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Violence in Scripture
The Bible frequently depicts God as angry and violent, and also sometimes depicts human violence as positive or even as commanded by God. This forms one of the most vexing problems in approaching Scripture and in interpreting the Bible for preaching and teaching today. In this volume, Creach first examines the theological problems of violence and categorizes the types of violence that appear in scripture. Then, he wrestles with the most important biblical texts on violence to work through specific interpretational issues. This new volume in the Interpretation: Resources for Use of Scripture in the Church series will help preachers and pastors interpret those difficult texts, encouraging them to face violence in the Bible with honesty.
- GenresOld Testament
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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52 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 24, 2014
A biblical-theological treatment of the topic. Creach's views on Scripture and the date of various biblical books reflect the mainstream critical consensus. He limits "righteousness" and "wickedness" in the Old testament too much to political and economic considerations. Nonetheless, it it a thoughtful study and will repay the discerning reader. I have a full-length review in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
January 30, 2014
Violence in Scripture
Interpretation: Resources for the use of scripture in the church
Author: Jerome F. Creach
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Date Published: 2013
Price: $35.00 Hardback (US dollars)
ISBN: 9780664231453
Number of pages: 302
According to the author, this book is a response to 9/11 and to the critics who say there is too much violence in religion. The criticism seems to have originally focused on the faith of the 9/11 terrorists, but before long some people complained about the violence in the Bible. I am really confused – were Christians behind 9/11? Have Christians said to anyone – “you must convert to Christianity or have your head chopped off?” When I was about 12 years old I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. Even then, I understood the violence in the Bible and recognized that it didn’t tell me to “kill the infidels”. Yes, there is violence in the Bible but there is violence all around us. Yes, God did some violent things and ordered some violent things, but there was a reason. Personally, I don’t see the need for this book. Common sense (yes, I know it isn’t common anymore) should end the discussion except for those who thrive on causing conflict and creating misunderstandings where none exist.
If I could rate this book less than 1 star, I would. I find the author’s views so far from traditional Christianity that I am amazed he is writing “Christian” books. He does not take as literal most of the historic events in the Bible. To him they are figurative descriptions given to explain a larger goal being accomplished by God. While I do believe that most events in the Bible also have a spiritual application, I still believe they literally happened. In looking at his credentials one would think he would be a strong, knowledgeable Bible scholar. However, while reading “Violence in Scripture” I kept getting the idea either he never really bought into basic Christianity, or else lost his way somewhere along the path. While reading the book I kept getting the feeling “I have heard this somewhere before”. I finally figured it out. Satan said to Eve in the garden, “Did God really say that?” In this book the author says “Did God really do that?”
At first I thought I would take each point where I had disagreement and give my counter argument. But as I read on, I couldn’t find anything on which we agreed. Also, because I know that very few people read really long book reviews, I decided it wasn’t a profitable use of my time. If you choose to read the book, you will either agree with the author or disagree with him.
One other point, the author did two things in the book that smacked of blatant disrespect. Every instance of the word “God” in the book is spelled with a small “g”. At first I thought it was just because of an uncorrected proof copy. But amazingly all sentences began with a capital letter. All other proper nouns were capitalized. It felt deliberate. Also, the author used the term “BCE” (Before the Common Era) in place of “BC” (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) instead of AD (Anno Domini/year of our Lord). Since this is a book commenting on Biblical scripture it seems strange that the newly devised, liberal and non-Biblical (some call it atheistic) terms would be used. It is at the very least a concession to political correctness.
I do not recommend this book. But I do thank Westminster John Knox Press for providing the book free of charge for review.
I was provided a free copy of this book for review from Westminster John Knox Press. I was under no obligation to provide a favorable review.
