Is God a Moral Monster? 7

In one of my classes a student, one who had grown up in suburban evangelicalism and who was developing some critical thinking skills, after reading Joshua, said, “There is no way God did what the writer of Joshua says God did.” Another student, who had grown up in a tougher world evidently, said, “God is God and he can do whatever the hell he wants!” That’s a quote.

I find those two responses to tough passages in the Bible typical: one side says, “How can this be?” Or, “This can’t be God.” While the other side says, “God’s in charge, God can do what God wants.”

Paul Copan, in Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God, examines some of these passages under the theme of “Barbarisms, Crude Laws, and Other Imaginary Crimes.”

He is inquiring here into what I think are some of the most important issues in his book. He breaks the problems into separable themes, but begins with general observations:

The OT laws are similar and dissimilar to other laws in the Ancient Near East — and he sees borrowing and improving and shifting and changing those other legal ideas as part of how Scripture arose. But his major point is that the Mosaic law morally improves the ANE laws.

Two themes emerge: (1) Some OT laws were inferior to creational ideals; (2) the Mosaic law is not permanent, universal and the standard for all nations.

Themes:

Sabbath breakers and slanderers (Numbers 15:32-36; Exod 31:14-15; Deut 21:18-21). He sees some “first time violations” here that are singled out for special punishment.

The glutton and drunkard son of Deut 21 rips into the fabric of family and culture.Mediums and sorcerers assault the true worship of the One God — this is an Israelite law alone.

One of Copan’s major conclusions is that Israelite laws and punishments are tame compared to the more brutal laws in the ANE, and in this he’s accurate. Israelite laws protect and value the person more than property. The lex talionis is about finding punishments that justly fit the crime and never go beyond the crime; the length of justice was measured but there was very little demand that it had to be applied in a one to one correspondence.

He then deals with child sacrifice and finds texts that don’t prescribe Israelite behavior or condone Israelite behavior.

I sensed that Copan (1) justified the texts too often when (2) his own two themes above needed more integration. It only goes so far to say Israel’s laws are an advance: it’s like saying the man only hits his wife when his neighbor cuts off fingers.  The issue here is always the most difficult one: God is connected to these laws and it is hard to know why God couldn’t have revealed laws and punishments that were much more advanced.

Which leads me to this: Copan could explore both accommodationist understandings of God’s involvement with Israel, could explore evolutionary or developmental theories of how Israel’s laws emerge, and he could have been more forthright on what he means by “inferior.” Why not just say that’s how they did things then? But we don’t do things that way now? Isn’t this implicit in his “inferior” theme? Or perhaps even in his second theme that these laws aren’t universal.