A resolution to the problem of violence in the Old Testament? [Peace and the Bible #4]

Ted Grimsrud—November 24, 2023

The Old Testament has a poor reputation among many Christians (and others) for telling stories of terrible violence that is either initiated directly by God or clearly favored by God. Certainly, this can be a problem for Christian pacifists. But it actually should be a problem for anyone who gives the OT authority as divinely revealed scripture. I had a student once who thought he was in favor of OT violence and sought to gather evidence for an argument against pacifism. As he studied the OT, though, he realized that it was a lot more violent than he had anticipated; before long he had given up on Christianity altogether. Thus, I would say that the “problem” requires attention, even for those who do not find it a deal-breaker for faith.

Not long after I became a pacifist in 1976, I had a short time of struggle as I confronted the problem of violence in the Old Testament. I was assured by some people I respected that the problem could be overcome. So, I kind of put it on the back burner and moved ahead with developing my peace theology, emphasizing, of course, the message of Jesus. Since that time, I have not been troubled by the OT problem all that much but have focused more on finding a peace message on those writings. However, I have remained interested in how to think about divinely initiated violence. Here are some of my current thoughts.

An alternative political economy

The first argument for a certain kind of pacifist reading of the Old Testament that I encountered was a chapter in John Howard Yoder’s book The Original Revolution, the first book on Christian pacifism I ever read. Yoder drew heavily from his colleague at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Old Testament professor Millard Lind. A bit later, I used the library at the University of Oregon to track down Lind’s PhD dissertation on war and the Old Testament that Yoder cited. Lind turned that work into a book, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in the Old Testament. As it happened, this book was published late in 1980 when I was a student at AMBS. In the spring of 1981, Millard taught a class on the book, and I was fortunate enough to be able to take it.

In my memory now, the class was quite helpful, though it was fairly narrowly focused. The main emphasis was on how to understand the stories in the books of Exodus and Joshua of God’s violent intervention in liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and driving the Canaanites out of the promised land. Millard’s main point, as I remember, was that the stories tell us that God fought instead of the Hebrews. It was a unique moment in the people’s history that was not repeated. The key motif was that the people needed to depend on God for their security, not on their own military might. After they settled in the promised land and established a territorial kingdom, their political dynamics changed. They became “like the nations,” including establishing a standing army. Crucially, the kingdom became quite corrupt, practicing injustice against the vulnerable in their community and also beginning to practice idolatry. Because of these injustices, God turned against the Hebrew kingdom and allowed it to be destroyed by the area’s great empires, Assyria and Babylon.

The lesson to be learned from these stories, in Lind’s argument, was that God called out this people in order to be a “light to the nations” that witnessed to God’s love and justice. In order to be such a light, the community had to center their lives around Torah, the prophetic word of God’s justice, and practice care for the vulnerable in the community (Lind called this “theo-politics”). For such a political economy, it was necessary that the liberating acts of escaping slavery and being established in the land would clearly be due to God’s intervention instead of the force of arms. Were the liberation something the military power of the Hebrews accomplished, then the politics of the new community would inevitably be militarized and based on the centralized, hierarchical human authority of kings and generals. As it turned out, when the community turned from being Torah-centered and came under the domination of a human elite, it was indeed transformed into being like the nations, not an alternative to the nations’ domination as a way of life.

According to Lind, the prophets kept the message of Torah alive after the end of the territorial kingdom, and after hundreds of years of sustaining the peoplehood through the practice of Torah, a new prophet arose who captured the essence of Torah’s alternative political economy. This new prophet, who shared Joshua’s name (in Greek, “Jesus”), provided clarity that now the embodiment of the call to bless all the families of the earth would not rely on any kind of violence but would be about love and restorative justice for all peoples.

As I said, I found Lind’s argument helpful, formative even. However, over time I realized that it left quite a few issues unresolved. It took many years of preaching and teaching in various churches and then teaching a course on “Biblical Theology of Peace and Justice” to gain clarity about the issues and how to resolve them.

Key issues about OT violence

One of the main issues that remained for me was simply the question of whether it is credible to believe that the events described in the OT actually happened. Should we read those stories as historically accurate? Conservative Christians with their belief in the “verbal plenary inspiration” of the Bible (i.e., that every single word is directly inspired by God) seemed to be focused on historical facticity. Lind himself, while not arguing for this high view of inspiration, still read the text as mostly historically accurate.

I came to believe that it is simply not conceivable that the God of Jesus (or a God I would want to believe in) could possibly have intervened with the kind of violence the OT describes—maybe most tellingly recounted in the genocidal treatment of the people of Canaan in the book of Joshua. That led me to recognize that the Bible-as-historically-accurate approach was not actually a necessary belief for Christian faith. The Bible is an ancient text made up of various writings all produced by ancient human beings for the purpose of faith development, not historical veracity. What if we read the Bible for the ways its stories empower faithfulness rather than assuming that we must simply accept its stories as factual—the same way we read other ancient texts?

Now, it remains a question for me as to why the stories would have been told the way they were. And we can’t ignore the influence of these stories over the years for both the Jewish and Christian traditions. I think the issues that arise with trying both to affirm the value of the Bible and to affirm the way of peace are never going to be fully resolved. I have found the tension creative, though, as I have sought to hold on to such a double affirmation.

