Making Sense of the God of the Old Testament [sic]
Just a brief note this morning, as we begin the journey into the Book of Joshua...
These parts of the Hebrew Bible get pretty violent, and bring me back to that wrestle I mentioned earlier in our journey-- about whether God really wanted the Israelites to be so brutal, or if the Israelites needed their God to be so brutal...and so that is how they depicted God...
When "you" are a theocentric and ethnocentristic nation, struggling for survival, located in a small piece of fertile land, between global superpowers who are ever battling one another, and either invading you in order to battle one another, or seizing you for the sake of strategic positioning, "you" need a god/God who can be a mighty warrior on your behalf... That is the interpretation of God that we encounter, especially in these books that depict the invasion of the Promised Land (Joshua), and then the settling in of the Israelites as they organize themselves in this new, non-nomadic, reality. To say that we will encounter genocide is no exaggeration.
One of our fellow readers, Elizabeth Parrotte, is reading with a different schedule, and is already through Joshua and into Judges. Her take on this has a perspective on rhetoric as well:
"I am also sure that when these stories were written, there was a lot of exaggeration involved. They were, after all, trying to convince people that the God of Israel was the one true God. I'm sure the number dead was not such a great number, just as I'm sure that the number of people who wandered through the desert was not such a huge number simply for logistical reasons. Among other issues, how could only one tent of meeting (portable synagogue) service that many people? What about human waste with a camp that size? What about the animal waste? Yes, God could easily feed that many people with manna, but that doesn't explain other things. Those numbers are greatly inflated. I'm sure the amount of death and defeat is exaggerated as well."
Thanks for letting me share that, Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, the good folks at St. Thomas' in Ft. Washington, PA, who started the Bible Challenge, are hosting a conference at the end of April, entitled, "Making sense of the God of the Old Testament."
Here's some information. I wish I could go, and that I could bring all of you. I will connect with my colleague, Marek Zabriskie, and find out if any of it will be web-casted or otherwise recorded.