Interpretation: Resources for the use of scripture in the church
Author: Jerome F. Creach
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Date Published: 2013
Price: $35.00 Hardback (US dollars)
ISBN: 9780664231453
Number of pages: 302
According to the author, this book is a response to 9/11 and to the critics who say there is too much violence in religion. The criticism seems to have originally focused on the faith of the 9/11 terrorists, but before long some people complained about the violence in the Bible. I am really confused – were Christians behind 9/11? Have Christians said to anyone – “you must convert to Christianity or have your head chopped off?” When I was about 12 years old I read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. Even then, I understood the violence in the Bible and recognized that it didn’t tell me to “kill the infidels”. Yes, there is violence in the Bible but there is violence all around us. Yes, God did some violent things and ordered some violent things, but there was a reason. Personally, I don’t see the need for this book. Common sense (yes, I know it isn’t common anymore) should end the discussion except for those who thrive on causing conflict and creating misunderstandings where none exist.
If I could rate this book less than 1 star, I would. I find the author’s views so far from traditional Christianity that I am amazed he is writing “Christian” books. He does not take as literal most of the historic events in the Bible. To him they are figurative descriptions given to explain a larger goal being accomplished by God. While I do believe that most events in the Bible also have a spiritual application, I still believe they literally happened. In looking at his credentials one would think he would be a strong, knowledgeable Bible scholar. However, while reading “Violence in Scripture” I kept getting the idea either he never really bought into basic Christianity, or else lost his way somewhere along the path. While reading the book I kept getting the feeling “I have heard this somewhere before”. I finally figured it out. Satan said to Eve in the garden, “Did God really say that?” In this book the author says “Did God really do that?”
At first I thought I would take each point where I had disagreement and give my counter argument. But as I read on, I couldn’t find anything on which we agreed. Also, because I know that very few people read really long book reviews, I decided it wasn’t a profitable use of my time. If you choose to read the book, you will either agree with the author or disagree with him.
One other point, the author did two things in the book that smacked of blatant disrespect. Every instance of the word “God” in the book is spelled with a small “g”. At first I thought it was just because of an uncorrected proof copy. But amazingly all sentences began with a capital letter. All other proper nouns were capitalized. It felt deliberate. Also, the author used the term “BCE” (Before the Common Era) in place of “BC” (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) instead of AD (Anno Domini/year of our Lord). Since this is a book commenting on Biblical scripture it seems strange that the newly devised, liberal and non-Biblical (some call it atheistic) terms would be used. It is at the very least a concession to political correctness.
I do not recommend this book. But I do thank Westminster John Knox Press for providing the book free of charge for review.
I was provided a free copy of this book for review from Westminster John Knox Press. I was under no obligation to provide a favorable review.
January 30, 2018
Creach's book is far from being perfect, but it is a more than adequate guide for interpreters in tackling difficult passages in Scripture that seem to support violence. Creach's main thesis is that God does not condone violence and the Bible does not encourage it; violence is humanity's attempt at usurping God's own authority, justice, and righteousness. In the first chapter he presents careful, nuanced interpretations of Eden, Cain & Abel, Noah, and the Tower of Babel that set the tone for the book. God does not create out of war and chaos (like in the Enuma Elish), but out of peace and cooperation.
Then Creach gives attention to the war against Pharoah & Amalek, the "ban" (total destruction of Canaanites), Israelite conquest, period of the Judges, Elijah & Elisha, prophetic oracles against the nations, imprecatory Psalms, and other seemingly violent passages of the Old Testament. His argument has some weaknesses; for example, by attributing Joshua to the time of Josiah, he skirts around the issue of the ban by attributing the narrative to a powerless people who saw "destruction" as a rooting out of idolatry rather than a literal killing of people. Intriguingly, he then finds much in common with Origen, whose position he describes at length. The whole book then is then concluded by comments on the Sermon on the Mount.
I enjoyed this book and learned much, though Creach could have spent much more time on the Theology of the Cross and suffering of God than he did. As I mention above, he also makes too many exegetical suppositions in his interpretation of Joshua (and 1 Sam. 15). The frequency of words like "probably" and "most likely" give these portions away as being the weakest of his arguments.
