It has been suggested that I was not terribly helpful in stating that people should have questions about the violence in the Old Testament, if Jesus is what God is like, but then not giving any further answers.
I hope that the previous blog gave some help but I have decided to do this “bonus blog” to look more deeply.
First, I should say that Greg Boyd spent many years writing a 1,500 page book on this subject, so you are not getting the full answer in this short blog, but I hope to give you some pointers. I will certainly not solve everything!
Did YHWH Tell Israel to Slaughter All the Women, Children and Animals?
In the Ancient Near East (ANE), it was normal to assume that your god gave you victory and victorious nation had the best god. It was expected that you would ascribe all victories and your actions to your deity. For you to invade another country meant that you would kill all living things, so that they did not come back and take revenge. In other words, Israel’s assumptions would be that this is the way to fight, this is what YHWH would want them to do and having done so, they would state that he had told them to do so.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but a god who looks like Jesus on the cross would not have.
Greg Boyd says, “when Yahweh says, ‘I want my people to dwell in the land of Canaan,’ what Moses’s fallen and culturally conditioned ears heard was, ‘I want you to slaughter all the Canaanites so my people can dwell in the land of Canaan.'” (Cross Vision, Greg Boyd, 117.)
I think that there is merit in what Boyd says. Here is a quote from Deuteronomy 7:
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. (Deut 7:1-4)
Can you see the contradiction?
“You must destroy them totally” followed immediately, by “do not intermarry with them”.
If they were meant to totally destroy them, then why tell them to not intermarry?
Boyd’s argument, and I can buy it to a certain degree, is that this is inspired and god-breathed because it gives us an insight into the fallenness of God’s people and how he still deals with them and loves them, and even seems to accommodate them to a degree.
Did YHWH Slaughter People in His Wrath?
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, God’s “wrath” is a metaphor for him allowing us to experience the consequences of our own sins. In Romans 1, Paul states that “God’s wrath is being revealed…” and he goes on to explain that this means that, “God gave them over to…”
As Brad Jersak notes, we can see a lot of the Old Testament reinterpreted by Paul through the cross; “For example, in Numbers 16, 21 and 25, the children of Israel rebel against Moses’ leadership, grumble against the Lord, and then ‘play the harlot’ with the ‘daughters of Moab.’ In these stories, the narrator says that the plagues of judgement came upon the people… [and] that God sent these plagues. He killed them.” (A More Christlike God, Brad Jersak, 204.)
However, when Paul reflects on these events, he says that the people were “destroyed by serpents” or “destroyed by the destroyer” (1 Corinthians 10:9-11). As Brad notes, “To Paul, where wrath appears, Satan is the destroyer and God is not. God is the redeemer.” (Jersak, 205).
So, did God kill loads of people or was it the destroyer? Did he send the plagues or did he step back and allow the people to experience the consequences of their sin?
If God looks like Jesus then this latter idea seems a more plausible answer.
Conclusion
I think that these are BIG questions and in this space I have not in any way done justice to addressing them. I am not fully settled on how it all works. I think that Boyd’s arguments have many holes, but I think that Jersak’s are more thought-through and I can totally buy into them. They both overlap a lot.
Whatever we think, we cannot escape the fact that Jesus is the exact representation of God and so we have to accept that perhaps we are missing something in some of what we read in the Old Testament. Because God has never changed, even though his people have.
Reading
Cross Vision, Greg Boyd. This is the shorter version of the 1500 page tome. It is easy reading and makes some great points and will make you think. I cannot fully stand by his arguments but I still think it is worth reading.
A More Christlike God, Brad Jersak. This is brilliant. Easy to read and challenging.
Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Brian Zahnd. Best book I read last year.
Both Brad and Brian are over for a conference at New Community Church (October 26-27th 2018). Well worth getting along to.
Take a look at our own Stef Mile’s site too as this is largely what it is about –
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