Why I'm Not Ripping Genocide out of My Bible

We desperately need the book of Joshua in our Bibles. We need it because it is so plainly abhorrent:

They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys (Joshua 6.1, NRSV)

It gets worse. This bloodthirsty violence was not only based on God’s command, but on God’s threat of abandonment if the destruction is not total and ruthless:

I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction (Joshua 7.12b)

I am speechless recalling this was all part of the children’s story (!!) of marching around Jericho, and I grew up not giving it a second thought. Holy shit! (I use the words quite deliberately and specifically.) How is this possible? What were we all thinking?

In the first of my series on “Holy Eavesdropping,” I made the throw-away comment that I felt that holy eavesdropping gave me the confidence to question texts without trashing them, even if they were genocidal commands coming from the God who is Love. I decided that this comment may have needed follow-up.

So, I’ll confirm: I do not regret that these words are in our sacred text, but I’m stunned by the silence of our leaders and elders about these texts (even in the non-violent, Mennonite church in which I grew up)

.I completely understand the urge to rip these verses out of our Bibles. The trouble is that if we do rip them out, it wouldn’t be long until we were telling ourselves that those violent urges are what others want or do (you know: Nazis, Islamic jihadists, white supremacist Zionists – “them”). Whereas we have only peace and love in us. But c’mon, ‘fess up: haven’t you been itching to pray down some brimstone lately? Just a little? Don’t we at least feel the urge inside of us?

It's insanely frustrating when our visions of shalom, of peace and prosperity, are blocked by others who get in the way. They’re such good visions! But “others” keep seeing things differently from us and doing things wrong! Can’t you judge them a little, God – like, right now? Just say the word, and as long as it’s on you, we can drop a bomb to do your work. We can always dehumanise them first to take the sting out of it.

A wise and good part of us knows that we’ll never cleanse anything with an act of violence, nor will we ever pave the way for peace by destroying those that block our visions for paradise. It’s never worked, and it never will. Any God remotely worth loving knew that long before we did.

But another part of us is frustrated by the long and painful road to building peace. And we surely don’t want to suffer the violence of others or even give up part of our desires. So, we imagine/project that God (because the murderous urges couldn’t have started in our own hearts…) says “Enough!” and hands us a sword. And since it’s God’s command, some magic will convert all the hate and gore to peaceful bliss and goodness.

Both of these parts are reflected in sacred texts because they’re in all of us humans, and it’s crucial that we remember that we need to look continually at these texts and say, “Hey kids. What’s going on here? It sounds like God is some monster wanting soldiers to massacre all these women and kids and old folks (not to mention animals and even men – who may count too). What’s going on here? Would we love and trust a God like that?” Every generation at least (and probably a lot more often), we need to face these texts and the evil in us that they reveal – and name what’s exposed for what it is: a plain evil that we actively need to resist because we will never completely purge it from our own individual or collective souls.