Religion and Violence in Western Traditions

Selected Studies

André Gagné, Jennifer Guyver, Gerbern S. Oegema, André Gagné, Jennifer Guyver, Gerbern S. Oegema

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000409086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Intolerance, Persecution & Conflict

This book examines the connection between religion and violence in the Western traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths, from ancient to modern times. It addresses a gap in the scholarly debate on the nature of religious violence by bringing scholars that specialize in pre-modern religions and scriptural traditions into the same sphere of discussion as those specializing in contemporary manifestations of religious violence.

Moving beyond the question of the "authenticity" of religious violence, this book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines. Contributors explore the central role that religious texts have played in encouraging, as well as confronting, violence. The interdisciplinary conversation that takes place challenges assumptions that religious violence is a modern problem that can be fully understood without reference to religious scriptures, beliefs, or history. Each chapter focuses its analysis on a particular case study from a distinct historical period. Taken as a whole, these chapters attest to the persistent relationship between religion and violence that links the ancient and contemporary worlds.

This is a dynamic collection of explorations into how religion and violence intersect. As such, it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Theology and Religion and Violence, as well as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies.

1 “I will be an enemy to your enemies”: the genocidal ideal in the Hebrew Bible and its legacy

Frances Flannery

DOI: 10.4324/9780367487379-1

“War is the coward’s escape from the problems of peace.”

William Sloane Coffin Jr.

Introduction

Most sophisticated researchers recognize that the majority of religions contain both violent and peaceful elements in their doctrines. Attempting to rate how violent a particular religion actually is rests on accounting that is simply too complex to determine, for, as Johan Galtung has argued, violence comes in many forms: personal and structural, intentional and unintentional, manifest and latent, physical as well as psychological (Galtung 1969). Thus, this analysis is not meant to assert that the Jewish scriptures are any more violent than those of another religion, but only that significant themes of violence are indeed present in these scriptures, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Even if, like Lemos (2017), we limit our definition of violence to intentional physical harm inflicted on persons without their consent (16), the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature outside of the canon are rife with violence – including child sacrifice and perhaps cannibalism of children, arguably the most immoral form of violence.¹ However, while the Bible and contemporary Jewish scriptures contain a surfeit of violent images and acts, these scriptures certainly also contain visions of peace, mercy, and reconciliation that stand in tension with the violence.

The present analysis focuses on one motif of violence among many in the Hebrew Bible and literature of early Judaism: the ideal of divinely sanctioned intra-group violence that aspires to the complete extermination of the evil or contaminating “other” – i.e., genocide. The Torah promotes a genocidal ideal as an aspect of regional physical warfare, a view that is taken up again in the writings of the prophet Ezekiel and transformed into genocide with a global reach. In turn, this portrait influences the Jewish apocalyptic tradition outside of the canon, especially the Qumran sectarian scrolls, such as the War Scroll (1QM), where genocide is projected onto a cosmic, supra-global scale. While the prophetic and apocalyptic portraits of genocidal fantasies thankfully never fully came to pass, the scriptures’ dangerous repository of violent theologies have at times motivated actual acts of violence. This is the case whether the interpreters looking back at these texts lived during the first and second-century Jewish Wars with Rome, during European colonization of the Americas, or in a 1980s American white nationalist Christian Identity group that named their camp Zarephath-Horeb (Flannery 2016, 75).

Enemy formation, identity, and violence in the Hebrew Bible

Practically the whole Torah and Prophets may be read through the lens of identity politics – who is included among or excluded from those who consider themselves to be the righteous. The first covenant with Abraham establishes a paradigm in which nations will be judged by the one God according to how they treat Israel. God promises, “I will bless those who bless you, and the ones who curse you I will curse” (Gen 12:3a). Thereafter, any divine violence that comes upon the enemies of Israel fulfils not only an expressive function of conveying that God is on the side of Israel but also an instrumental function of vanquishing the enemies of Israel (Riches 1986, 11).²

