The violence of the Old Testament - Part 2

(Thursday thesis)

This is the second part of a series on violence in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Part 1 can be found here. And yes, I know it's not Thursday, I'm posting this late.

Two options that don't work

Ignoring the violence of the Old Testament isn't an option for several reasons. First, it suggests that we’re afraid of what conclusions we might come to if we did face it. We’re afraid that our image of God and the way he works might have to be revised in ways that we’re not comfortable with. We’d rather stick with the censored Bible and the blurry image of God we’re familiar with.

But living in fear of discovering the truth isn't healthy, psychologically or spiritually. It puts us constantly on guard against anything that might disturb our carefully constructed version of truth. It means that our faith is not really placed solidly on the God of the Bible, but on an idol of our own construction. We’re creating our own cannon of books and passages that are acceptable to us.

If the God of the Bible really is a cruel and sadistic monster, as the New Atheists suggest, then we should be right to reject him as they do. But not bothering to find out whether it’s true or not seems bizarre. Hoping that it isn't true is not faith but wishful thinking.

Ignoring the violence of the Old Testament also ensures that we live in fear of other people questioning us about it. We’ll find ourselves unwilling to invite people to church or our Bible study group if we know that one of the ‘difficult’ passages from the Old Testament is going to be read. We’ll avoid suggesting that people read the Bible for themselves, or point them only to the New Testament. We’ll look embarrassed and give a half-hearted answer when we are questioned about difficult passages. Fear will kill our desire to evangelise, or lead us to offer a short and sweetened version of the gospel.

Ignoring the violence of parts of the Old Testament means that we’ll have no biblical way to understand the violence in the New Testament or in the world around us. The crucifixion will be a jarring aberration in an otherwise peaceful landscape. The final judgement scenes in Revelation will seem out of place. The lavender-scented version of the world that comes from our edited Bible won’t match up with a reality where war, brutality, rape, domestic violence, murder and a host of other evils are on display daily.

"Did God really say...?"

If we can’t ignore the violence of the Old Testament, what other options do we have? How are we to understand it? And in particular, how are we to understand the violence apparently sanctioned or even carried out by God in many texts?

One suggestion is that the people who wrote the books of the Bible interpreted what happened in history and read back into it the will God. So if the Israelites went to war with their neighbours and won, God must have willed it that way and been on their side. And if they lost, God must have willed that they would lose. It was then not unreasonable to have God tell the Israelites in advance to fight this battle and not that one when the story was recorded.

If the Israelites suffered terrible hardships and exile, it must have been that God was punishing them for their sins and apostasy. So the writers of the texts describing these events added "Thus says the Lord" to words written retrospectively in the name of the prophets, as an explanation of what had happened. 

The advantage of this suggestion is that it takes responsibility for the violence away from God and puts it back on human beings. We can go on believing that God has nothing to do with violence and assume that the writers of the Old Testament misunderstood what God is like. They were, after all, pre-Christian.

The trouble with this idea is that it puts words into God’s mouth. It’s one thing to quibble over the accuracy of things like the reported number of soldiers in an army, or the names of places in the Biblical text. It’s quite another to suggest that “Thus says the Lord...” is sometimes added to words that God didn't in fact say.

Once we start arguing that some of what God is reported to have said is just a human author’s interpretation of events, we undermine the whole reliability of the Bible and faith itself. How are we to believe anything that the Lord is reported to have said? Who is to decide what he really said, and on what basis? "Did God really say...?" is the oldest question in the Bible, one that has caused endless difficulties. 

So I think we must assume that if the text says “The Lord said...” then God did in fact speak in some way, no matter how unpalatable we find what he is reported to have said. Not in the sense that what he said is recorded verbatim - we can allow for human editing for clarity and brevity - but the fact that he spoke and the meaning of what he said is recorded accurately. How God spoke, and how his hearers heard him is another issue, but we must assume that what we have is a true record of his communication.

In the next post in this series I'll explore some other ways that we might come to terms with the violence of the Old Testament.