Redeeming God in Canaan

by Doctor Science

Last weekend I noticed two religion blogs, one Jewish and one evangelical (though not fundamentalist) Christian, discussing the same passages in the Bible: the ones commanding the Israelites to fight, slaughter, enslave, and dispossess the Canaanite inhabitants of the Land of Israel. To commit genocide, in fact.

The two ministers come across as reasonably similar in personality and emotional tone -- I suspect they would get along quite well. Both read the Bible in historical-critical context, but they insist that it is necessary to read the Bible, not to just follow your bliss. Neither is willing to accept the "genocide commandments" as-is, but neither is willing to just throw them out or ignore them, either.

And they approach this text from different perspectives: asking different questions, using different tools. I was brought up as a Christian (in a Catholic/Lutheran family) but am now a practicing Jew, so I find a compare/contrast very illuminating. In this case, the Christian asks about the character or personality of God; the Jew asks what we Jews should *do*.

I am cutting this because it's almost 2500(!!) words. A lot are quotes, thank goodness, but even so I may have gone a trifle overboard for many tastes.

Too Many Words by Payana, based on Umbrella by Snyckeeers. You may want to bring yours.

The Two Readers

Peter Enns is an evangelical Christian trained in Calvinist (Presbyterian and Reformed) institutions. He starts talking about the Canaanite Genocide in response to an interview with John Piper, a Baptist General Conference minister. Piper said, speaking of these same verses:

“It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.”

Enns rejects such a reading because of what it says about God's character. The central question for Enns is theology, strictly speaking: what sort of a Person is God? His methods are largely historical, about the context of the text and our own, but he always reads the Tanakh as the Old Testament, precursor to the New.

Rachel Barenblat, the Velveteen Rabbi, is in the Reconstructionist/Jewish Renewal strain of Judaism. She's reading these passages because they were last week's portion in the cycle of yearly Torah reading, Matot-Masei, Numbers 30:2 - 36:13. The question she struggles with is that these verses are used as

justification for establishing Jewish sovereignty over "Greater Israel." Are our only options either to accept that interpretation, or to disregard these verses altogether?

Her fundamental approach is to *wrestle*, to re-think and re-analogize, to read, as she says, creatively and "expansively". She doesn't want to just read the text, she wants to *redeem* it.

---

Peter Enns' Christian reading

Pages from the Luttrell Psalter, made in England c.1320-1340. Part of the British Library's online gallery of sacred texts, an amazing way to waste spend immense amounts of time.

Enns writes:

First, until you are clear on what the motive is for God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites, you will not feel the true weight of the theological dilemma.

He gathers evidence from various parts of the Torah, leading to the conclusion:

Iniquity is not the reason for the extermination. All nations are iniquitous. The reason is that the iniquity will lead Israel into idolatry.

The Canaanites are wiped out because they occupy the land Yahweh means to give Israel, and sharing the land with Canaanites and their abhorrent religious practices runs the risk of luring the chosen people into spiritual adultery.

Basically, God is doing a horrible thing to make things more convenient, not as a moral principle.

Second, if you are willing to accept Canaanite genocide as compatible with God’s character, to be consistent, you must also accept as compatible with God’s character other troubling issues that come up in those very same passages.

Specifically, Enns means the mandated infanticide, slavery, and rape described in Numbers. Even those (like John Piper) who say that it's God's right to kill anyone whenever he pleases are maybe not willing to say that it's God's right to order mass rape.Enns' basic approach to this dilemma is to ponder the historical context of Scripture, while thinking of God as a *person*, with a personality and character that he can relate to.

He thinks about how he talked about his own father to other boys in the schoolyard, as they bragged about who had the best dad (who could beat up the other dads). He didn't say his father was from a pacifist Mennonite community, he *did* talk how his dad won a turkey shoot.

That story was genuinely connected to my real father, but honor was at stake. How I told the story was dictated, unwittingly, by rules of the schoolyard.

And this is how he looks at the Bible now:

The Bible is what happens when God allows his children to tell his story–which means the biblical writers told the story from their point of view, with their limitations, within the cultural context in which they wrote.
...
When God lets his children tell the story, the way that story is told is deeply and thoroughly influenced by the “rules of the schoolyard”; in the case of the Old Testament that means ancient tribal societies that valued in their people and in their gods such things as taking land, vanquishing (i.e., killing or enslaving) their foes, and generally bragging about who has the best gods and the best kings.

