. I don’t know why my parents let the puppy stay, but stay she did. Second, it was a Doberman Shepherd. The furball would one day become large and powerful.
I guess Brownie’s puppy eyes stole my parents’ heart, or they didn’t want to disappoint me. In any case, Brownie became part of our family. How bad could she be?
Well . . . we had no idea what lay ahead! Once she got a twelve-inch stick accidentally stuck in her esophagus and just about died. She bit nearly every dog she met (sending one neighbor’s dog to counseling—seriously!). The police would often bring her home in the squad car after her neighborhood wanderings. She once jumped through a closed window; she always chewed rocks—ruining all of her teeth; she frequently climbed out of her pen; she tore the chain from her doghouse and ran away; she was hit by a car and survived; she barked incessantly, ate neighbors’ trash, chased and was chased by a very large buck, fell through ice in a river, pulled my grandfather over when he walked her; she needed hip surgery, and tore apart a wall during a thunderstorm. I accidentally hit her in the head with a baseball bat and she needed stitches. And somehow, she lived fourteen years. Suffice it to say that our first impressions at my tenth birthday were wildly off and certainly naive.
Many Christians look back on life with God in a similar way. First meeting Jesus included all the joy, thrill, and infatuation of a new puppy owner. But years later they feel like someone stuck with a God who is defined exclusively by his violent power and unpredictability. It’s easy to feel foolish, naive, or duped, especially as we watch Christians carelessly wield violent biblical texts. If we sample some of the “toxic texts” in the Bible, they seem to make Brownie look tame by comparison. What do we do?
Throughout the centuries, Christians and Jews have wrestled with the challenges of Scripture’s violence in various ways. If we’re going to avoid a fatal combustion, we need to know what options lie before us. In this section, we’ll explore some of the big ones. I encourage you to think through which options you gravitate toward. Perhaps you’re squarely in one camp, or perhaps your view is represented by a few of the options that follow. Wherever you are now, it’s worth asking why. What factors contribute to your current views on biblical violence? Perhaps you don’t know. If that’s the case, read through the following list of options and try to gauge which views resonate or make you cringe.
THE OPTIONSON THE TABLE
Evangelical theologian Roger Olson once wrote a blog post called “Every Known Theistic Approach to Old Testament ‘Texts of Terror.’”1 I’ve often used his list of approaches to help my students recognize the range of options Christians have considered through the ages as they work through violent texts. While it doesn’t cover every option, Olson’s list offers a helpful starting point. I’ve reproduced it here in modified form with his permission. As you read it, ask, How do I approach the problem of violence in the Old Testament? What are the benefits and pitfalls of each approach below? Which approaches do I favor? Which had I never considered?
1. Reject it. Marcion from Sinope (AD 85–160), about whom we read in the previous chapter, was so affronted by the wrath and judgement of God in the Old Testament that he proposed rejecting it entirely. Marcion believed that the God of the Old Testament was real but was a lesser deity than the high God and father of Jesus. Jesus came to save us from the evil god of the Old Testament. The main slogan of Marcionites could be, The Old Testament is infected. Get rid of it all!
Problems: This view is wholly unorthodox and ultimately undermines the New Testament’s claims about Jesus, which are rooted in the Old Testament. Not surprisingly, Marcion’s Old Testament amputation cost him a good deal of the New Testament as well. His “Bible” was little more than a few letters of Paul and an abbreviated Gospel of Luke. Marcionism was roundly condemned by the early Church, by theologians like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius. Marcionism can also lead toward anti-Semitism. The church shares Scripture with Israel, but Marcion wanted to sever that unifying bond. Also, you lose the unified tradition with which Jesus and the apostles identified.
2. Spiritualize it. The slogan for this approach would be that things are not what they seem. Spiritualizing approaches date back to the early church as well. Theological giants like Origen, John Cassian, and much later, Anselm of Laon, believed that the stories of violence in books like Joshua are really about our need to do battle with the vices that wage war in our souls. Take this example from Origen:
Within us are the Canaanites, within us are the Perizzites; here are the Jebusites. In what way must we exert ourselves, how vigilant must we be or for how long must we persevere, so that when all these breeds of vices have been forced to flee, ‘our land may rest from war’ at last?2
While not all of these writers were responding directly to the violence in the text, it seems that Origen was.