Then Creach gives attention to the war against Pharoah & Amalek, the "ban" (total destruction of Canaanites), Israelite conquest, period of the Judges, Elijah & Elisha, prophetic oracles against the nations, imprecatory Psalms, and other seemingly violent passages of the Old Testament. His argument has some weaknesses; for example, by attributing Joshua to the time of Josiah, he skirts around the issue of the ban by attributing the narrative to a powerless people who saw "destruction" as a rooting out of idolatry rather than a literal killing of people. Intriguingly, he then finds much in common with Origen, whose position he describes at length. The whole book then is then concluded by comments on the Sermon on the Mount.
I enjoyed this book and learned much, though Creach could have spent much more time on the Theology of the Cross and suffering of God than he did. As I mention above, he also makes too many exegetical suppositions in his interpretation of Joshua (and 1 Sam. 15). The frequency of words like "probably" and "most likely" give these portions away as being the weakest of his arguments.
August 8, 2022
There is so much in this book that offers a fresh perspective and new approach to difficult passages; it is not the standard rehash of evangelical special pleading. This is a work from someone who takes scripture seriously but doesn't think this means taking it all literally/historically, and also someone who allows morality to have some play in his interpretations, rather than declaring that good and justice are whatever God does or commands, so if the bible says God tortures babies for fun and tells parents to rape their children, then this would be good and just, and we have no right to question and quibble.
Much could be said, below are some random reflections sparked by Jerome Creach’s fascinating argument that the Canaanites and Amalakites are intended to be understood as literary characters by Hebrew storytellers. These characters likely symbolized sin, evil, and idolatry, and not flesh and blood people.
It is obviously true that when one biblical text is read in light of other verses, the genocide stories cannot be taken as history. Certain enemies of the Israelites are like Wile E. Cayote: no matter how times he blows up and falls from the sky ( to what would be his death in reality), still in the cartoon, he is after the road runner again in the next scene. Consider how in one story in Joshua, Joshua's army goes and fights against King Jabin and the Hazorites. God commands Joshua to hamstring their horses and burn their chariots. The text says quite clearly that they killed the king, and every man, every woman, and every child, and left no one alive that breathed and destroyed all the horses and chariots. Then we open up Judges and find out, not long after, that King Jabin of Canaan, with his 900 iron chariots had oppressed Israel for 20 years, and God raises up Deborah and Barak to deliver Israel. Haha… it is pretty impressive for a people group that was completely annihilated to obtain 900 iron chariots and oppress all of Israel for 20 years! Were they an army of skeletons and ghosts?!
Then we later have those pesky Amalekites; God is like go slaughter every baby because 400 years ago, their ancestors attacked Israel. So Saul mostly obeys, and kills every single Amalekite, young and old, but does not kill the king. For this sin (lack of thoroughness in genocide, which was like the sin of witchcraft) Saul loses his kingdom. Samuel hacks Agag to pieces before the Lord, the last Amalekite alive, according to the text. But then a few chapters later, David is warring with the Amalekites and they are ever popping up again, even in Esther!
I remember being irritated by how the recent Star War movie, where Han Solo is killed by his son, has the evil empire reigning again, without any explanation of how the hell after the destruction of the death star, Darth Vadar and the empire in the previous movie, they could regroup and rule over the galaxy in a few years. Yet I see that the movie makers needed a big bad guy to make the movie work, so logic and plausibility (within that fantasy world) were completely thrown to the wind. And clearly, it was something similar for biblical authors, who want to tell a good story, and had to keep resurrecting the bad guys who were vanquished in the previous stories. They felt no need to try to logically explain or make it plausible.
I don’t like that they used actual people groups as their literary bad guys. Once people could watch fictional TV shows of Cowboys and Indians, and cheer as the Indians have shot down episode after episode. Hmm… and yet even then, the movie makers would likely have lost the sympathy of their audience if they showed a pastor claiming to have the word of the Lord, commanding the cowboys to slaughter every Indian woman and child and show no pity. Even if fiction, and even though people turned the Indians into 2D bad guys, if they watched them hacking to pieces toddlers and shooting women in the head, that might have gone a bit far. We clearly live in a very different world, for we see within their storytelling, that they so dehumanized their bad guys, that killing women and children was like trying to exterminate fleas or rodents. Even in fiction, we have our limits today, they didn’t.
