We all hear about the supposed \u201cGod of Wrath\u201d in the Hebrew Bible, and the supposed \u201cGod of Love\u201d of the New Testament.<\/p>\n
Those who draw that distinction don\u2019t know their Bibles very well.<\/p>\n
For the Hebrew Bible celebrates human sexual love, underwritten by the Hebrew Bible\u2019s God, in its Song of Solomon. This God also tells his people that he will shepherd them so that they will not lack any good thing, and will bring them goodness and mercy all the days of their lives (Psalm 23).<\/p>\n
Do they know that the Jesus of the New Testament holds a two-edged sword in his mouth in the book of Revelation, and \u201ctreads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God\u201d (chap. 19)?<\/p>\n
So it is a myth that the God of Israel is a god of wrath (alone) but that the Christian God is a God of love (without wrath). The fact is that the God of the Bible, who is the God of Israel in both Testaments, is wrathful toward evil and loving toward all who want him\u2014and that this is in both parts of the Bible.<\/p>\n
The toughest part of the Bible for me has always been God\u2019s war against the Amalekites and other Canaanites in Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, and Joshua. Why would God tell his people to exterminate all of these people, including their children and elderly?<\/p>\n
In his essay on religious violence in a new book of essays, Ploughshares into Swords? Reflections on Religion and Violence<\/em>, Eugene Korn tackles this question head-on.<\/p>\n These biblical texts, with their depictions of Amalek and the Canaanites as subhuman, were not lost to religious authorities and zealots throughout history: During the Crusades, Pope Urban II considered Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem to be Amalek. In medieval times Jews considered Christians to be Amalekites, and in modern times anti-Zionist Jews considered Zionists to be Amalekites, while radical Jewish nationalists have designated as Amalek the Palestinians, Jewish leftists, and Israeli officials advocating ceding biblical land to Palestinians.<\/p>\n Even Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish philosophers, ruled that \u201cit is a commandment to destroy the seven (Canaanite) nations\u2026.If one of them comes into your hands and you do not kill him, you have violated a negative commandment.\u201d<\/p>\n But Korn also points out that the rabbinic traditions dealt with this moral problem in two ways. First, it determined that since the Assyrians forced the intermarriage of their conquered peoples, and the Canaanites were among them, it was impossible after Sennacherib to trace any people who were still purely Canaanite. Hence this biblical command was no longer applicable.<\/p>\n Second, the Talmud contains a story that Moses saw the moral problem, and argued with God about the justice of killing the innocent. According to the story, God allowed Moses to provide for Canaanites an escape route if they were willing to make peace.<\/p>\n Maimonides picked up on these cues and proclaimed that the commandment to make war on the Canaanites should be observed only if there were Canaanites who refused to make peace.<\/p>\n Korn\u2019s larger lesson is that every religious text that seems morally problematic must be evaluated by the way it has been interpreted in the religious community that uses that text. In this case, the Jewish rabbinic tradition constructed a categorical and non-falsifiable religious law that these texts about the Canaanites could be used only in just wars or in self-defense.<\/p>\n In a day when religious violence makes the news almost every day, this book is an important read. William Cavanaugh argues that the idea that religious violence is caused primarily by religion is a myth. Schlomo Fischer (Hebrew University) uses Rene Gerard\u2019s theory about sacrifice and communal violence to explore relations between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. Don Seeman unpacks Jewish understandings of the honor\/shame dynamic, including considerations of God\u2019s honor. Christopher Leighton studies the ways in which Christians have used the Cain-Abel story against Jews. Eric Gregory (Princeton) employs the Good Samaritan parable and Christian just war theory to argue for humanitarian intervention in international conflict.<\/p>\n