When the Bible doesn't say what the Bible says it says
So, this comes from a tangent on p.3 of this thread, and is primarily for my own curiosity and clarification. Hosts, if this is too well-trodden ground, I apologize.
The OT book of 1 Samuel includes the story of King Saul and the Amalekites. According to the text, God, through the prophet Samuel, commands Saul to annihilate the Amalekites. Every man, woman, child, infant, and beast owned by the Amalekites is to be put to the sword. There are to be no exceptions.
Here's exhibit A, clipped form a longer post:
So, this seems a little freewheeling to me. The Bible says God ordered it, but we can just decide we don't think so? How does this work? I prodded:
It seems it works via straightforward rejection in the face of clear text. But why do this? The questionable historicity disclaimer is interesting, but that's a pretty slippery slope, and includes far more important things for Christians like the census requiring Joseph to take his family to Bethlehem. Anyway, @Nick Tamen to the rescue re: the Amalekites:
So, the failure of Saul & the Israelites to achieve the directive renders the directive itself as questionable? Saul and the Israelite people did spare the Amalekite king (Agag) and the best of the livestock, the latter intended for sacrifice, but the most important consequence was: Saul lost his kingship. Later in the book of Esther, Haman, an Agagite (allegedly Agag had a bit of fun during his captivity) caused a whole new set of issues for the Israelites in Persia, but we don't need to go there. @Nick Tamen continued a few posts later:
A different angle on the idea that the text may well say a particular thing, but can't we do better than that? What do we make of the traditions that don't reject literalism? If the standard moral of the story is that God prefers obedience to sacrifice (hello, Abraham and Isaac), does nothing else matter as long as we get that bit? How much Bible should we feel free to disregard?
The OT book of 1 Samuel includes the story of King Saul and the Amalekites. According to the text, God, through the prophet Samuel, commands Saul to annihilate the Amalekites. Every man, woman, child, infant, and beast owned by the Amalekites is to be put to the sword. There are to be no exceptions.
Here's exhibit A, clipped form a longer post:
The bloodshed to me is just sort of par for the course in terms of the time period. I don't think God ordered such things either way, but it's not like other Near East/Middle East civilisations of the time didn't also carry out such things.
So, this seems a little freewheeling to me. The Bible says God ordered it, but we can just decide we don't think so? How does this work? I prodded:
I didn't say that the text doesn't say that God ordered such things, I said that *I* don't think that God ordered such things. I don't see why I'm somehow obligated to believe that everything that the Bible says that God ordered actually was ordered by God. There is also debate about the historical reality portrayed in the OT - for example, it's generally agreed by historians that the Hebrews were not enslaved in Egypt and that pyramids were built by paid workers.A plain reading of the OT demonstrates that God explicitly ordered such things. There's really no way around that. And the idea that genocide was just a product of the time or that since it was commonly done we can just shrug it off doesn't help.
It seems it works via straightforward rejection in the face of clear text. But why do this? The questionable historicity disclaimer is interesting, but that's a pretty slippery slope, and includes far more important things for Christians like the census requiring Joseph to take his family to Bethlehem. Anyway, @Nick Tamen to the rescue re: the Amalekites:
Nick Tamen wrote: »To me, the interesting thing is that despite the (reportedly) divine commands to annihilate entire nations, the text makes clear that those commands were not followed, and that unlike other failures to follow other commands in the Hebrew Scriptures, the failure to follow the command to annihilate entire nations appears to have brought no consequence on the people of Israel. That’s one reason I’m reluctant to take those parts of the Hebrew Scriptures at face value.A plain reading of the OT demonstrates that God explicitly ordered such things. There's really no way around that. And the idea that genocide was just a product of the time or that since it was commonly done we can just shrug it off doesn't help.
So, the failure of Saul & the Israelites to achieve the directive renders the directive itself as questionable? Saul and the Israelite people did spare the Amalekite king (Agag) and the best of the livestock, the latter intended for sacrifice, but the most important consequence was: Saul lost his kingship. Later in the book of Esther, Haman, an Agagite (allegedly Agag had a bit of fun during his captivity) caused a whole new set of issues for the Israelites in Persia, but we don't need to go there. @Nick Tamen continued a few posts later:
Nick Tamen wrote: »“Reportedly” was simply an acknowledgement that the text does indeed say God commanded the annihilation of nations, but that I come from a tradition that does not require me take that literally or at face value, but that instead encourages some wrestling with the text to try and discern what’s really going on and what the church is to do with those texts.What is 'reportedly'? Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain!
A different angle on the idea that the text may well say a particular thing, but can't we do better than that? What do we make of the traditions that don't reject literalism? If the standard moral of the story is that God prefers obedience to sacrifice (hello, Abraham and Isaac), does nothing else matter as long as we get that bit? How much Bible should we feel free to disregard?
Comments
We can’t really harmonise those views, nor should we try. It may be a controversial word, but a perfectly proper reading of the Bible shows that the understanding of God has evolved. Not in a straight line way, but nevertheless it has changed.