The covenant with Moses in Exodus establishes further moral and ritual criteria for being blessed by God: if Israel keeps all the mitzvot (commandments) of the covenant and listens to the angel that God sent to lead them, they will be considered righteous. Their enemies will now be God’s enemies and God, his angel, and all the forces on God’s side will fight those enemies: “… if you obey [the angel] and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes (וְאָיַבְתִּי אֶת–אֹיְבֶיךָ וְצַרְתִּי אֶת–צֹרְרֶיךָ) (Exod 23:22). The nouns for “enemy” and “foe” are used as verbs enacted by God, literally: I will “enemy” your enemies and I will “foe” your foes. The context is divinely decreed identification of the “other” that takes on clear ethno-national contours:

When my angel goes before you, and brings you to the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I annihilate them (וְהִכְחַדְתִּיו)… I will send forth my terror (אֵימָתִי) before you, and I will throw into panic all the people among whom you come… I will drive them out before you little by little, until you have increased and possess the land… (Exod 23:23–24, 27–30 JPS, italics added for emphasis).

On one side are the indigenous inhabitants, divided into ethnic groups. On the other are Israel, God, the angel of God, God’s terror, and a plague or maybe hornets (הַצִּרְעָה) (Exod 23:28). The enemies are not simply an inconvenience because they occupy the land God has picked for Israel. Rather, their lack of this particular covenant with the one true God de facto makes them immoral: “They shall not remain in your land, lest they cause you to sin against Me; for you will serve their gods – and it will prove a snare to you” (Exod 23:33). For this reason, the people of Israel are instructed to tear down the indigenous peoples’ religious monuments (Exod 23:24) and displace them, taking over their land. The moral argument here is weak: the people that are already in the land are wicked because Israel wants to invade the land and because Israel practices a different religion. The logic rests on the premises that God gave a covenant to Israel, stands with them if they obey it, and has made their foes God’s own foes. Israel’s very identity as God’s people is wrapped up in having enemies to defeat.

Ḥerem as sacralized violence

Additional portions of the Torah and Prophets repeatedly employ monotheism to justify harsh treatment of the enemy other, claiming that being a threat or obstacle to Israel is tantamount to being positioned against the one true God. Deuteronomy brings this logic to its full completion by enshrining the practice of ḥerem or “ban” warfare in sacralized, theological terms. The relevant passage is worth quoting in full:

… For it is the LORD your God who marches with you to do battle for you against your enemy (אֹיְבֵיכֶם), to bring you victory… When you approach a town to attack it, you shall call on it to surrender. If it responds peaceably and lets you in, all the people present there shall serve you at forced labor (לָמַס וַעֲבָדְוּךָ). If it does not surrender to you, but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it; and when the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword (לְפִי–חָרֶב) (Deut 20:4, 11–13 JPS).

For cities that are far away, the offer of forced labour should be made – this is what this biblical book defines as “peace” (תַשְׁלִים). If a faraway city “does not respond peaceably” by surrendering and instead defends itself against Israelite aggression, then all the males should be killed – with no distinction made between combatants or non-combatants. What the text goes on to say is even more striking, in that women, children, and cattle and “all that is in the town” are called “booty” or “spoils” (שְׁלָלָהּ תָּבֹז). Most translations, such as the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, translate what follows along the lines of saying you shall “enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the LORD your God gives you. Thus, you shall deal with all towns that lie very far from you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout.” In fact, the text literally states, “you shall eat (וְאָכַלְתָּ) the spoil of your enemies (אֶת–שְׁלַל אֹיְבֶיךָ)” (Deut 20:14), after having just used “spoil” to refer to cattle, children, and women. While this is hopefully metaphorical imagery and not the language of human sacrifice,³ at the very least we know from Deuteronomy 21:10–14 that wartime activity in towns far away includes taking girls and women as forced concubines, which means rape.

This cruel and irrational biblical justification for violence has had a long and actual legacy, notably in the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. Drawing on an earlier Muslim use of Deuteronomy 20, Spanish conquerors were required by papal decree to recite the Requiremento to Native Americans as an offer of conversion, but in a different language and from a distance, such as from a boat or outside a camp. The enemy’s failure to convert and surrender under these circumstances placed them in the category of towns far away that refused conversion, which was considered biblical justification for slaughter, enslavement, and/or rape (Newman 2016, 130–131).