That is how people thought, and this “rule” is stamped all over the Old Testament. This is a way of understanding why the Bible behaves the way that it does. It bears the marks of the limitations of the cultures.

Bear in mind this is only an analogy, but if we want to extend this to the New Testament, we can think of the teachings of Jesus as a more “mature” telling of God’s story. Jesus tells the story in a way that is more in line with who God is (“you have heard it said, but I say to you…”). Such things as land acquisition and killing and enslaving enemies is no longer part of God’s narrative.

Enns is aware that his historical-critical method looks to some Christians as though he's removing inspiration from Scripture, but he points out that traditional Christian (and Jewish!) scriptural interpretation has always talked about context:

What marks off recent generations is not that a renegade group of scholars and other troublemakers are now, all of a sudden, allowing “historical context” to invade our understanding of the pristine Word of God. Rather, the problem is that we have come to understand much more of that ancient context than ever before. The fact that many Protestant communities are deeply committed to Scripture as a clear word from God, which, therefore, can safely be understood without engaging the messiness of history, creates an antagonistic attitude toward those who are perceived as sacrificing Scripture on the altar of (unbelieving) scholarship.
...
The problem, again, is that the more we know of ancient contexts, the more uncomfortable grammatical-historical exegesis has become, and so threatens to undermine the very Evangelical theological system that relied on it so heavily. Rather than abandoning the method, however, it is wiser, I feel, to be willing to do the hard work of trusting God, going where the questions lead, and rethinking theological articulations when necessary, knowing that the survival of the Christian faith does not hang in the balance.

---

Rachel Barenblat's Jewish reading

A page from The Duke of Sussex's German Pentateuch, Torah and associated texts created in southern Germany c.1600. Another from the British Library's Sacred Texts collection.

Barenblat writes:

The Hasidic rabbi known as the Sfat Emet reads this text creatively. He says that we ourselves are the "borders" into which holiness can flow. Those other inhabitants, he argues, weren't able to experience the holiness inherent in the land. Only when the Israelites entered did the supernal land of Israel, the ideal Israel on high, merge with the earthly land of Israel here below. And when we prepare our hearts and souls with Torah, he says, God causes holiness to flow into us, contained by the borders of who we are.

Christians should be aware that one of the defining differences between Jewish and Christian Biblical interpretation is that Hasidim are generally classed as "Ultra-Orthodox", but they do *not* have a "fundamentalist" approach toward the Bible in the sense Christian Fundamentalists do. "Orthodoxy" in Judaism is a misnomer, it's really "Orthopraxy": Right (or traditional) Practice, not Right/Traditional Belief.

So Hasidim are both very traditionalist about Jewish practices (such as keeping kosher or wearing certain types of clothing), but also very open to mystical or emotional readings of Scripture. But then, I'd say that no Jew approaches the Bible expecting (or wanting) its meaning to be clear or simple, or for there to be a reading of any passage that is the "real" or sole intended one. If you can't read it a number of different ways, you're not reading it right.

Barenblat continues:

I love the idea that we ourselves are the "borders" into which holiness can flow...but I chafe at the ethnocentrism. I espouse a post-triumphalist Judaism; I understand other religious traditions as meaningful paths to God. I can't accept that only we are capable of true holiness and true connection with our Source.

What, then, can we do with these verses?

...
How do we balance this week's Torah portion, with its instructions regarding displacement and violence, with the verses in Torah which call us to social justice and which champion the needs of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger? (For that matter, how can we balance the bloody slaughter of the Midianites with Torah's repeated calls to seek peace and pursue it?)

Notice that the question that exercises Enns -- what kind of Person is God, to say such contradictory things? -- is not the issue for Barenblat. She's thinking about what Jews should do, *now*:

Is it possible, or desirable, to read these verses today without thinking of Gaza and the West Bank: those who settle in Judea and Samaria, and those who argue that the settlements are a primary obstacle to peace?

