Genocide in the Bible
Trigger Warning: this devotional deals with violence and sexual violence
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You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies. - Matthew 5:43-44
Jesus took on some of the harshest passages in the Old Testament head on - and in so doing, he was taking on the harshest practices of his day (and ours). In a world full of war and sexual violence, Jesus seeks to dismantle the structures that would justify such horrid abuses of the image of God in humanity. When Jesus preached against hating enemies, he was speaking to passages like this one:
The Lord said to Moses, “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites.”
So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites so that they may carry out the Lord’s vengeance on them.
They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses,and killed every man…
They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” Moses asked them. “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man. - Numbers 31:1-34
The approach of Jesus towards his enemies is radically different than that of the believers in Numbers 31. Jesus is reinterpreting scripture here through the lens of God’s original design of love and care for all of humanity. Jesus is pushing back against religiously motivated hate and violence. Jesus is pushing back against the power structures that would permit mass killing and mass sexual enslavement of women.
We are invited to follow Jesus in all things, including how he handled scripture - yes, even the really painful, confusing, and damning passages like Numbers 31. A helpful guide on that journey of looking with Jesus’s eyes at the Bible is Wilda Gafney, who put it this way:
I am talking back to the text, challenging it, questioning it, interrogating it, unafraid of the power and authority of the text, just as a girl-growing-into-a-woman talks back to her elders, questioning the world around her in order to learn how to understand and navigate it. - Wilda Gafney, Womanist Midrash
What does the spiritual discipline of ‘talking back to the text’ look like these days for you? How might you need to step up your willingness to engage scripture like this? What might be gained? Lost?