Problems: This approach depends on substituting one thing for another based on what is “worthy of God.” This can lead to a loss of the Old Testament’s plain sense, which is a critical part of the Old Testament’s ability to challenge (often prophetically) the church.3 It risks creating Scripture into our own image. Also, Christians like Origen never denied the historicity of the conquest, or that God was involved. They just disputed the idea that it should be literally applied today. Many would argue that we don’t need a spiritualizing approach to make that same point. We can get there by other means.4 As Michael Rhodes once said to me, “It’s the OT’s ‘earthiness’ that makes it so challenging to our hyper-‘spiritualized’” forms of Christianity.5
3. Divine command theory. The foremost proponent of “divine command theory”—summarized here in the slogan God Commanded it, that settles it!—was St. Augustine. Before he was a Christian, Augustine was offended by the violence, wrath, and “crass literalism” of the Old Testament. After converting, he taught that God’s actions don’t have to play by our standards of justice. Instead, God’s acts become moral when God commands them. So, if God commanded the destruction of the Canaanites, it must be moral.6
Augustine also believed that God could inflict punishment with love, and sometimes as an act of mercy. He noted that Paul handed a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh (1 Cor 5:5).7 He also argued that God worked differently at different times. While he waged war through violence in the Old Testament, the martyrs show a better victory. In the end, Augustine (and others after him, like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin) ask us to trust God’s judgements, which often appear mysterious to us but are always just.
Problems: Divine Command Theory can sever the connection between God’s justice and human perceptions of justice. That makes it difficult to follow the prophetic call to act justly like God. If the justice of God bears little or no connection to human justice—albeit shaped by the guidance of Scripture—then God’s ways become impossible to imitate. While God’s ways are often mysterious, examples like Abraham show us that his justice and righteousness are examples to be followed. We’re to learn God’s ways. Moreover, Scripture also invites us to raise questions before God, even about his justice (Gen 18:19, 23-25).8
4. Times change. This view, also known as “Progressive Revelation,” has a hard and soft version. The main slogan here is, God works differently over time.
The hard version. Augustine also anticipates this view. God did command the people of God to slaughter men, women, children, and animals in the past, but later changed his approach. God changes his ways of dealing with sin throughout salvation history. He shifts from acting like a warrior God to a God who loves peace, but will, in the future, enact violent judgement once again. Essentially, God works in different ways at different times.
Problems: This view raises serious challenges to the doctrine of divine immutability (the idea that God does not change) even regarding God’s moral and ethical will.
The soft version. “Inspiration” does not mean word-for-word dictation or that every story in the Bible is to be taken at “face value.” God accommodated his revelation to our ability to understand him, and people came to understand God’s revelation more clearly over time. As God incarnate, Jesus is the clearest revelation of God’s character and will. God’s revelation of his own character and will became clearer throughout Scripture with the later (clearer) parts relativizing the earlier (less clear) parts.
Problems: It is very difficult to chart a clear trajectory from less clear to clear when tracing the theme of violence through Scripture. Some of the strongest condemnations of violence come from the Old Testament (Is 1:10-17; Prov 21:7) and some of the greatest violence appears in the New Testament (e.g., hell, future judgement). This view is also subject to accusations of implicit Marcionism (see option 1).
5. Old ways of speaking. We tend to misread ancient literature because we think they wrote like us. But we know from other ancient war accounts that when they said, “We left nothing alive that breathes,” they really meant, “We won!” Of course plenty of people survived.9 This approach focuses on ancient ways of writing about wars of conquest and asks us to avoid literalistic interpretations. If you heard a basketball player claim, “We destroyed the opposition!” you know it simply means that they won. Put another way, this approach calls for literary and cultural awareness. That means paying attention to different kinds of writing, or genres (warfare rhetoric, poetic prayers, prophetic literature, etc.), and how they worked in the ancient world. Ancient stories exaggerate the extent of their victories.10
Problems: While this approach helps us grapple with ancient warfare rhetoric, ancient warfare was still horrific. Does it really help us if the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan and spoke about it like the Assyrians? Isn’t violent speech also wrong?