Allow me to read our Torah portion expansively. What if we read the verses like so:

If you choose to dispossess the inhabitants of the land, then you'd better kill or displace all of them -- otherwise you're in for a world of reciprocal suffering, a spiral of violence which will enmesh generation after generation in hatred and bloodshed. But maybe someday, when humanity has evolved beyond this kind of tribalism, you'll reach the possibility of treating one another as fellow human beings despite your religious and cultural differences. That's the path to wholeness and peace, and if you don't seek it, you'll be driven out of the land yourselves.

Does Torah actually say this? Not in so many words. But we can choose to read between the lines, to seek the white fire between the black fire of the text. Have we collectively evolved to the point where we can seek coexistence and common ground? I don't know. I hope and pray that the answer is yes.

Rabbi Arthur Segal notes in a d'var Torah on Matot-Masei that this week's portion contains instructions about the "cities of refuge" to which accidental murderers could flee in order to prevent the vicious cycle of blood feuds. He points out that we can come away from this week's Torah portion either "remembering to do genocide to our enemies," or choosing to relinquish vengeance. I believe I know which option I would rather pursue.

---

For myself, the context I start with is genre: what type of text is this? Even the most fundamentalist evangelical readers can tell that the Bible includes books in different genres: songs, proverbs, strongly personal statements (the prophets), apparently objective history (e.g. Chronicles), etc.

But we can't know the genre unless we understand the actual historical context, which for this period (broadly 2000-500 B.C.E.) means archaeology. Here we find the biblical archaeological discovery of the past 50 years that has surprised me most: there is no evidence for the conquest of Canaan. No evidence for war, widespread destruction, massacres, or a sudden cultural shift.

Current scholarly thinking is that:

.. for most historians, too many clues point to the Bible's greater Israel having its genesis in the Palestinian hill country in the last part of the Late Bronze Age and the early part of the Iron Age. The Bible, these historians reason, is the collective memory of a group that at some point saw itself as unified. This collective biblical memory places early Israel in the central Palestinian hill country or highlands in approximately the Iron Age, when archaeology also indicates that many new villages arose there.

In other words, the Israelites *were* Canaanites. Israelites didn't cross the physical desert to conquer Canaan, "Israel" arose when some Canaanites changed their minds -- to wrestle with God.

In that case, the Conquest narrative is a kind of fiction, and there's no bar to me reading it as fiction. I can read it as Sfat Emet does, as a story about how when we prepare our hearts and souls with Torah...God causes holiness to flow into us, contained by the borders of who we are.
Enns points out

It is not at all clear that these biblical stories were even written to depict “what God did.” Recent work has made the case that the book of Joshua is not a “conquest narrative.” Rather, using conquest as a narrative setting, Joshua is a statement about what it means to be an insider or an outsider to their community.

The conquest stories are symbolic narratives that point to a theological truth. For example, the fact that Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute, is spared but the Israelite family man Achan and his family are treated as Canaanites (Joshua 6-7) is designed to make people think long and hard about what insider and outsider even means. (See Douglas S. Earl The Joshua Delusion?: Rethinking Genocide in the Bible and Daniel Hawk Every Promise Fulfilled: Contesting Plots in Joshua.)

I can work with this.

A refined, spiritual scholarly debate. From the cover of A Treasury of Chassidic Tales on the Torah (ArtScroll Judaica classics) by Shelomoh Yosef Zevin. The picture is based on this one, and it is indeed the most accurate depiction I've seen of how "two Jews, three opinions" plays out even in the most serious and scholarly of discussions.

Comments

[wj]

When Jesus chose "father" as the analogy to explain God to his listeners, what that says to me is that Joseph was one heck of a man. Pity he gets so roundly ignored.

I think it is too bad that the traditional Christian take on Jesus as the Son of God blithely ignores the first two words of the Lord's Prayer he taught: "Our father...". And as you are the son (or daughter) of your father, does that not also make you a son of God -- in exactly the same way.

I guess that makes be a pretty ideosyncratic Christian. But it seems like the only honest take.

[bobbyp]

Interesting stuff, doc. James Carroll touches on similar themes in his book "Jerusalem, Jerusalem", at least in the first 100 or so pages I have read so far. I recommend it to all.

Thanks.

[reboho]

Curious why such tortured theological gymnastics is required? We know that events didn't happen as described, that there is no promised Land, so why the charade?

[Baskaborr]

wj is agreeing with a key difference between traditional Christian beleif and Mormon doctrine. Mormon's believe that all humans are literally the sons and daughters of God.