So, how then do we read the Old Testament as a meaningful and formative text while also recognizing that it is not historically accurate? In what sense do we want to affirm the OT as “inspired” and revelatory of the character and will of God? How do we Christians think of the OT accounts in relation to our understanding of Jesus?

A peaceable reading of the Old Testament

I believe that the best way to read the Old Testament, for Christians at least, is to see it as part of a single whole, one Bible with two complementary parts, Old Testament and New Testament. The Bible as a whole contains one story—albeit with many diverse elements and many tensions—with a beginning, middle, and end. This story is best understood in the light of the message of its central character, Jesus. Thus, it is a story of God’s love and healing work in history amidst actual human beings with all their strengths and weaknesses. Jesus himself affirms the truthfulness and efficacy of the OT in communicating the core message of love and healing; so should we.

We read the Old Testament, then, as a guide to the peaceable will of God. That means we, first of all, look for content that directly articulates that peaceable will. And we may expect to find a great deal more of this kind of content in the OT than has usually been recognized by those who are overly negative regarding its message. Secondly, we read the parts that do not seem so peaceable in ways that help us better understand the issues and challenges for embodying the way of peace in an often-non-peaceable world. Some of those parts will be understood differently than they have been traditionally, as more peace-affirming when read in this way. Other parts will still be contrary to the way of peace, but they provide helpful background and complexities that may help us to deepen our understandings of peace.

In all of this, though, it is crucial that we always keep in mind, first, that the OT is a storybook, not a history book. We are not bound to explain how such terrible things could actually have happened but rather to try to understand how these things may add to our appreciation of the core peaceable witness. Second, we who read the story as Christians, keep in mind the overall story of Jesus and his love. That remains the heart of the Big Story even with the complexities. That meaning is not overthrown or even threatened by the presence of counter-messages. Those counter-messages, that is, must be kept in perspective.

The Bible when read as a book of peace

Here is a nutshell summary of the plot of the Bible as a whole, read as a book of peace. We start with the story of creation, a peaceable act by a loving God that shows the high value human beings and all of the created universe have. The story is realistic early on in portraying the presence of brokenness in the creation, brokenness that leads to judgment from God. However, even then, the image of the rainbow in the story of Noah and the Flood shows that God ultimately resolves to bring healing, not destruction, to the world.

The book of Genesis, besides its account of the beginning of the universe, also tells of the beginning of what I like to call “God’s healing strategy,” God’s purpose to work through human communities to bring blessing and healing to all the families of the earth. The initial community in the story, descended from Abraham and Sarah, models peacemaking strategies in the resolution of conflicts between brothers Esau and Jacob and then Joseph and all his brothers.

The story then tells of the enslavement of Joseph’s descendants in Egypt, how God intervened to take them out of slavery, provide them with Torah as a guide to a politics of justice in contrast to Egypt’s domination order, and lead them into the promised land where they could live Torah. The entry into the land contained troubling elements, but the long-term lesson was that to live in the land always required that the people embody the social justice of Torah. When they turned to human kings and unjust power politics, they suffered the consequences and lost the land, forever ending the strategy of using a territorial kingdom as the channel for the blessing of all the families of the earth that constituted the vocation of these people.

The peoplehood was sustained even when the territorial kingdom was destroyed, centered around Torah. In time, a prophet arose who powerfully articulated and embodied a vision for the on-going sustenance of the way of Torah. Jesus was effective enough in his presentation of this vision that he attracted the violent hostility of the main institutions of political authoritarianism, cultural exclusivism, and religious institutionalism. These “Powers” colluded to put him to death, executing him via crucifixion as a political revolutionary. I conclude, though, that Jesus was not executed because he rejected the Old Testament story—but because he fulfilled it. He received the same fate as OT prophets who challenged the powers of their day in the name of Torah.

The New Testament argues that the story does not end with Jesus’s death. God raises Jesus from the dead and in doing so vindicates his life and teaching. Among other things, we may say (if we accept this argument) that God confirmed that Jesus’s interpretation and embodiment of the way of Torah was accurate and truthful. Thus, Jesus should be seen as a validation of the peaceable story we find in the Old Testament. The rest of the NT may be read as a series of meditations on that validation.

The betrayal of the Bible

Tragically, though, the story of the Bible in important ways was derailed not very long after Jesus’s death and resurrection. I believe that the Bible itself, down through the book of Revelation, does give us a coherent story, a peaceable story, a story well worth understanding and seeking to embody. However, the post-biblical traditions of the groups that were shaped by the events of which the Bible tells did not remain all that peaceable.

The two key elements I will mention have led to an alienation of many heirs of the Bible from the message of the Bible. First, the Jewish-Christian schism essentially insured that Christianity would sever its connection with the peaceable message of the Old Testament. Second, Christianity would soon affiliate with the Roman Empire and marginalize the life and teaching of Jesus. Surely, these two elements are closely related. Both have been disastrous—and it is in light of their continuing impact on heirs of the biblical people that struggles to find a biblical peace message remain crucial.

In the end, I believe the peaceable story is clearly enough presented in the Bible when read as a whole to take priority over all its complexities and seeming counter stories. We may read the complexities in light of the peaceable story and recognize that they do not threaten it.

Blog posts in the “Peace and the Bible” series