6. Cultural projection. Portions of the Old Testament (and perhaps also of the New) reflect the violent fantasies and practices of ancient (violent) people, but do not reflect God’s actual desires. At times God’s people may have misunderstood his commands and recorded their own beliefs about God as revelation from God. The people of God may have slaughtered men, women, children, and animals, but God did not command it. This approach’s slogan would be, Ancient people project their violent tendencies onto God.
Problems: This approach is the highwater mark of cultural imperialism. It assumes that ancient people were simply more violent than us, and implicitly asks us to turn a blind eye to our own violence. It can also undermine the revelatory value of the Old Testament, as there is just no limit to the number of other claims about which the ancients were “obviously” wrong (e.g., that God speaks to humans, that God relates to his people via covenants).
7. Mysterious ways. Embrace the mystery of it all is the slogan here. No attempt at harmonization should be exercised; we ought simply to accept at face value the texts of terror and Jesus’ teachings about God’s love and will (e.g., for peace). We shouldn’t try to diminish or reconcile either of them. The interpreter defers to the mystery of God, recognizing that “we see only a reflection as in a mirror . . . [and] know in part” (1 Cor 13:12, NIV modified).
Problems: This view can lead to belief that the ways of God are fundamentally opaque. It can also lead to the idea that behind Jesus lies a “hidden God” (Luther) who willed (and possibly still wills) extreme violence such as genocidal conquest. It can also create profound tensions between the Old and New Testaments, especially if the sense in which we’re using the term “mystery” isn’t clarified. The problems for Divine Command Theory (approach number 3) also apply here.
8. Cross-centered. The cross trumps earlier (violent) revelations of God in the Old Testament. This approach takes the cross as the final and definitive revelation of God’s character, response to violence, and treatment of enemies. All other biblical texts must be reinterpreted in its light.
Problems: I’ve written at length about this elsewhere.11 To summarize, this approach can flatten the very biblical story that gives the cross its meaning. It risks relativizing the rest of the biblical witness about God. Some proponents of this approach assume that the cross is the exclusive revelation of God, and so any other portrait of God (e.g., in judgement) must be reread until it looks exactly like the cross.
WAYS FORWARD
The options I’ve outlined above (following Olson) offer ways of approaching violent parts of the Old Testament. We might mix and match approaches. I do. I tend to favor a mix of numbers 4 (Times change), 5 (Old ways of speaking), and 7 (Mysterious ways), with a touch of 8 (Cross-centered), as you’ll see throughout this book. But an “approach” only gets you so far. It gets you to the base of the mountain and hopefully on the right route, but you still need keen orienteering skills on the mountain. Those skills are often developed from experience, which in turn, shapes intuitions about which routes to take. Then those intuitions lead to greater discoveries. I find that Christians really need to walk through hard passages and develop field-specific conclusions. We need to learn our ethical route-finding skills in the wilds of actual biblical texts.
But to name what I consider the best approach to interpreting violent texts it would be this: Read it slow. Read the biblical text slowly and carefully. Prepare to be surprised. Ellen Davis recommends “slowing down over violent texts to consider what kind of critical and specifically theological response is appropriate.”12 My hope is that we see violent texts not simply as problems to be solved or avoided, but instead, as opportunities to deepen our faith in the company of other Christians now and through the ages. Without the slow walk through specific texts, we end up trying to “solve” problems that aren’t there. That’s why we need to first hear the texts that trouble us. It’s a form of loving our neighbor. Even if they infuriate, they’re still our neighbors.
In his poem “Warning to the Reader,” Robert Bly describes the inside of a wooden farm granary. We see rays of light shining through the cracks between the granary’s boardwood walls. Many birds end up trapped in these granaries, Bly tells us. Assuming they’ll find an exit by following the light, the birds fly repeatedly at the small gaps between the boards. But they can’t fit. The way out, Bly tells us, “is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat’s hole is low to the floor.”13 Failing to recognize this, many birds end up starved to death in the granary.