[Patrick]

reboho- Because reading the passage in a positive fashion is a litmus test for membership in certain modern day social groupings. Until every religion descended from these texts are dead letters, we will be unable to read these passages like we do Gilgamesh.

[Slartibartfast]

Canaan was the son of Ham, who was the son of Noah. Yes, there is a fundamental interconnectedness of things in Biblical accounts. And, yes, in that sense Canaanites were Israelites. But Israelites are the descendants of Jacob. I think the difficulty here is the equation of tribal and national boundaries.

[Donald Johnson]

I think the claim is that the Israelites were, in reality, not descended from a mass exodus of six hundred thousand male slaves (along with their families, so probably a couple million people) from Egypt. There's no archaeological evidence for that. So what at least some historians and archaeologists are claiming is that most of the Israelites were really just living in Canaan all along. There's no evidence of the massive campaign attributed to Joshua or of the genocide of the Canaanites, so the theological problem becomes not "Why did God have them do that?", but "why is this endorsement of genocide in the Bible whether or not it actually happened?"

I think some have suggested that there must have been some sort of exodus event, just not on the scale described in Exodus or the Heston movie. So the relatively small group of people who really did escape from Egypt are identified with a much larger group, sort of like the way Americans might identify with the Founding Fathers and the Revolution even if their ancestors came over later on.

[Ian]

All this theological nonsense over an improbable being. why do people waste their lives on such nonsense

[Laura Koerbeer]

"But then, I'd say that no Jew approaches the Bible expecting (or wanting) its meaning to be clear or simple, or for there to be a reading of any passage that is the "real" or sole intended one. If you can't read it a number of different ways, you're not reading it right."

I read Karen Armstrong's book about the Boble and she makes this pointe repeatedly.

It's very strange to discuss the Bible with an American fundamentalist because they simultaneously insist that their interpretation of the Bible is not an interpretation (because they are right! They know what God meant!) while claiming to be the real true supporters of Jews based on the real true understanding of Jewish history.

[hairshirthedonist]

They know what God meant!

I've always found that sentiment to be blasphemous, myself. Not that I'm religious, so blasphemy isn't, in and of itself, something that bothers me much. But I would expect it to bother the sort of people who think of themselves as being good Christians. And it does bother me only because of the sort of behavior and thinking it allows people to believe are justified by it.

[wj]

Baskaborr,
Just for the record I should perhaps note that I am not (and never have been) a Mormon. And my impression, from far outside, is that their religion has a number of other serious differences from mainstream Christianity.

"mainstream Christianity" -- is that a meaningful concept these days?

[Jim]

Why can't Christians simply say that the genocide in the OT is hideous, repellent, monstrous, and evil--which it is? Why must they degrade themselves by finding excuses for it or by trying to change the subject? Why defend the Bible--a mere set of books-- when Christ is supposed to be their Lord and the person to whom they are committed? Clearly these people worship the Bible idol and not the Christ of the cross and of the empty tomb. No wonder Christianity is dying in the western world; it's following the other idol-worshipping pagan religions into oblivion.

[someotherdude]

Just some thoughts:

The notion of a “personal relationship with God,” has quite a history in the United States.

Within high church Christian denominations, (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran) the mystical aspects of the theology resembled and satisfied a type of “intimate relationship.” But high-church discipline would place the “relationship” within a context that usually kept in mind a historical-critical context. If you pushed it, you left and started a religious movement.

And many did!

As the popularity of low-church traditions, (Methodist, Holiness, Pentecostals, Sanctified, 7th day Adventists), and then their off-shoots, (Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses) became more wide-spread, the mystical experience and the primacy of the individual experience became more popular. On top of that, Existentialism and Marxism also influenced many Presbyterians and Lutheran theologians (Paul Tillich comes to mind) to emphasize the “personal experience and relationship”. These guys still respected the historical-critical context, but they also rejected the literalism. While low-church types (at least popularly) never took the historical-critical context all that serious, but embraced literalism to the nth degree. These 2 streams of theological trends give birth to the many understandings of a “personal relationship” with God, we have today. Plus….since it’s a “personal relationship,” many use the latest pop-psychologies to articulate this very personal relationship.

