Violence in the Bible Archives

Flood and Fury, Matthew J. Lynch. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: A searching study of the biblical texts on the flood in Genesis and the conquest of Canaan, facing the issue of violence and God’s participation, against the backdrop of the shalom of God.

Violence has been a sad part of the human story since the fall, and its continued existence and the havoc it wreaks in human lives is something any thoughtful person wrestles with. What is also troubling to many thoughtful, believing or not, is the violence in scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, that is either God-sanctioned or God-perpetrated.

Some approaches to this defend the violence as necessary, as God’s warranted judgment. Others are basically arguments that try to eliminate the problem by saying it didn’t really happen that way. Matthew J. Lynch takes a somewhat different approach in this book, one that at some points says there is more (or perhaps less) to the perception of violence than meets the eye, and yet does not deny the reality of violence but also tries to set in a larger context of God’s shalom and God’s great compassion.

Lynch begins by contending that we need to face the problem without “burning down the house.” which he argues Marcion did in trying to excise violence from scripture. To do so is to eliminate a tension that leads to greater insight. He then briefly surveys the different approaches to the violence in scripture and then contends that we need an approach that reads slowly and carefully, reads problematic texts in light of the whole, that is willing to be surprised and shocked, that continues to allow the Bible to “bite back,” speaking into our own situation, and that keeps wrestling.

The next two parts take two major concerning passages on violence–the flood narratives in Genesis and the conquest of Canaan including the practice of herem. First, in Genesis 1-8, he explores the theme of shalom and its shattering. In contrast to other origins narratives, he notes the shalom that is part of the DNA of creation–of wholeness, of harmony, of human rule causing all to flourish. This ended when sin entered in. He traces the development of violence, not only against Abel, but against women through polygamy, military and political violence. He develops the idea of the spread of creation-destroying violence and God’s conclusion to bring it to an end through the flood to restore shalom through returning the world to the formlessness at the beginning of creation. It should be noted that he does allow questions both about the universality and historicity of the flood, opening the way to treating this as story of how God pursues shalom.

He then turns to the conquest narratives. Perhaps the most interesting thing in his discussion here is that he shows that there are two “reports” in Joshua, and we usually hear only one. The Majority Report focuses on the utter destruction of cities and their inhabitants. The Minority Report is of the settlement of Canaan little by little, sometimes settling with the peoples around them, sometimes displacing them, and sometimes enslaving them, all of which are far more merciful. He shows how both are in the text, but often only the more violent texts are focused on, and these may in fact have been limited to key military outposts and political cities, some with relatively small populations. At times, he allows for hyperbole in the accounts. More controversial, and less grounded in the biblical text, he allows for the possibility of not a “conquest” but a gradual “infiltration” consisting of some coming from outside and others already in the land. Also, he suggests that Joshua’s conquests of the “kings” of Canaan completes the Exodus, as these kings would have been vassals of Egypt–an intriguing idea. What he proposes is that the literary art of Joshua is to display Joshua as a second Moses, who completes what Moses began. This allows us to resolve discrepancies between biblical accounts of Jericho and the archaeological evidence (or lack thereof) of a conquest.

The concluding section, perhaps was the most helpful. He sets these accounts against the larger Old Testament narrative in which he believes the covenant-keeping love and faithfulness of God predominates. He does argue that accounts of wrath and judgment are embedded in this larger picture and that this is a “wicked” problem, one he would deem “irresolvable.” There is mystery here, and as he has observed earlier, to try to pull out violence and judgment diminishes, yet its presence troubles.

I particularly appreciate in this work the way he looks closely at the biblical text while reading it within larger themes–the shalom of God in Genesis, the love and mercy of God, evident even in many places in Joshua (e.g. Rahab). His insistence that we credit both the majority and minority reports in Joshua and ask what is the larger narrative purpose of incorporating both is important. His willingness to not settle for simple answers and even to allow scripture to question us–for example about our own ecological violence and exploitation of others for our benefit–is a strength of the book. I do find unsettling his willingness to go along with scholarship that basically concludes that some texts really can’t be read as they would most plainly be understood, or that history really didn’t happen the way it is rendered in Joshua. I realize these pose challenges. I’d rather live with the discrepancies than deny the biblical text, and hope for further illumination.

However one comes down on these questions, Lynch has written a thought-provoking study of two important sections of the Old Testament dealing with God-sanctioned or -perpetrated violence. If you are looking for a resolution, it is not here. But you will find valuable insights along the way, and a posture in approaching the questions that, apart from concessions to critical scholarship, is one worthy of imitation.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

The Violence of the Biblical God, L. Daniel Hawk, foreword by John Goldingay. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2019.

Summary: A study of the narratives of violence in scripture and the multiple perspectives one finds in the text regarding God’s involvement in that violence.

The incidents of violence in scripture, and particularly those where God commands, or actively participates in that violence, pose a great challenge for any thoughtful believer both in his or her own reading of scripture, and in discussions with skeptics who point to these passages, and especially the book of Joshua. Does not this deeply conflict with the New Testament witness to the love of God in Christ?