I suppose that is a significant problem I have with Hebrew storytelling. They fictionalized history—including in their made-up stories, real people and people groups. It would have been so much better if they instead used a mythological genre with heroes fighting against monsters, or a fantasy realm with orcs and goblins.
Hmm… I suppose in Star Wars, few felt any sorrow as the Death Star explodes, yet here there still is something about it being sci-fi. If we retold WWII where we sent 20 nukes to destroy the major cities of Nazi Germany, I don’t think we could cheer as we did with the destruction of the death star. We would know the retelling of WWII was definitely fiction, but ugg… even with how we see Nazis as evil, we wouldn’t like a plot that has FDR rejected by God because there was one city in Germany he didn’t nuke. We wouldn't like him to be condemned because he left some German women and children alive. We likely wouldn’t be comfortable if in the next show Truman completes (in obedience to God) the genocide of Germans—sending in several more atomic bombs until it was utter ruins. What would we think if in the following movie, we have the Nazis alive and at it again and Biden contemplating using the a-bomb? What if such a movie series was an allegory and the Nazis in the retelling represented Racism? Well, yes in such an allegory, it would be bad to show mercy, and as this is an issue that keeps raising its ugly head, it will need to be faced by every generation. And this is kind of how the Amalekites and Canaanites function in Hebraic literature. If Amalekites symbolize evil and Canaanites idolatry and these issues pop up, then every generation will be fighting against the Amalekites and Idolatry, and some will be successful and others less so. Yet the problem, again, even in Allegory, they should NOT have used flesh and blood people groups to symbolize the evil that needed to be exterminated. The same principles can be expressed in stories of destroying monsters or demons.
I don’t know how coherent these reflections are. These are merely musings on how we have literary bad guys, and how the Jews like to tell stories where their heroes succeed or fail at killing their enemies. Even if they kill them all, the bad guys are oppressing them in the next round of stories. It's not history, thank goodness, God never commanded the atrocities, but even as fiction, as my modern examples are meant to illustrate, I find it all quite problematic.
Much could be said, below are some random reflections sparked by Jerome Creach’s fascinating argument that the Canaanites and Amalakites are intended to be understood as literary characters by Hebrew storytellers. These characters likely symbolized sin, evil, and idolatry, and not flesh and blood people.
It is obviously true that when one biblical text is read in light of other verses, the genocide stories cannot be taken as history. Certain enemies of the Israelites are like Wile E. Cayote: no matter how times he blows up and falls from the sky ( to what would be his death in reality), still in the cartoon, he is after the road runner again in the next scene. Consider how in one story in Joshua, Joshua's army goes and fights against King Jabin and the Hazorites. God commands Joshua to hamstring their horses and burn their chariots. The text says quite clearly that they killed the king, and every man, every woman, and every child, and left no one alive that breathed and destroyed all the horses and chariots. Then we open up Judges and find out, not long after, that King Jabin of Canaan, with his 900 iron chariots had oppressed Israel for 20 years, and God raises up Deborah and Barak to deliver Israel. Haha… it is pretty impressive for a people group that was completely annihilated to obtain 900 iron chariots and oppress all of Israel for 20 years! Were they an army of skeletons and ghosts?!
Then we later have those pesky Amalekites; God is like go slaughter every baby because 400 years ago, their ancestors attacked Israel. So Saul mostly obeys, and kills every single Amalekite, young and old, but does not kill the king. For this sin (lack of thoroughness in genocide, which was like the sin of witchcraft) Saul loses his kingdom. Samuel hacks Agag to pieces before the Lord, the last Amalekite alive, according to the text. But then a few chapters later, David is warring with the Amalekites and they are ever popping up again, even in Esther!