Chapter 20:11–13 is actually the more lenient case in Deuteronomy. For cities in the land close to Israelite base camp, “which the LORD your God is giving you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive (לֹא תְחַיֶּה כָּל–נְשָׁמָה)” (Deut 20:16). The text continues, “No, you must proscribe (כִּי–הַחֲרֵם תַּחֲרִימֵם) them,” by killing every living being (Deut 20:17). This is not presented as an option, but rather as what “the LORD your God has commanded you, lest they lead you in doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods and you stand guilty before the LORD your God” (Deut 20:18).

This warfare of total annihilation was not unique to ancient Israel; it is also known from the Mesha stele, which documents that the kingdom of Moab conducted the practice (Lemos 2017). This late monument, usually dated to around 840 B.C.E., tells us that King Mesha of Moab killed “seven thousand adult men and grn, adult women, grt, and rchmt – for I performed ḥerem for Ashtar-Khemosh (Ins. 1–2, –47, 14–17).” Thus Mesha equates ḥerem with the wholesale slaughter of men, women, gurin and gurot. Lemos convincingly argues that the latter two terms refer infant boys and girls, which fits thematically (and tragically) with killing pregnant women or reḥamot (52–53).

It is unclear whether the Deuteronomic model for ḥerem warfare was only an ideal aimed at controlling insiders, particularly as several competing literary strata are woven into the main passage in Deuteronomy 20 (Collins 2004, 14–16; 2015, 193). The narrative of the conquest of the land in the 13th–12th centuries B.C.E. likely stemmed from a later period, as late as the 7th–5th centuries B.C.E., in the context of a time of Israelite warfare. However, the Mesha stele provides some evidence that ancient Near Eastern peoples did in fact practice ḥerem (Hoffman 1999; Lemos 2017). Leviticus is unambiguous about the meaning of ḥerem, translated here as “proscribed” but which is perhaps better translated as specially consecrated (to the LORD, a state enacted by death): “… every proscribed (כָּל–חֵרֶם) is totally consecrated (קֹדֶשׁ–קָדָשִׁים) to the LORD. No human being who has been proscribed (כָּל–חֵרֶם אֲשֶׁר יָחֳרַם) can be ransomed: he shall be put to death (מוֹת יוּמָת) (Lev. 27:28–29).” We, therefore, cannot rule out the existence of the actual practice of ḥerem in ancient Israel’s warfare.

Regardless, the enduring theological influence that frames ḥerem violence as sacred may leave an even more destructive legacy than the actual practice of mass killing. The persons and objects set apart for destruction are cast as an acceptable sacrifice to God. Extermination takes place within a ritual, cultic dimension that casts victimhood as an act of valuation, as noted by Niditch, who understands well that “The ban as sacrifice requires a wider view of God who appreciates human sacrifice…” (Niditch 1993, 50). She rightly identifies the insidious core of the ritual: “the ban validates the enemy as human and most valuable and does not turn him into a monster worthy of destruction” (Niditch 1993, 49–50).⁴ Thus, no appeal to mercy or morality is a suitable argument against wholesale slaughter if that slaughter is cast as a divine honour.

The prophet Isaiah describes the ḥerem of the Edomites as a sacrifice and likens the human victims to sacrificial animals:

For it is satiated, my sword in the heavens. Behold, upon Edom it descends and upon a people my ḥerem (חֶרְמִי) [descends] for judgment. The sword of Yahweh is full of blood; it is engorged with fat. From the blood of lambs and he-goats, from the fat of the kidneys of rams. Because there is a sacrifice (זֶבַח) for Yahweh in Bozrah, a great slaughter (וְטֶבַח גָּדוֹל) in the land of Edom. (Isa 34:5, English translation Lemos 2017, 54–55)

In fact, the text appears to indicate that the sacrifice of humans occurred alongside that of animals: “And wild oxen have descended with them, and steers…” (Isa. 34: 5–7). Humans and cows, sacrificed together to please God, lose any right to personal autonomy, or personhood, as Lemos (2017) has aptly termed it. They are no longer a subject, but an object, a “proscribed thing” (כָּל–חֵרֶם) that must be killed and is therefore the holiest of holy things (קֹדֶשׁ–קָדָשִׁים) (Lev. 27:28)....