Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God – Matthew J. Lynch
An easy to read and thought provoking exploration of some of the often-quoted ‘violent’ texts of the Old Testament, concluding that, whatever questions we might want to ask of a violent text, the text has questions for us and our society too, and that there are more nuances to the biblical text than we might expect.
The God of the Old Testament is the same God we see in Jesus in the New Testament, loving and merciful to a degree that far exceeds violence and anger.
Lynch’s main texts are the early chapters of Genesis, especially the flood narrative, and the book of Joshua narrating the arrival of the Israelites in Canaan and the displacement (and annihilation?) of the Canaanites.
With regard to the former, Lynch starts in the creation accounts, noting that violence was no part of God’s good creation and that humanity’s violence had brought destruction on the earth before the flood itself. The biblical text itself makes clear that the flood did not bring literal world-wide destruction, as there are descendants of Cain and of the Nephilim described in passages later than the flood.
The flood is presented as God’s way of starting creation again, and afterwards God chooses to limit the violence that God might visit on the earth.
A larger section of the book is devoted to a study of Joshua, and Lynch brings a number of different tools to the text to help understand it on its own term. He draws significant attention to the fact there are, in the text, both a ‘Majority Report’ and a ‘Minority Report’ as he calls them. According to the Majority Report, which is what we might easily find on a quick read through, God orders annihilation and violence to be visited upon all the inhabitants of Canaan. However, according to the Minority Report, what actually happens is that Canaanites are displaced gradually, their kings are overthrown but the people remain, and the focus is on destroying Canaanite idols and on idolatrous worship more than on destroying the people.
When the text mentions complete annihilation and destruction, is it often mimicking the ancient way of referring to a convincing victory, an aspect that is clear from the way that apparently annihilated people re-appear later.
Lynch suggests that the text of Joshua is more concerned with idolatry in contrast with the worship of Yahweh than with ethnic insiders and outsiders, saying that it appears that one way the Israelites are to ‘destroy’ the Canaanites is in fact to destroy their idols (rather than all the people).
He also refers to the Israelite Achan, who Joshua 7 describes as coveting and keeping some of the treasures of Ai rather than devoting them to God, and Rahab, the Canaanite resident of Jericho who Joshua 2 describes as protecting the Israelite spies and acknowledging Yahweh as “God in heaven above and on earth below”. Achan and his family are destroyed while Rahab and her family are saved from the destruction of Jericho and subsequently lived in Israel. Thus the text shows that there are loyal ‘Israelites’ among the Canaanites and idolatrous ‘Canaanites’ among the Israelites.
All of this is helpful in learning to read the text on its own terms. I was left with the thought that what we might think of as ‘the problem’ of the violence in Joshua (and the Old Testament overall) might in fact be ‘our problem’ that we bring to the text – the text itself is more nuanced and does not appear to have a problem with it!
Lynch convincingly suggests that, overall, the Old Testament presents a God who is merciful and full of steadfast love, and that love for God’s people is sometimes seen in anger against things that are not good for God’s creation and God’s people.
He also acknowledges that the question of violence is a ‘wicked problem’, that is one without an easy, or perhaps any, total solution. This, however, is not a reason not to address it, as exploring the problem may be beneficial for us as readers, not least drawing attention to the fact that what humanity is now doing to creation and the wars we are now fighting are at least as bad and violent as anything described in the biblical text.