Stump a Bible Scholar: Why Genocide?

Last updated on: August 26, 2014 at 5:14 pm by Deborah Arca

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Stump a Bible Scholar: Why Genocide? 2014-08-26T17:14:01+00:00 Deborah Arca

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Think you can stump a scholar? No question is too tough or too radical (this IS the Bible after all — a tough, radical book) for our new Stump a Scholar series at Patheos Progressive Christian. Every week, we’ll answer your questions about the Bible, Christian history, the Church, theology; and we’re bringing in the experts to tackle your questions.

This month, we’re focusing on the Bible and have invited Jerry L. Sumney, professor of biblical studies at Lexington Theological Seminary, to be our resident scholar. Sumney is the author of Colossians: A Commentary (2008) and Identifying Paul’s Opponents (1990). He is also the editor of Reading Romans (2012) and the coeditor of Theology and Ethics in Paul and His Interpreters (1996) and Paul and Pathos (2006). He’s also the author of the brand new Bible: An Introduction, Second Edition from Fortress Press, a dynamic interactive digital textbook for learning about the Bible on your own.

Professor Sumney will be answering your questions about the Bible for the next several weeks here at the Faith Forward blog (subscribe to the blog on the right so as not to miss any of the series!). The second question from our Facebook inquiry (to which many of you responded) and is from Marc A. Keep the questions coming in the Comments section below or on Facebook! Your comments on Sumney’s answers are also welcome below.

Marc asks: Why does the God of the Old Testament partner with the promised people in committing genocide?

Professor Sumney responds:

There is good news and bad news about the stories in which all the people (and the animals) in cities were killed. The good news is that these stories were written long after the events they purport to recount. Most scholars of the book of Joshua would say that these mass killings are exaggerations. Such mass executions probably did not happen. The economic disincentives were too great. People taken captive in a war became slaves and so were valuable commodities. They could be used or sold. To see that the Israelites did not kill all the people, look at the beginning of the book of Judges. It is the book that immediately follows the book of Joshua, where these killings are recounted. Beginning at 2:11 (after the death of Joshua who led the “Conquest”), we hear that all of those earlier inhabitants of the land are still around! And because they are around, the Israelites worship their gods and by doing so are unfaithful to the covenant. Note that the Canaanites are all still all over the place. They have not been exterminated. So the good news is that these slaughters are exaggerations.

The bad news is that the writers think those acts would have been a good idea. This seems hard to fathom. But if we read these books as a whole, the point seems to be that living among people who worship multiple gods was constantly too tempting for the Israelites. This is not because they are weak, but because everyone in the world thought you should worship multiple gods. You needed a god for rain, one for the city, one for the farmer, one for each region, one for war, one for love, etc. Everyone believed you should ask different gods for different things. When someone said they worshiped only one god, everyone thought they were completely stupid and probably dangerous. The ire of the appropriate god for a request might be aroused when she or he is snubbed. Your neighbors do not want to be caught up in the response of that god. Plus, when others prayed to the corn god and got a good crop, it seemed that they had done the right thing. Given this environment, the writers of these books come to think that the only way to be faithful to God is to be separate from those who worship multiple gods. They think faithfulness is so important that it would be worth killing all the people of a region who worship multiple gods. That is how important faithfulness to God is for these writers. Now, while the way they express the importance of faithfulness is, to say the least, unacceptable, the theological point they make is important. Nothing is more important than faithfulness to God. (Of course, I would say that faithfulness to God would require a completely different response to those who do not have that faith.)

The radical nature of the response of these writers is rooted in their own experience. These stories are put together while the people were in exile in Babylon. They believe that their nation has fallen because they were unfaithful to God. The only way to return and have a nation that lives under God’s law is to begin to be faithful to God in exile. So when they write these stories, they have no power that they might use to execute cities full of people. These stories are lessons in how important faithfulness to God is. The writers know what unfaithfulness has done to them, so they call their fellow-Judahites (since they are all from the nation of Judah) to faithfulness, claiming that faithfulness to God is more important than anything in life. These stories become more dangerous when they are read by people who have power, including the power to launch terrorist attacks. So it is important to see why the authors see good things in these stories, even as we see how the tactics they report are unacceptable.

Got a question? We’ve got an answer! Join the new Stump A Scholar series every Tuesday here at Patheos Progressive Christian!

And to learn more about the Bible on your own, check out The Bible: An Introduction, Second Edition interactive digital textbook by Jerry L. Sumney here!

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