A new book challenges popular notions about Christianity, Islam and the role of genocide in the Old Testament. (photo: FILE)
By Patrick Allitt, The American Conservative
11 February 12
[REPRINT]
s
it true that the Bible teaches peace and the Koran war? Only if you
approach the books selectively, taking the gentlest of Jesus' teachings
and setting them against the harshest of Muhammad's. Philip Jenkins's
challenging new book Laying Down the Sword shows that the Bible contains
incitements not just to violence but also to genocide. He argues that
Christians and Jews should struggle to make sense of these violent texts
as a central element of their tradition, rather than hurry past them or
ignore them altogether.
The most painful passages come in the books of Joshua
and Judges, which Jenkins describes as an "orgy of militarism,
enslavement, and race war." The Israelites, emerging from the desert
after their escape from Egypt, attack Canaanite cities, whose people are
described by the biblical narrator as very wicked. God commands the
Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants - men, women, children, and
animals alike, until nothing is left alive. Likewise in the Book of
Samuel, King Saul eventually loses God's favor not for his
bloodthirstiness in war but for his restraint - he fails to annihilate
his enemies. The prophet Samuel denounces him for sparing some of the
Amalekites, takes up a sword, and personally hacks the captive King Agag
to pieces. To make matters worse, says Jenkins, God sometimes
deliberately "hardens the hearts" of other peoples, using them to
chastise the sinful Hebrews. Then He raises up Judges, righteous
Israelites, to smite and destroy them in turn. It's almost as if He
wanted the highest possible body count.
Jenkins offers a useful thought experiment, asking
readers to view these stories through the eyes of the Canaanites
themselves. To them, the Israelites would seem as terrifying as the
Janjaweed militia of Darfur in our own day, or as the Lord's Resistance
Army of Uganda, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has justified the mass
torture and killing of men, women, and children in God's name.
For centuries Jews and Christians have struggled to
come to terms with these stories. One option was always to take them at
face value and act accordingly. Crusaders in the Middle Ages, militant
Christians on both sides during the wars of religion that followed the
Reformation, and extremist Zionists in Israel today have taken the
stories as evidence that killing your enemy without mercy is exactly
what God wants. Sometimes, in their view, we must accept that God's
purposes are inscrutable but nevertheless just and righteous.
Similarly, the genocidal passages settled the
consciences of European empire-builders between 1500 and 1900. They
attributed "Canaanite" wickedness to their American, African, and Asian
enemies, then exterminated them, noting that in doing so they had
emulated God's chosen conqueror, Joshua. One of the difficulties of
becoming Christian for Native Americans and Africans since then has been
God's apparent willingness to victimize people like themselves en
masse.
Another common approach has been to overlook or
exclude these genocidal texts. In the Revised Common Lectionary,
published in 1994 and now used by a wide array of Protestant and
Catholic churches in America, the biblical readings recommended for
every Sunday of the year carefully omit all the warlike texts while
emphasizing the most benevolent themes in the Old Testament that
prefigure Jesus' message of peace, love, and social justice. "Modern
preachers," notes Jenkins, "regularly proclaim the confrontational and
challenging character of the Old Testament, by which they mean the
social radicalism of Amos, or the withering critiques of war and
injustice in prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Yet few indeed are
the sermons that explore the injunction to leave nothing that breathes,
or condemn those who fail to kill the last victim." He speculates about
what would happen if a typical suburban minister were compelled, one
Sunday, to preach on the text from Deuteronomy 7: "You must destroy them
totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy."
Early figures in Christian history approached the
genocidal passages in different ways. Marcion, leader of a highly
influential Christian movement of the second century AD, argued that the
God of the Old Testament, capricious, brutal, and violent, was the
antithesis of the God of Jesus in the New Testament. His own proposed
version of the Bible omitted the Old Testament completely. So, a century
later, did that of Mani, founder of the Manicheans, who thought of
divine history as a great battle between light and darkness and denied
that the New Testament fulfilled prophecies made in the Old.
Arguing against the Marcionites and the Manicheans,
some of the Church Fathers, including Origen and Augustine, denied that
the genocidal passages should be taken literally. In Origen's view they
should be read metaphorically or spiritually so that the Canaanites or
Amalekites were not actual groups of people, deserving of death, but the
tendency to sin in every human heart, against which we should make
perpetual war. At one point in the book of Joshua, for example, five
kings hide in a cave until the Israelites find and kill them. To Origen
this story meant not that the Israelites were murderers but that the
five senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) are always at work
in the "cave" of the human mind, always offering temptation, but that a
truly religious man, with the help of Jesus, will overcome them.
