Deuteronomy 20:10-16
II Timothy 3:14-17
This morning is the second Sunday of a preaching series about the Bible – which seems an odd thing to say, because it’s safe to assume that our preaching is always based on the Bible or a text within the bible, but this series is more about what’s up with the Bible as a whole. What’s it like? How do we approach it? How is it God’s Word to us?
I wonder, have you ever, in a moment of crises or despair, ever held a Bible in your hands and prayed, “God I really need to hear something from you right now,” and opened it up to words that were exactly what you needed to hear? I’ll admit it; I have – probably more times than I can count. What’s up with that? What am I assuming about the Bible when I do that?
Well my task this morning is to ask questions like that. And in particular this morning I’m going to ask, “What’s up with the Old Testament? How are we using it as normative? How do we hear God’s Word in it? And to make the task more interesting and challenging, what’s up with passages in the Old Testament where God appears to be commanding violent actions?
People have been asking and answering these questions in different ways from at least as early as the formation of the Bible itself. Within the very texts we have come to know as scripture we see explicit examples of parts of Scripture talking about or interpreting other parts of Scripture. Looking briefly at one of our texts for today:
II Timothy 3;14-17 is one of the most well known texts within our Scriptures that tells us how we should view the texts that were canonized or made into what we know as the Bible before this passage also obviously became part of the Bible.
14But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, 15and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
These verses are a classic demonstration of the shared assumptions of early interpreters – including those who were still producing the documents that became Scripture. The apostle Paul himself would have shared these interpretive assumptions. All of it “is useful for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be equipped for every good work.”
For them, the interpreters within scripture itself, scripture was as beautiful and patterned and orderly and functional as this postage stamp four-patch quilt on my right.
Four of the assumptions shared by ancient interpreters are as follows:i (by ancient interpreters, I mean those who were around in the closing centuries of BCE and early CE who were making the decisions about what would be included in what became our Bible).
First, they assumed that the Bible was fundamentally a cryptic text. When it said A, often it might really mean B. This assumption led to some pretty creative interpretations.
Second, ancient interpreters assumed that the Bible was a book of lessons directed to readers in their own day. It may seem to talk about the past, but it is not fundamentally history. It is instruction; telling us what to do.
For example, if Abraham was rewarded for his obedience – likewise we should be obedient and will be rewarded for our obedience. You may recall that already, in the book of Hebrews in the New or second Testament, the faith of Abraham and others is commended to us as an example to follow. Assumption number 2 like assumption number 1 allows for some pretty creative interpretations. Both of them allowed for typologies, allegories, allusions, and for saying that events of the Old Testament were really foreshadowing events of the New.
Third, ancient interpreters assumed the Bible contained no contradictions or mistakes. It is perfectly harmonious despite being an anthology. In short, it is an utterly consistent, seamless perfect book.
Fourth, or lastly, they believed the entire Bible is essentially a divinely given text, a book in which God speaks directly or through His prophets.
We can see in these assumptions of ancient interpreters that many people of faith today share some of them. As a pastor and a preacher, I share with the ancient interpreters assumption number 2. The Bible isn’t just a relic from the ancient past. I believe it contains important guidance for faith and life today. I also assume along with assumption number 3 that the Bible has some sort of coherent message to communicate though I won’t go so far as to say that it does not contradict itself. And Our Confession of Faith in a Mennonite perspective shares with the ancient interpreters at least a version of assumptions 2 and 4 – that the Bible is guide to our life and faith and that the Bible is a divinely given text. In our Confession of Faith we say it this way. “We believe that all Scripture is inspired by God through the Holy Spirit for instruction in salvation and training in righteousness. We accept the Scriptures as the Word of God and as the fully reliable and trustworthy standard for Christian faith and life.”
The assumptions of ancient interpreters have had staying power. In fact, these interpretive assumptions held for almost two millennia. For two millennia the Scripture in the life of the church was as beautiful and orderly and seamless seeming as this postage stamp four-patch to my right. The divinely inspired artistry of the authors of our Scripture as with the artist of this quilt created something both beautiful and functional. Its beauty warms my soul and its functionality warms my body. Quite simply put – this quilt keeps me warm.
And then along came the 19th century and 20th century historical critical project. With the historical critical project, devout Christian men and women scholars sought to sweep away what they actually called “the rubbish” of centuries of interpretation according to the above assumptions in order to get at the “real Bible” and the “real Jesus” within that Bible.
What was that historical critical project, exactly? In some senses it was a change in approach. No longer did its critics sit “at the feet of the text”
and let it, or the Word of God within it, speak. Instead we, I include myself in this because as a 20th and 21st century student of the Bible I have done this as well, we began to examine it for evidence of its very human fingerprints – kind of like the quilt to my left – we began to be aware of its pieces. We began to see that not all the parts fit together quite right. We began to know and understand some intimate details about the pieces too. Just as I know when I look at this quilt that
this part was a shirt,
and this fabric used to be shorts
and this fabric used to be a blouse
and this fabric used to be a housecoat
and this fabric used to be a skirt,
and this fabric was left over from another quilt
and here there are even some stains from misuse.
When we began to examine the bible in detail and with new assumptions – we noticed that the language of the covenant between God and Israel in Deuteronomy has amazing similarities with ancient Assyrian Suzerainty treaties,ii and the story of the flood has almost word for word similarity with the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and most stories in Genesis appear originally to have had some etiological reason for being – in other words they explained the origin of the name of a place or the reason for strained relationships between two nations. Originally they weren’t necessarily meant as stories with lessons.