Of course for some people this raises big questions of what it means for the Bible to be inspired, authorised, trustworthy. I think it’s better to face those questions honestly, rather than try to formalise the whole text on the basis that it must present a consistent view of God.
As someone who would probably be seen as very much on the "liberal" side (though I hate labels and have refused for many years to be restricted by them), I would gently challenge the use of the word "disregard".
All of the Bible helps us to understand the story of how the Jewish faith came into existence and gradually evolved. Along the way, we can see (especially in the light of the teachings of Jesus) that people went down a wrong path, even while claiming that God had told them to do it.
Are there bits of the Bible where we can now say "that was wrong"? Of course. The instructions to carry out genocide; the commands for Jews returning from exile to abandon non-Jewish spouses - just to mention two. But this is not disregarding but using the light of Christ to show us better ways to be and to act. We need to pay attention to these bits of the Bible precisely so that we can say "In Christ - no! There is a better way."
So, it’s not that the failure to carry out the command makes the command suspect. It’s that the fact that the failure incurred no consequences can lead to questioning whether the commander was accurately recorded to start with. Is it reporting what God actually commanded, or are the authors’ own understandings and biases creeping in, and do we need to recognize and work through that?
Beyond that, I generally agree with what @Barnabas62 said. Beyond that, I’d say we all have a starting place when it comes to reading and understanding Scripture. For some, that starting place involves understandings of literally accuracy throughout, and/or what is sometimes called infallibility, though that term can mean different things to different people. For myself, I don’t come from a tradition that expects either of those things.
For me, the starting points include, in no particular order:
- When I was ordained a deacon, and later when I was ordained an elder, one of the questions I had to answer in the affirmative was “Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?” For me, that sets up a guiding framework that starts with the understanding that the purpose of Scripture is to witness to Jesus, and that witness to Jesus must be the lens through which everything is read and understood.
- Figurative language, including things like metaphor and exaggeration/hyperbole, are a thing and have always been a thing. Cultural differences may make it harder for us to pick up on those aspects of ancient writings. I think myth (in a strict sense of the word) is often at play. All of which is to say, I think there pets of Scripture we’re not meant to take literally.
- I think it’s noteworthy that the new name given Jacob, which will be born by the people descended from him, is Israel, a reference to Jacob’s wrestling with God. I think the Scriptures, perhaps the Hebrew Scriptures in particular, are designed to be texts we wrestle with, struggle with, work through, meditate on, to try to figure out what’s really going on beneath the surface.
I could say more, but that’s probably more than enough for now, except to add that like @Rufus T Firefly, I’d challenge the idea that we can disregard parts of Scripture when we want to, or that that’s what people who don’t take a particular bit of Scripture at face value are doing.It all requires interpretation, without exception. And it may say what it says, but that does not equate to God saying it.
It does make me think, though, of something that I meant to put in my earlier (long) email, and that is I find it can be helpful to examine how rabbinic Judaism has interpreted these difficult passages, particularly in the Talmud, the Midrash and the like. My experience is such writings rarely take such texts at face value.
The New Testament is a collection of documents that the early church considered to have been written by eyewitnesses to Jesus or by those with direct access to eyewitness testimony or by Paul.
As with all documents, the meaning of the text depends on the questions you put to the text. The Church continued to use the Jewish scriptures and gathered them into the Old Testament on the belief that if you put the question, 'what witness do you bear to Jesus?' you'l could get a meaningful answer. There was no guarantee that the answer would come from a literal face value reading of the text. (This was the classical world: allegorical readings of texts were habitual.)
Only problem is that by that measure, historically the church has largely failed.
Then again, with all the crusades and religious genocide and everything else, that checks out.
A story
The Parable of the Two Portraits
There once was a village painter named Miriam who was famous for her portraits. One day she unveiled a massive canvas of the King—stern eyes, square jaw, thunderclouds gathering behind him. The villagers gasped. “He looks terrifying!” they whispered. “Best behave.”
Years passed, and Miriam unveiled a second portrait of the same King. This one showed him laughing with children, kneeling beside the sick, sharing bread with beggars. The villagers gasped again. “This can’t be the same man,” they said. “One of these must be wrong.”
So they marched to Miriam’s studio and demanded an explanation.
Miriam sighed, set down her brush, and said, “You’re judging the King by two snapshots taken at different moments. The first portrait shows him riding into battle to protect you. The second shows him at rest, revealing his heart. Same King. Different moments. You just didn’t see the whole story.”
“But why didn’t you paint the gentle one first?” they asked.
“Because,” she said, “you wouldn’t have trusted his gentleness until you knew he could fight for you. And you wouldn’t understand his strength until you saw how he chose to use it.”
The villagers looked back and forth between the portraits. Slowly, the two images began to merge in their minds—justice and mercy, power and tenderness, one King all along.
And Miriam smiled, because at last they were seeing him clearly.