Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric?

Wrestling with Troubling War Texts

William J. Webb,Gordan K. Oeste

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830870738
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Bibelkritik & -auslegung

Word Guild Award Shortlist — Biblical StudiesWord Guild Best Book Cover AwardAssociation of University Presses Design Show — Book, Jacket, and CoversChristians cannot ignore the intersection of religion and violence, whether contemporary or ancient. In our own Scriptures, war texts that appear to approve of genocidal killings and war rape—forcibly taking female captives for wives—raise hard questions about biblical ethics and the character of God. Have we missed something in our traditional readings?In Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? William Webb and Gordon Oeste address the ethics of reading biblical war texts today. Theirs is a biblical-theological reading with an eye to hermeneutical, ethical, canonical, and ancient cultural contexts. Identifying a spectrum of views on war texts ranging from "no ethical problems" to "utterly repulsive, " the authors pursue a middle path using a hermeneutic of incremental, redemptive-movement ethics.Instead of trying to force traditional Christian answers to fit contemporary questions, they argue, we must properly connect the traditional answers with the biblical storyline questions that were on the minds of Scripture's original readers. And there are indeed better answers to the ethical problems in the war texts. Woven throughout the Old Testament, a collection of antiwar and subversive war texts suggest that Yahweh's involvement in Israel's warfare required some degree of accommodation to people living in a fallen world. Yet, God's redemptive influence even within the ugliness of ancient warfare shouts loudly about a future hope—a final battle fought with complete and untainted justice by Christ.

THIS BOOK EXPLORES THE ETHICS of two war actions within the biblical accounts: genocide and war rape.1 Why these two? In short, they are the most ethically troubling components of holy war that readers encounter in the Bible. Genocide and war rape raise hard questions about the ethics of Scripture and about the character of the Yahweh God of the Old Testament. Today’s religion-and-violence theorists and new-atheism proponents make their ethical assessment clear by labeling Yahweh as a “genocidal baby killer” and a “divine rapist.”2 Their viewpoint, of course, leaves little room for ethical virtue in either the text or the God of Scripture. We will argue that new atheism’s assessment misreads the biblical text and terribly distorts the God of Scripture; the evidence for this counterassessment will unfold as we journey through the pages of this book. For now, however, those evocative labels capture the ethical problem and provide a starting point from which to untangle the hermeneutics, ethics, ancient setting, and story line of the biblical text. But, fair warning—it is a messy job because the pictures of war are muddled for many of us.

Let’s begin the untangling process by talking about pictures—images in our minds. What comes to mind when reading the terms genocide and war rape?

THE MIXED-UP WAR PICTURES IN OUR MINDS

When we read literature—recent or ancient—our brains automatically supply mental pictures that correspond to the words we have just read. This imaging by the brain as it reads war literature is especially vivid because the imagination is highly attentive to imaging matters that contain an emotive impact. When we read biblical war passages, graphic war images automatically emerge in our brains. The crucial question is this: From where within its massive storage system does the human brain pull to create war images that correspond to the words of Scripture? Well, the images in our minds when reading biblical war material will predominantly come from an already-banked collection of war images from our own world of present-day war.

We cannot help it. It simply happens. Graphic pictures of present-day war violence fill our minds when reading ancient Scripture, especially when we bump into the biblical accounts that seem to describe genocide and war rape. Our brains almost automatically (without our making conscious decisions) produce images of genocide and war rape from picture files closer to home. In other words, we simply cannot read about ancient genocide in the Bible and escape the revolting images of Rwanda’s mass graves—many containing the bodies of women and children who were hacked to death—in what has become a touchstone genocide image for us. Our minds inevitably jump between Rwanda (1994) pictures—whether printed photography, online sites, or movies we have seen—and other genocidal images that we cannot erase from our minds: the murder and deportation of Armenians (1915–1923), Nazi concentration camps (1933–1945), the killing fields of Cambodia (1975–1979), the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (1992–1995), or Sudan’s ongoing genocidal murders of Darfuri civilians (2003–). Our minds do not lack for contemporary images of genocide as we read ancient war literature.

The same picture phenomenon occurs when reading of war rape. Should we encounter war rape within ancient literature, we are likely to have our mental images already shaped by recent war events. Our pictures come from images of Congo war rape with its staggering numbers—over eleven hundred rapes each day (conservative estimates by various health organizations3)—or from images of heavily armed Boko Haram soldiers capturing young girls for wives and/or sex slaves; a parade of mothers crying in the streets, “Bring back our girls!” These war-rape images from the experiences of others are now etched into our collective psyche, along with experiences of our own or of people we know personally.

