Most Christians in the United States have heard of so-called \u201chonor killings\u201d in the muslim world. If you haven\u2019t, let me give you the basic idea. A young unmarried woman either has sex with a man or is raped by a man. In either case she is considered immoral and socially damaged. The stigma is also cast onto her family. Her father (or possibly a brother) decides to restore the family honor by killing the young woman. This\u00a0death penalty can be carried out in many ways. The most likely method is strangulation. The community then offers praise to God and her family for\u00a0taking the shame away.<\/p>\n
I wish I could say that such actions are limited to one culture or religion only. However, India has seen its share of honor killings when\u00a0a woman\u00a0marries or has sexual\u00a0intercourse (or is suspected of having done so) or is raped by\u00a0an outcaste person. This sense of shame\u00a0and uncleanliness on a family seems to transcend religion and affect\u00a0both Hindu and Christian communities.\u00a0No wonder there has been such an outcry over the rape\/murder of a young college student in India.<\/p>\n
Those of us who view the world through Western eyes cannot see the justice involved in such death penalties. We might argue the perpetrators should be killed. But, why the women involved? It is because in most cultures on earth female sexuality is seen to be something that is to be controlled. Failure to control \u201cour women and their bodies\u201d is\u00a0understood\u00a0by the cultures involved to be a failure of masculinity (fathers and brothers are in charge). Remember that Anglo-Saxon culture calls a man whose wife is known to have sexual intercourse with someone else a \u201ccuckold\u201d and \u201claden down with horns.\u201d Whereas a wife who husband is a public adulterer is called\u2026a wife.<\/p>\n
Ancient Israel and Judah both had a sense of this practice of \u201chonor killing.\u201d The\u00a0Law of Moses records an incident in Numbers 25:1-18 where Israelite males and Moabite females are getting together for family relationships and even communal intermixing with the worship of Baal of Peor. Aaron the High Priest\u2019s son Phinehas summarily executes an Israelite man of the tribe of Simeon who marries a Midianite wife. Since Moses himself married a Midianite woman (Exodus 2), we should assume then involvement with the other religion is\u00a0the reason the murder takes place.\u00a0 Yet, the text of Numbers quotes the God of Israel thusly, \u201cI hereby grant him my covenant of peace\u2026\u201d (NRSV).<\/p>\n
What are we western\u00a0Christians to make of this text?<\/p>\n
Here is one option. We can ignore it. We\u00a0can say it belongs to another time, place, and people. But, that raises the\u00a0objection, why then believe any of the text? I know we often take what\u00a0we like from the scripture and tradition. For us it does not invalidate these teachings from the past. It puts them into a context we can safely ignore. Yet, it is lacking in intellectual and moral rigor.<\/p>\n
A second option would be to say no to the text. We can nullify the law and the teaching. Christians do this often by pointing to ideals demonstrated in scripture and tradition rather than actual words at any given point. This approach\u00a0is similar to what John Wesley considered \u201cthe whole tenor of scripture.\u201d When scripture appears to advocate or directly teach something that is morally repugnant we seek something higher and nobler in our approach to the text. For instance, in the West arguments for slavery were taken from texts in the Bible that regulated slavery. Yet, they did not advocate or teach it unless the alternative was murder. So we then nullify the teaching by not practicing slavery at all.<\/p>\n
A third option considers the context of the text and the context (if any) of who is reading the text. I take this approach to this kind of religiously and culturally motivated violent teaching in the Bible. The presence of other Peoples and their cultic practices were always problematic for the people of Judah and Israel. The Bible gives us the one major time in the history of the returned people from Babylonian captivity\u00a0that intermarriage was a problem. It is dealt with in the text(s) of Ezra-Nehemiah. In chapter 8 of Nehemiah, the people are summoned to gather around Ezra the priest and scribe to hear the words of the Law of Moses. The people then re-covenant to obey the whole of the Law. When Nehemiah as governor must deal with the mixed marriages of his people especially the priests no killing in involved (Nehemiah 13:23-30). Shame and exile are options if the men do not wish to leave their wives. But no one believes the example of Phinehas from the Law itself is to be applied. Why?<\/p>\n
There are other people writing at this time whose works make into sacred text who argue against the priest and the governor. Malachi, the prophet, talks about the idea that Judah profanes the sanctuary by marrying the \u201cdaughter of a foreign god.\u201d The prophet believes that those who do this should be cut off from the sanctuary. But, he continues in chapter 2:10-16 of his book that divorcing these wives is not the answer. God has made the women of the foreign gods just as he made the men of Judah. And therefore, the offspring of these marriages can be godly. Another writer from the same period tells the story of a woman of Moab named Ruth who lived in the time of the judges and became a daughter of Israel and an ancestress of King David.<\/p>\n
What then should we do with this story of Phinehas? We should consider that there is more to how we use scripture and tradition than simple obedience because scripture itself demonstrates a discussion about what God wants us to do and become. Ezra, Nehemiah, Ruth, and Malachi do not even offer the solution of violence and \u201chonor killing\u201d to deal with shame. They instead offer an argument for returning to a path of godliness and argue with each other what that path should look like.<\/p>\n
Honor killing, war, slavery, and destruction are all in the Bible. The Bible also unabashedly opposes these things even if it takes us awhile to get to those condemnations. We Western Christians should be learning this lesson most of all. We believe in a God who is active and working in this world to bring it into a time being we often call the Kingdom of God. With the examples we have already seen let us contemplate what that means as we read the unfolding of the divine work in the scriptures.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most Christians in the United States have heard of so-called \u201chonor killings\u201d in the muslim world. If you haven\u2019t, let me give you the basic idea. A young unmarried woman either has sex with a man or is raped by a man. In either case she is considered immoral and socially damaged. The stigma is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n