Growing up my family read the Bible regularly. From a very young age I remember hearing the stories full of violence – and it’s not always violence done by the bad guys. Some stories felt horrible and tragically heavy – like all the boy babies of the Children of Israel being killed when they were enslaved in Egypt. But they kind of made sense to me because the actions are ordered or done by selfish, evil people. But sometimes the violence is done by the “good” people.
There are many stories as the Children of Israel go out and conquer the lands that involve them being told to kill whole towns, cities, and even whole groups of people. And it’s often quite specific that they not even leave one infant or woman alive. As a kid a part of me loved hearing the stories of the Word, and I took pride in knowing the facts and the progression of many of these stories. But along with that I also really hated the violence. And I couldn’t make sense of why so many people were entirely wiped out. It felt unsettling how cruel and angry it all seemed.
As an adult I have benefitted hugely from Bible studies, journey groups and sermons that dig into spiritual meanings of some of these more violent stories. I remember one class in particular talking about one of those stories where the whole group of people was to be wiped out – not any tiny remnant left. But how when you understand it from a spiritual level it is about the fact that to “conquer” an evil within our own individual selves we really have to stamp out every speck of that evil. We can’t pick and choose and think that some parts of it are okay to leave alive. In order to actually do the work of repentance the whole kit and caboodle needs to be wiped out.
Continue reading Holding Violence in the Bible