Yesterday “Friendly Atheist,” Hemant Mehta, posted a video detailing eleven of the most gruesome passages in the Bible, the message of the video seemed to be to take the occasion of Halloween to posit that any book that includes such gruesome violence should not be looked at as an inspirational text. There are many, many lists like this floating around the internet and I am always amazed at the lack of effort given by those who compile the lists to try to understand what the text is doing. In this video, in particular, this lazy approach to understanding the literature was expressly stated. Hemant begins by quoting the last verse of Psalm 137, and expressly stated, “you don’t need any context.” As a student of literature of all sorts, I was frankly shocked by this.After all the maxim, “a text taken out of context becomes a pretext” is literally one of the cardinal rules of critical reading.
The passage is question is, in fact, quite shocking. It states, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” But one would think that when one encounters a passage that shocks there would heighten efforts to highlight the contextual setting of the text. All writing must be evaluated contextually if one wants to understand it, but this is particularly true when dealing with the poetic Psalms.
Hebrew poetry is by nature written with parallelism. This means that the lines themselves don’t carry the total meaning. Each line relates to another in some way, expanding it, contracting it, or balancing it.
In this poem the line before (verse 8) gives the context from which the meaning of verse 9 is dependent.
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
The psalmist is asking that the Babylonians get what they have given and the last line reveals in an amazing act of subversion the horror of the atrocities that they themselves suffered. Like I said, context matters!
This is just one example. I could go through each of the other examples too and demonstrate how important context is to understanding the text, perhaps another day. I only address this one because Hemant explicitly stated that context didn’t matter, and I believe it matters immensely.
Does understanding the passage in context make all the difficulties go away?
No, passage like this are hard to understand, and difficult to wrestle with, but if there is any hope at understanding the scriptures it needs to be grounded in an understanding of the context.
Scripture is a collection of writings written over hundreds of years, using three different languages, in a variety of genres, and contextualized in a myriad of worldviews, each of which is dramatically different then anything that we have today. Failure to evaluate it with this understanding can result in abuse, both by those who seek to justify their own convictions using the text, and by those who seek to denounce the text.
The methodology exhibited by Hemant and his ilk is well and good if all you seek to do is take potshots at a tradition or a text, but I want to challenge the atheist community to try harder. I’m not saying you need to put on rose colored lenses when you look at the text, I’m not saying you need to put kid gloves on, but I do think our conversation would be better served if you took the time to look at what a text is trying to do before you critique it, for it’s gruesome or bizarre content. The Bible is a text that records a community of broken people trying to make sense of living under covenant that calls them to be whole.It includes a lot of violence, yes, but much of the most ghastly imagery is included expressly to show what is wrong, broken, and deplorable.
Lets talk about the difficulties of scripture with honesty and openness, not flippant dismissals and academic torpescence.
Let’s make a deal, I will do my best to read and quote atheist books and arguments in context, but I do hope that our conversation might be marked with due diligence on both sides!
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