Today, “personal relationship” seems to act as if God is your best friend, a buddy you would want to have a beer with…and of course you would not have a beer with a genocidal maniac. While, for others “personal relationship” seems to mean, “intimate relationship” and would never refer to God as a “personal friend” of buddy.

If it is a personal relationship, much like a close friend, then…wouldn’t your friend agree with your nationalist understandings of scripture?

[Art]

The main take away is:
1. Invent your conclusions
2. Use the Bible and Torah to support them.

[Laura Koerbeer]

There is, for some people, a step three: doubt yourself, be humble about your religious convictions, be always looking for answers but beware of finding them.

Those are the kind of religious people I like. The other kind, well, to me they range from the boring to the obnoxious.

But I care a lot more about what people do than I do about what they say.

[peter hoffman]

Laura:

Would not replacing

"...be always looking for answers but beware of finding them"

by

"...be always looking for answers but reject them if they violate logic or the requirement for evidence, despite them making you feel good"

be preferable?

[cleek]

Art:
The main take away is:
1. Invent your conclusions
2. Use the Bible and Torah to support them.

exactly.

and that's what I get from Dr S's:
But then, I'd say that no Jew approaches the Bible expecting (or wanting) its meaning to be clear or simple, or for there to be a reading of any passage that is the "real" or sole intended one. If you can't read it a number of different ways, you're not reading it right.

if it doesn't give you the answer you like, read it again - you can find a way to make it work.

good stuff, religion. you get to claim to be acting according to God's Will, which you carefully divined (so as to match what you were going to do anyway) from lawyerly reading of a text you know nobody agrees on.

[Baskaborr]

wj,
I'm a lapsed Mormon, joined in my teens, left in my late twenties, active for about twelve years. My view of "mainstream Chrisianity" is probably skewed by my personal experience. I'll tell you my deep dark family secret, I'm descended from a long line of Missionaries. My mother grew up in Jamaica where her father was a Baptist missionary. He was born and raised in China where his father was a baptist missionary. My mother switched to Methodist after the death of her parents. Both my brothers joined the Catholic church as adults. That plus my experience dealing with operation rescue after I volunteered to escort patients through picket lines into women's health clinics in the 80s, which led to myself and my wife getting concealed weapons permits and going armed at all times constitue my experience with Christianity in the US.

Yes there are other major doctrinal differences between Mormon and the Christian denominations I am familiar with. In my view those differences have the foundations in two things. The first is the whole Eden and Christ in the new world thing, the second is the literal offspring of God doctrine. That doctrine leads to the logical consequence that each of us, if we follow the proper path, will with our spouse perform our own creation and become the God of the universe we create. I suspect there aren't many other Christian denominations that don't consider that heretical.

[Baskaborr]

Missed one. Back when I had a sideline in photography I shot publicity stills for the United Pentacostal Church International. That involved portraits of several church leaders and attending and photographing services at three congregations. I find I always get better portraits after I relax the subject with conversation unrelated to photography. I also took every opportunity to talk to the church members before I started photographing. I found the Pentacostals not at all shy about discussing their beliefs, so I came out of that experience with at least a basic understanding of the Pentacostal church.

[Matthew G. Saroff]

So quoting your 3re paragraph in my blog.

You nailed a difference that I've always had a problem verbalizing.

[McKinneyTexas]

It's very strange to discuss the Bible with an American fundamentalist because they simultaneously insist that their interpretation of the Bible is not an interpretation (because they are right! They know what God meant!) while claiming to be the real true supporters of Jews based on the real true understanding of Jewish history.

I will keep this very excellent point in mind for a long time.

They know what God meant!

This is a subset of "I know I/we am/are right." It's a universal human defect.

I'm an Episcopalian. I don't argue with dyed-in-the-wool Christians very often and never with dyed-in-the-wool atheists. Neither is productive nor especially uplifting.

One semi-funny thing from a recent sermon at my church: "God created man in his image and man, unfortunately, has been trying to return the favor ever since."*

*'Man' in this context is synonymous with humanity. We have female priests and bishops.

[Barry]

"Even those (like John Piper) who say that it's God's right to kill anyone whenever he pleases are maybe not willing to say that it's God's right to order mass rape."

I'm too lazy to find the links, but Piper has been cozying up to a least one rape apologist.