Not until the Enlightenment did significant numbers of
European intellectuals begin to use the genocidal passages to argue
against religion itself. Some, like Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense
and a hero of the American Revolution, regarded the God disclosed by
these passages as so morally inferior that no civilized people should
accept him. In The Age of Reason he described the Old Testament as "a
history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."
Paine became a radiant figure for skeptics through the 19th and 20th
centuries. His most recent heirs include our own era's leading atheists,
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
Scholars of historical criticism offered yet another
approach to the Bible. Starting in Germany and gradually coming to
dominate the academic study of scripture, they recognized that the
canonical books of the Old Testament were written in different times and
places by different authors with different intentions. By now, biblical
scholars are largely in agreement about the existence of four main
traditions woven together in the Old Testament: the Yahwistic, the
Elohistic, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomic. They have also shown that
the familiar order of the Old Testament books is not the order in which
they were written. On the contrary, Joshua and Deuteronomy, whose
historical passages deal with events in about the 12th century BC, were
almost certainly written 500 or 600 years later, at about the same time
as the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Amos, whose peaceful and
universalistic message appears to contradict them. In other words, the
genocidal actions were attributed by much later writers, to men who had
lived as remote from them in time as Christopher Columbus is from us.
Jenkins believes that these much later writers
attributed to Joshua actions that never happened. Their motive was to
exhort their own contemporaries to live up to the rigors of monotheism
and not to let their attention be drawn away by the multitude of other
gods, from the surrounding empires and societies, competing for their
loyalty. He admits that praising their forefathers for genocide implies
that they were familiar with the concept, but takes consolation from the
fact that the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not
take place.
Scholarly evidence now supports the idea that the
Hebrews coexisted with many other peoples in the Canaan of the 12th
century B.C. Archaeologists in particular cast doubt on the claim that a
new group of marauders came out of the desert and annihilated
pre-existing cities and peoples; the evidence of such massacres simply
is not there. What really happened, Jenkins argues, is that the
Deuteronomic writers, concerned about dangerous political and religious
conditions, were "telling a story and at every possible stage
heightening the degree of contrast and separation between Israel and
those other nations," not for the sake of historical accuracy but to
send a spiritual message to their own people. "Israel had to kill its
inner Canaanite," so "perhaps the later commentators, Jewish and
Christian, were not that misguided in seeing the massacres in
allegorical terms."
What does all this imply for practicing Christians
today? In Jenkins' view, ministers and worshipers should face up to the
genocidal texts because they are an integral part of the Bible, whose
Old and New Testaments, he believes, depend on one another. He invokes
the authority of Martin Luther, who reminded the excitable first
generation of Protestant Bible readers not to take any passage out of
context, always to think of the overall meaning of a book, and to be
attentive to the setting and specifics of a passage. Deuteronomy 7, for
example, can then be understood not as a claim that it's right for
Christians to massacre their enemies but as "a call to absolute
dedication." If we continue to ignore or deny these texts rather than
face up to them in their proper context, we will be taken by surprise
when another fanatic uses them to justify murder.
That's asking a lot of ordinary Christians because
only sustained study in the historical-critical method can lead them to
understand and share his conclusions. Jenkins must know he's aiming far
higher than most congregations are willing to stretch. As I reached the
last chapter of Laying Down the Sword, I had mixed feelings. On the one
hand this book is a wonderful example of the kind of rigorous work
Christians must do if they are to retain intellectual credibility -
Jenkins is doing just what Mark Noll asked for in his 1995 manifesto The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He's also right to show the
unreasonableness of thinking that Islam is essentially a religion of
violence and war and Christianity a religion of peace. On the other hand
it's hard to escape the feeling that he is making excuses for the
biblical authors. Perhaps it is true that they used the language of
genocide only figuratively, but in doing so they gave warrants to people
who not only committed actual genocide but claimed God's blessing for
it into the bargain.
Let me end with another paradox about which I would
have liked to hear Jenkins's thoughts. He encourages us to look at
historical events from the vantage point of the weaker party, and he
tells us that we need to reincorporate the genocidal passages into our
understanding and worship. That got me thinking about another biblical
genocide - Noah's flood. We are all familiar with pictures of the
animals lining up two-by-two and parading into the ark; these plucky
survivors have become a staple subject for greeting-card artists,
songwriters, cartoonists, even environmentalists. What we are not used
to thinking about is the fact that God Himself in this story is
committing genocide, killing everyone in the world except for the
members of a single family. It's a horrifying tale but one that our
culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first
rainbow. I've never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and
apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins' general
point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we
think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent
tendencies in the religions of others.
Patrick Allitt is a professor of history at Emory University and author of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History and Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985