I remember being irritated by how the recent Star War movie, where Han Solo is killed by his son, has the evil empire reigning again, without any explanation of how the hell after the destruction of the death star, Darth Vadar and the empire in the previous movie, they could regroup and rule over the galaxy in a few years. Yet I see that the movie makers needed a big bad guy to make the movie work, so logic and plausibility (within that fantasy world) were completely thrown to the wind. And clearly, it was something similar for biblical authors, who want to tell a good story, and had to keep resurrecting the bad guys who were vanquished in the previous stories. They felt no need to try to logically explain or make it plausible.
I don’t like that they used actual people groups as their literary bad guys. Once people could watch fictional TV shows of Cowboys and Indians, and cheer as the Indians have shot down episode after episode. Hmm… and yet even then, the movie makers would likely have lost the sympathy of their audience if they showed a pastor claiming to have the word of the Lord, commanding the cowboys to slaughter every Indian woman and child and show no pity. Even if fiction, and even though people turned the Indians into 2D bad guys, if they watched them hacking to pieces toddlers and shooting women in the head, that might have gone a bit far. We clearly live in a very different world, for we see within their storytelling, that they so dehumanized their bad guys, that killing women and children was like trying to exterminate fleas or rodents. Even in fiction, we have our limits today, they didn’t.
I suppose that is a significant problem I have with Hebrew storytelling. They fictionalized history—including in their made-up stories, real people and people groups. It would have been so much better if they instead used a mythological genre with heroes fighting against monsters, or a fantasy realm with orcs and goblins.
Hmm… I suppose in Star Wars, few felt any sorrow as the Death Star explodes, yet here there still is something about it being sci-fi. If we retold WWII where we sent 20 nukes to destroy the major cities of Nazi Germany, I don’t think we could cheer as we did with the destruction of the death star. We would know the retelling of WWII was definitely fiction, but ugg… even with how we see Nazis as evil, we wouldn’t like a plot that has FDR rejected by God because there was one city in Germany he didn’t nuke. We wouldn't like him to be condemned because he left some German women and children alive. We likely wouldn’t be comfortable if in the next show Truman completes (in obedience to God) the genocide of Germans—sending in several more atomic bombs until it was utter ruins. What would we think if in the following movie, we have the Nazis alive and at it again and Biden contemplating using the a-bomb? What if such a movie series was an allegory and the Nazis in the retelling represented Racism? Well, yes in such an allegory, it would be bad to show mercy, and as this is an issue that keeps raising its ugly head, it will need to be faced by every generation. And this is kind of how the Amalekites and Canaanites function in Hebraic literature. If Amalekites symbolize evil and Canaanites idolatry and these issues pop up, then every generation will be fighting against the Amalekites and Idolatry, and some will be successful and others less so. Yet the problem, again, even in Allegory, they should NOT have used flesh and blood people groups to symbolize the evil that needed to be exterminated. The same principles can be expressed in stories of destroying monsters or demons.
I don’t know how coherent these reflections are. These are merely musings on how we have literary bad guys, and how the Jews like to tell stories where their heroes succeed or fail at killing their enemies. Even if they kill them all, the bad guys are oppressing them in the next round of stories. It's not history, thank goodness, God never commanded the atrocities, but even as fiction, as my modern examples are meant to illustrate, I find it all quite problematic.
Read
December 13, 2023I read probably about 85-90% of this book for one of my special topics classes, Violence in the Old Testament. As goes biblical scholarship, I found Creach’s ideas to be very compelling. He coves a vast majority of violent passages from Gen.to Rev. Definitely a good start to the study/research/exegesis into the more difficult narratives of the Bible. He has some rather interesting takes… but none the less important to consider. Give it a read!
September 1, 2021
This is a bold and interesting approach to divine violence in Scripture. I appreciate his desire to think biblically, and even though i’m not completely convinced, I hope he’s right. The faithful use of textual criticism was especially helpful, as was the Hebraic appropriation of Origen. This deserves a seat at the table of the body of Christ.
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