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Have any of you read (or heard of) a book named "The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy," by Eric A. Seibert? If some of the stuff within the Old Testament bothers you, then I highly recommend it. I just posted a review to my blog, if you’re interested:

http://in-fide-scientiam.com/2013/09/29 ... testament/

tomhardman wrote:Have any of you read (or heard of) a book named "The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy," by Eric A. Seibert? If some of the stuff within the Old Testament bothers you, then I highly recommend it. I just posted a review to my blog, if you’re interested:

http://in-fide-scientiam.com/2013/09/29 ... testament/

your review linked to Amazon book seller with its quick summary where i read"or indeed violence carried out or commanded by God–from Cain’s murder of Abel" etc..

What kind of reading thinks God commanded Cain to murder? Well perhaps the the book does not descend to that sort of stupidity. It does sound like it seeks to oversimplify difficult history. I sympathize with questioning things but I doubt the problem of war is solved by saying we should be nice. It might help the world if people put more effort into nice though.

Exodus 15:20 then Miriam the prophetess ,Aaron's sister, took a tombourine in her hand and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing Miriam sang to them:

Sing to the Lord
for he is highly exalted
the horse and rider
he has hurled into the sea.

I think this is real and a nonviolent reading is just a bit of hot house pretend. People who live in the most powerful nation and can hire lots of often poor young men to do the grunt work of violent defense can afford to sit and pretend nonviolence in some classroom. People in the old Testament were living in a small group surrounded by large powerful and violent societies who were a constant threat to Isreals survival. Military success was desperately longed for. Sure the Old Testament has excess, it has barbaric laws, it has outlandish folklore like the flood but as a member of the human family a person should be capable of empathy with the desire for military success. They were a people who could not take military security for granted.

I can see a lot of the violence in the old Testament as a direct reflection of peoples yearning for safety in a world with violent thug armies demanding constant payment under threat or worse.

Yet there is clearly a deeper layer of violence which is emotionally and morally troubling. Israel is understood as having been elected in part to execute judgment upon evil in the world and are supposed to possess zeal and courage to complete this destructive task. I think this troubling dimension is a fundamental aspect of Old Testament theology and as distasteful as it is simply trying to remove or change that seriously damages any meaning in the book.

I think the flood is fictional but to understand the story one must remain within the framework of the fiction. The people destroyed in the flood had become so destructively evil that their end is the only positive possiblity. This is not a question of whether there was some time when everybody was like that. Searching for such a time is like looking for Oz. But theme repeats in the old testament in events which at least border on real history, invasion of Canaan and fights with groups in the area. I do not know a ready escape from the puzzle of doubting the people destroyed were so far committed to evil and violence to justify their destruction. Yet the Bible story understands them to be just that. We have no real evidence to assess that judgment beyond the memory of the Biblical people.

Whether Israeal wielding the sword of judgment is justified or not their understanding of themselves in those terms created an important question for themselves. How can they possibly live to not be under the same judegement they have meted out to others?. What is real virtue and what hope humans have for such a society is the heart of that question. I believe that question best answered by Jesus but others have looked in the same direction as well. This question historically exists as an outflow from the violence of the Old Testament. That may not be a happy observation but it is part of the human condition.