L. Daniel Hawk takes a different approach than others who I’ve seen address this question who either rationalize the violence of God against the Canaanites, or in various ways argue that it actually wasn’t nearly as bad as it appeared. Hawk’s approach argues that “it may be more important to think biblically than to seek biblical answers” (p. xiv). He proposes that one of the reasons there are so many different responses to this question is that the canon itself speaks with multiple voices that do not all agree. He seeks to take an approach that sees all of the canon as authoritative scripture without muting portions that are in conflict with others.

His work begins with a survey of the approaches taken to this question through church history, and then outlines his own narrative approach, eschewing the “quest for a Theory of Biblical Everything” (p. 18) to listen to the biblical narrative in its complexity as it tells in multiple voices the story of God’s work to redeem a fallen world that is violent by “coming down” and entering into that world. He traces this through the fall, the slaying of Abel, and the flood as an accelerating death spiral that God sorrowfully brings to conclusion with the flood, while saving both creatures and one human family to begin anew.

With Babel, Hawk sees a new approach of a God who “comes down,” first confusing the languages of those who would make a name for themselves, and then coming down to make great the name of Abram (Abraham) through whom he begins a redemptive work. He consults with Abraham in his plan to violently destroy the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, and honors his plea for the righteous. To stand with Abraham means to stand against others, as in the case of Abimelech, who Abraham had deceived. As evident in the deliberation between Abraham and God regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, violence is not a paroxysm of anger but what it means to do what is needed within the context of fallen creation to set things to rights.

He then studies the narratives of God’s descent into Egypt to break the power of Pharoah that held Israel in slavery. Only through violence will Pharoah recognize a power greater than his, and to create a new people through the overturning of the power of Egypt. Hawk notes that no emotion or expression of caprice or anger is evident in these episodes, but rather God doing what was needed to deliver and establish this people of the promise, to show God supreme over all other powers. The narrative then continues with this new people as he establishes this covenant, deals with the disobedience of his people (an incident that evidences God’s anger), and the violence that both responds to sin, and yet restores his relationship with the people to whom he has committed himself.

Before turning to the text of Joshua, and Israel’s conquest of Canaan, he jumps forward to God’s assent to give Israel a king like other nations. God first commits himself to Saul, and then to David and his family. His work in the nation becomes taken up with the power dynamics and violence of these kings while acting as a check against their ungodliness and injustices. With the fall of Israel comes an end to this way of working in the world through the instrumentality of the nation as a political entity. His approach will still work through human agents but in another way.

Finally, Hawk comes to Joshua. He contends that exodus and conquest are inextricably connected to God’s decision to renew the world by forming a people. He states, “No exodus, no conquest. No violence, no Israel” (p. 165). He demonstrates the focused character of the invasion against the kings of Canaan that arises neither from caprice or judgement to establish a space in which Yahweh alone, and not the gods of the kings is worshiped. In this book there are narratives both attributing violence to God and counternarratives in the latter part of Joshua that indicate this is not God’s “preferred mode of working in the world.” Hawk notes that while God’s coming down and entering into the making of Israel as a nation involves God in violence, this is not a warrant for other wars.

With the fall of Jerusalem and the exile, Hawk sees a move of God “to the outside.” Instead of working in and through human systems, God refuses to meet violence with violence, or engage the earthly powers, but takes the violence of the world upon himself in Christ, and in the resurrection, establishes a rule outside the world’s systems.

The conclusion Hawk reaches from this narrative survey is a call to move from debates over who is reading scripture rightly to a dialogue that listens to the full complexity and the biblical text. He doesn’t argue for “anything goes” but sets interpretive parameters that include an understanding of divine violence that doesn’t arise from petty caprice, that often God does not use violence in judgment but to accelerate already evident deterioration (as in Sodom), that biblical accounts are testimonies, not templates, and cannot be use to justify wars advancing national or group agendas. Yet Hawk also seems to recognize that the diverse voices of God’s work inside, and from the outside, create the basis for respectful dialogue between Christians who base a peace stance on the narrative of God’s work from the outside, and Christians working “within the system” who face the choice of engaging in state-sanctioned violence in the resistance of evil.

For me, Hawk’s work challenged a long held assumption of how we read scripture. Do we believe that the Spirit of God speaks with one voice. Or does our understanding of scripture allow for a complexity of voices that reflect the complexity of being both in and not of a fallen world? Where one comes down on this may well affect one’s response to Hawk’s reading. What commends that reading to me is that it does not gloss over or mute the hard passages or seemingly conflicting testimony (for example, the commands to utterly devote to destruction the Canaanites and a strategy of gradually supplanting the people).

More profoundly, we see a God who neither remains aloof in the face of human evil and violence nor acts with petty flashes of anger, but rather a settled purpose to redeem through a covenant people, one that involves God in that violence, yet ultimately ends with the taking of that violence on God’s self in Christ. We also find in Hawk a model of an interpreter of scripture taking the text as it stands, listening humbly, and promoting dialogue between different perspectives rather than ruling everything not one’s own out of court in a “Theory of Biblical Everything.” Such models are all too rare and greatly needed in a time where people seem to polarize around everything.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.