Modern war pictures, for better or worse, become slotted as stock images. This present-day filling in of war images could be good or bad depending on the degree to which the images accurately reflect what was going on in the biblical war texts. One of the most helpful steps in starting to make sense of the biblical war passages is to consciously disconnect—just a temporary move—from our contemporary war pictures and begin placing our collection of war images in different picture piles.

This book will help readers sift through a range of war pictures and put them in three or four distinctly different groups:

• ► Stack one: Modern-day war pictures—described above
• ► Stack two: ANE war pictures—developed throughout the book (especially chapter thirteen)
• ► Stack three: Biblical war pictures, group one—what Israel actually practiced in war
• ► Stack four: Biblical war pictures, group two—what Yahweh wanted Israel to do in war

 

While we cannot control the modern-day war pictures that presently exist in our minds, we can choose to keep them separate from the other three groups, not wrongly superimpose them onto ancient texts, and we can work at figuring out how these four photo stacks are similar or different.

By the end of the book, readers should be able to enter a conversation about how our modern pictures of genocide and war rape (stack one) look similar to or different from the biblical text (stacks three and four) and, in turn, how biblical pictures compare with ANE warfare pictures (stack two). The importance of conscious image sorting cannot be overstated. We begin our journey by turning to the traditional understanding of the biblical war texts. Note well its set of images. As we will see, the traditional view pictures what happened in biblical holy war as literal mass killings—all Canaanite men, women, children, old and young killed by the sword. Obviously, the traditional perspective on biblical holy war overlaps closely with our modern-day scenes of genocide.

SQUARE PEGS, ROUND HOLES: FINDING ANSWERS THAT FIT

Probably all of us have seen children playing with toys that have some variation of the “square pegs, round holes” game. Their faces reveal puzzled frustration when trying to push an object into a hole that does not match. No matter how hard they try, it simply does not work. Conversely, their faces light up with delight and joy when they get all the pieces into the matching holes.

This square-pegs, round-holes idiom has become for Gord and me a short-form way of talking about one of six major theses of this book (see the introduction). In the next two chapters we maintain that what might be called the traditional explanation of war in the Bible has aligned its answers with the wrong questions. It is not that the traditional answers are bad. They are actually good answers, but they need to be connected or aligned with a set of story-line, ethics, and justice questions that relate to the original audience particularly. The traditional answers simply do not work with our contemporary questions about genocide and war rape. Investigating where traditional answers work and do not work is task of the next two chapters. These two chapters function as an invitation to the discussion in later chapters of answers that fit better with current questions.

Evidence for the square-pegs, round-holes thesis does not stop or end with the next two chapters. They simply begin the conversation. They show (negatively) in chapter two why the traditional answers do not fit. The arguments here derive from hermeneutics, ethics, and logic. Then (positively) in chapter three we will introduce where the traditional answers do make sense. Our arguments in that chapter derive from biblical theology and canonical themes at the level of the story line. But that is only the beginning. The evidence for the square-pegs, round-holes thesis goes much deeper, as later chapters will show.

Finally, the square-pegs, round-holes thesis is also a way of describing where our position, called “realigned traditional view,” derives its name. The realignment idea functions in two ways. First, the traditional answers need to be realigned with the right set of questions. Second, our modern ethical questions about genocide and war rape need to be realigned with a different set of answers from those proposed by the traditional view. We call this different set “better answers” (chapters four through twelve, appendixes A through C). We are not using the word better to talk about the intrinsic value of the answers or to disparage the traditional answers. Rather, the word better simply describes the fit. The answers in chapters four through twelve and appendixes A through C fit better with our contemporary questions about war rape and genocide.

 

IN WHAT BECAME KNOWN by our reading group as the “War Summer,” we read the four-views book Show Them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide.1 As mentioned earlier, my reflections on the biblical war texts began when some professors around the Toronto region gathered for an informal study group. The book was an easy read and a great introduction to the biblical war texts. To my surprise, however, I could not identify with any of the four views offered. I had fully expected to find one of the four options persuasive, but that did not happen.

From an ethical perspective our study group soon realized that the book really amounted to two views, not four. The ethical lines of debate are drawn between two polarized perspectives: biblical holy war as either a darkest evil (one author) or a pristine good (three authors). On the one hand, C. S. C...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface: The Story Behind the Book
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Rethinking Holy War Texts
• PART 1: HARD QUESTIONS: GENOCIDE AND WAR RAPE
• PART 2: TRADITIONAL ANSWERS: GOOD FOR BIG-PICTURE, STORY-LINE QUESTIONS
• PART 3: BETTER ANSWERS: BETTER FOR QUESTIONS ABOUT GENOCIDE AND WAR RAPE
• Conclusion: The Unfinished Justice Story
• List of Online Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric?
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright