Wrestling with the Bible:
A Response to Dan Foster
I just finished reading a post on Backyard Church entitled “Making Excuses for God’s Behavior,” by Dan Foster. In this post, he attempts to explain why the Bible contains passages that can only be called genocidal. You know, the ones that end with “And Joshua slew with the sword Amalek and all of his people.” In liturgical churches, this reading ends with the lector saying “The word of the Lord,” after which the audience intones “Thanks be to God.” The rhyming of “sword” and “Lord” combined with a somewhat regular meter — think of the choriambs in “Word of the Lord,” and “Thanks be to God,” — give the English version a garishness that I hope was not present in the original Hebrew. (My mother heard this passage read in church and snorted in derision. She has not been back to church since.”
Dan Foster makes a valiant attempt to explain this passage. His explanation is that God actually delayed this fearsome punishment for hundreds of years to give the Canaanites and other groups a chance to repent. Instead of showing God as a bully, passages like this actually show God as forbearing and merciful. He points to the Canaanite practice of child sacrifice to justify the carnage.
I had never heard this interpretation before and thought it interesting. It is certainly worth pondering.
Ultimately, I reject this interpretation because the killing included not only high priests who were sacrificing infants but also included women and men of low status— who may have disapproved of having their infants sacrificed but were powerless to resist it — and even small children, who certainly had no way of stopping the practice. There is also no record in the Pentateuch that God tried to educate the Canaanites into stopping their abhorrent child sacrifice.
I tend to agree with Israel Finkelstein, who co-authored The Bible Unearthed who argued that biblical archaeology shows that no such massacres occurred. Yes, Jericho had been completely leveled, its walls pulled down, but at the wrong time to have been done by Joshua and his troops.
In other, similar, stories in the Bible, the young virgins were spared. Since girls typically married soon after reaching full puberty, any female still a virgin was very young indeed, certainly younger than sixteen and often much younger than that. Being forced into a life of sexual slavery and domestic servitude to a man who killed your family can only be described as a horror. Incidentally, this argument about the cruelty inflicted on young girls was used by Thomas Paine in his critiques of religion.
What meaning then, can a non-fundamentalist Christian attach to this story? I am partial to an interpretation given by Mark Nicovich, a professor at William Carey University, who offered an interpretation of what it means to say that a religious text is divinely inspired. In his view as a believer, divine inspiration does not mean that God spoke and Moses took dictation. Rather, God works *with* human beings and does not just use them as a channel. Because humans *share* in this work and because humans are fallible, error creeps in when someone tries to interpret his or her experience of the divine. Language only partially captures reality. To write is to interpret. We necessarily interpret experiences and writings in light of our own culturally influenced beliefs and experiences — a view shared by Dan Foster as well, who has used this insight to go beyond traditional interpretations of the Bible and to embrace some very modern ones. Then, these texts must be copied — often by hand in those days — and often edited by others. Studies of early manuscripts show this editing process taking place.
Of course, this view means that we lose certainty. We must use our own, fallible, and limited reason to interpret these passages and their meaning, a fact that opens the door to different and perhaps very rich perspectives but also to further error. On the other hand, this interpretation offers a vision of a God who works with us, who makes us his partner in creation. This view offers both uncertainty and a greater capacity for human dignity.
Am I certain of this perspective? No. I am not certain of anything. I am not certain that God exists and I am less certain that the interpretation I just outlined manages to vitiate the unmitigated awfulness of the biblical passages in question.
On a final note, let me encourage anyone interested in these topics to read Foster’s A Backyard Church. His writings are thoughtful, compassionate, and honest.