We kept looking and noticed that songs and hymns and poems in the text were probably more ancient than the prose portions of the text and that differences in style seemed to point to different authors. And if we look at the different authors carefully we realize that they in fact rarely agreed with each other and not just about little things. If we accept as plausible some of the theories about the different authors of the first five books of the bible, (many scholars now say that there were at least five different authors), we see that their conceptions of God weren’t even the same. For some God dwelt only in heaven, for others God dwelt in the tabernacle and followed the Israelites and could be worshiped anywhere, and for some God only dwelt in the Temple in Jerusalem in the Holy of Holies.
One of the commentators I read notes,
“Time and again, scholarship has highlighted precisely the absence of agreement between one part of the Bible and another, [and this commentator goes on to say that] this absence of agreement in turn has necessarily undermined the notion of the common, divine origin of the whole.” iii
But this is where I say, “Wait, I disagree.”
How is noting and examining the very human fingerprints of the text necessarily undermining the notion of the common, divine origin of the whole?
To hold the human and the divine together is at least a couple of things –
a feat of the imagination – maybe
and a leap of faith – surely,
but isn’t that what incarnation is all about? God entered all that is human in Jesus Christ in order to reveal to us the nature of the divine. Do we think it is possible that God also enters the clay of written script, the written script that we call Scripture, also to reveal the desires of God’s mind and heart? And what if all of the different voices that reveal a vast diversity in understanding, what if all of them are necessary for a more complete revelation of God?
Turning back to the quilt for a moment.
Does knowing the origins of all the pieces of this quilt make it less beautiful? What if as in the case with this quilt the seams don’t line up because they were never intended to do so and what if some of them are coming apart a bit because the quilt has been so well used? Is the one on my left messier and less orderly than the other one – certainly, but to me it has never been less beautiful for my soul or less warm for my body.
Keeping all that I’ve said so far in mind, let’s look at the troubling and violent passage that I chose and ask some of our questions. What’s up with the Old Testament and in particular with texts like this one that apparently command violent acts? Deuteronomy 20:10-14 – I couldn’t even bear to have all the verses read aloud during the previous part of our service so I’ll read the next couple of verses now.
15Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. 16But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.
The text is disturbing and difficult and lies in the middle of a chapter of ethical instructions for how to behave in times of war. This text is not asking a moral question about whether war is necessary or not – it assumes that it is – if offering terms of peace have failed. This passage and others like it are examples of the ancient Near Eastern notion of herem, meaning the requirement after siege warfare to destroy your enemy or devote (as in sacrifice) all of your enemy to God so that they may not distract you or teach you to serve or worship other gods and therefore sin against the One God. In its most extreme literal interpretation, this text could be viewed as justification for genocide. There is no question that this is a very difficult and deeply disturbing text. I wish that I could ignore it completely, but it is there and there are others like it in the biblical books of Joshua and Samuel.
There are few interpreters who have not tried to explain it in some way other than literally. The most common scholarly view is that it is a literary fiction – told only as an injunction to the Israelites to have exclusive allegiance to God. The ancient interpreters would have called it a metaphor for the importance of sole allegiance to God. The historical critical interpreters have shown us that there is no evidence that complete extermination of the enemy was ever carried out in the land of Canaan when the first Israelites arrived there. I read numerous scholarly interpretations of this text this week in an attempt to find something that could honestly grapple with the difficulties that this text expressed. John Howard Yoder, for example, said of these verses that “the concept of herem was unique in relation to the morality of the time not in its violence, but in ensuring that “war does not become a source of immediate enrichment through plunder”, and hence was the beginning of a trajectory that would lead ultimately to the teaching of nonviolence.
But in general I found that no matter what any of the scholarly interpreters say or said about it in the past, they were and I am still disturbed by it and feel the push me/pull you tension of its use and misuse through the ages. If this is part of the quilt of Scripture how could it ever be beautiful – is this not both a tear and a stain?
So I pause and wonder and want to take seriously the general repulsion almost everyone – scholars and lay-persons alike – feel when confronted with this text.
Why does thi
s matter so much?
It matters to us if or because the Bible as a whole matters to us. We can’t just cut it out and ignore it even if we wanted to.
It matters because this text doesn’t coincide with how we normally understand God, or how we hear about and perceive of God in other places.
It matters because of what this text reveals about the potential savagery in the human race – a savagery we’ve never completely shed
and dare we say that it also reveals some truth about God – that God demands sole allegiance.
But thank God, this text doesn’t operate in isolation. As we live with and wrap ourselves in this text we call Scripture, we are wrapped in and held by other images of God. Images of a God who also says take care of the stranger in your midst for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. A God who says to us through Jesus, “You have heard that it was said, love your neighbour, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Yes, we do let some voices rise to the surface and others recede into the background when we are faithfully discerning the text.iv Allowing all of it to hold us guards against using any one particular part of it for ideological purposes.
And so, where does this leave us for today? My hope and prayer is that it leaves us wanting to take the whole of the Bible seriously – the neat, tidy, orderly and beautiful bits as well as the messy, the torn and the stained parts. We always have the option of just leaving all of it on a shelf or in a cedar chest because it’s worn out or because we have found it too disturbing. But maybe one reason to pick it up and wrap ourselves in it more often is not only so we can take it more seriously, but also because it takes us seriously. Why else would we be able to pick it up, pray for a Word from God – open its worn out pages and hear exactly what we need to hear. It always has taken us seriously and always will, the neat and tidy, beautiful and orderly bits and the messy, the torn and the stained parts of us too.
i The following remarks draw heavily on James L. Kugel’s tome, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, New York: Free Press, 2007. See in particular pages 16 and 17.
ii Ibid, p. 348
iii Ibid.
iv check http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/resourcecentre/ResourceView/5/13465 for Mennonite Church Canada’s “Being a Faithful Church” Documents and Jack Suderman’s approach to Biblical interpretation and discernment especially in Sec2:3