There's been a fair amount of discussion of the Bible lately (even kos got in on it), which prompted me to start a diary that's been on my mind for a while lately. One reason people give for disliking the Bible is that it is such a violent text. If you want to find evidence of this claim, the Book of Judges is a good candidate. One of the more disturbing stories involves Jephthah, who sacrifices his daughter in fulfillment of a vow.
The relevant section of the story is in Judges 11: 29-40 (the full story is all of chapter 11). As someone who reads the Bible as sacred scripture, someone like Richard Dawkins would assume that I either (a) am ignorant of this story or (b) see it as a mandate to allow or even act out such violence. Well, no. Some semi-random comments on the flip. But let me be clear about one thing first: I do not think the Bible has anything to do with making law. The purpose of this diary is to give some specifics as to what non-Fundamentalist religion looks like, not to argue policy.
No one has an innocent history
As the grandchild of a member of Hitler's SS, I am acutely and painfully aware of the fact that innocent histories are not to be found. I owe my existence to a man who was an active supporter of what has become one of the greatest icons of human evil. But while this basic familial connection to a violent history is something I can't shake, all of our ideological or religious commitments share in this embeddedness in the violence of human history. Christians have the sorry history of the Inquisition to own. Robbespierre should give secularists pause when they optimistically assert that the demise of religion is inherently a force for social improvement. American ideals of democracy can not be seen apart from the history of slavery and the genocide of the Native American population. To ask of a sacred text that it not lay bare the contours of human violence is to ask for it to be completely dissociated from human experience, which would render it useless as a religious text, insofar as religion is an inherently communal endeavor.
We can not fight an injustice until we name it
The Bible preserves a passionate understanding of justice as integral to any spirituality. This is an ethics that goes beyond ordinary "being nice," but demands social transformation. It is primarily on this basis that I maintain an allegiance to a biblical faith (that this is something different than "believing the Bible" will hopefully become clear by the end of this diary).
Yet, from the perspective of Jephthah's daughter, the biblical faith in question is supremely unjust. In a minute, I'll raise some questions about how the story functions within the Book of Judges; there are a number of ways to read the relation of the story to its literary and historical context. However, in the New Testament, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews cites Jephthah as an example of great faith, without critical reflection on the meaning of his daughter's death. From the perspective of seeking a just world, we could do worse than read the Epistle to the Hebrews here as papering over the text, the sort of thing people do to pretend that everything is fine.
But there are other ways to engage the text that allow injustices to be named and struggled against. At one church I attended some years back, I co-led a study of this story as part of a Lenten reflection group, followed by a report by a church member who was active in combating child labor around the world. And he proposed some very concrete political solutions for combating child labor, including noting that the Indian state of Kerala has a much better record on child labor than the rest of the country because they've elected Communists to the government. In this case, the story helped sharpen our analysis of the dynamics at play in the use of child labor. What the story did not do in that setting was give anyone the idea that religiously motivated violence is acceptable.
It is not entirely clear that the narrative approves Jephthah's action
I will bracket for the time being the question of whether the stories in Judges are fiction or history; most modern biblical scholarship is highly skeptical of the historicity of any events up to the United Monarchy of David and Solomon (and some scholars even relegate David to a legendary figure such as King Arthur). But from one way of reading the story, one could rest on the fact that Jephthah is victorious in battle as a kind of divine approval of the vow Jephthah makes to sacrifice the first thing he sees. And as noted above, the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks positively of Jephthah. That there are ways of reading this text that at the very least do not treat child sacrifice as a problem is why I can't say without qualification "the narrative disapproves of Jephthah's action." Still, there are other defensible approaches to the story.
The Book of Judges tells a story in which the inability of the people to live under direct rule of God sets up the beginning of the monarchy in 1 Samuel. (This connection is clearer in the ordering of the Masoretic Text, which goes straight from Judges to Samuel, than the Septuagint ordering, which inserts the book of Ruth between Judges and Samuel.)
Over the course of the Book of Judges, the stories of women generally get worse. The first story is of Achsah, who makes sure to secure real estate with wells for herself as part of her marriage (Judges 1:11-15). The last story is of an unnamed concubine who is raped, murdered, and dismembered, surely the most gruesome story in the Bible, perhaps in religious literature (Judges 19). In between these stories of a woman who has a great deal of agency and a woman who has none, we have a story of Jephthah's daughter who is able to seize what little agency is left her in determining the terms of her death. This escalation of violence over the course of Judges describes a problem needing a solution. In this limited sense, to read the story in the spirit of "naming an injustice in order to fight it" is perfectly consistent with the overall sense of the story as a whole. Beyond that, there are another set of issues we might open for interrogation. The problem the Book of Judges proposes is the failure of the Israelite people to adhere to a rigid henotheism as prescribed in Deuteronomy (Judges assumes the reality of deities other than Yahweh, it is not until Isaiah that a full-fledged monotheism is present in the Bible), and the solution is the establishment of the monarchy. These are diagnoses of both the problem and the solution progressives might well resist.
However, another reason I affirm the Bible as sacred scripture is that in structure it affirms a perspectival mode of knowing. From the two contradictory stories of creation in Genesis to the four Gospels telling the life of Jesus in very different ways, the Bible never rests with a definitive answer on a topic - it nearly always includes an alternative perspective. (In this regard, the epistemology of the Bible is closer to Nietzsche's than he might be comfortable with.) And it is on the basis of this refusal to rest with a single interpretation of an event that on inherently biblical grounds one can shift the analysis from the theological and political framing of the narrative offered by the Book of Judges to another frame of reference. That a feminist frame of reference is a logical move within the logic of the Bible can be seen in the Septuagint ordering of the text, which has the Book of Ruth, a story of womens' solidarity and self-determination, immediately follow the Book of Judges. (Ruth is generally understood to be a post-exilic work of fiction criticizing the exclusivist agendas of Ezra and Nehemiah.) This openness to many views on an event also is precedent for a biblical affirmation of religious pluralism - one theologian who has explored this insight is Marjorie Suchocki in her readable book Divinity and Diversity.
The story gives us access to womens' protests later in history
Archangela Tarabotti was a Venetian nun in the seventeenth century who had close ties to the Accademia di Incogniti, a kind of intellectual salon. One of the great social problems Tarabotti encountered was forced monachization. This involved the families forcing their daughters into convents as a response to dowry inflation in the Venetian Republic. For the many women who did not have a calling to the monastic life, this practice was the equivalent of life imprisonment. Tarabotti cites Jephthah as an example of someone who abused his authority as a parent. Here the Bible is not simply an instrument of control by clerics, but a tool Tarabotti turns back on the collusion of patriarchal and ecclesial power to denounce an unholy practice.
Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de la Guerre was a French composer at the turn of the eighteenth century. She composed a number of cantatas on biblical themes, a large number of which focus on stories with tense sexual politics. In her rendition of the story, the narrators interrupt the flow of the story to denounce Jephthah's actions:
"Barbaric father, stop and suspend a moment
the fury which inspires you:
It is a crime for you that that reckless oath
You made to the Lord promises the victim;
Perhaps in sacrificing her, you commit another crime."
There isn't a performance of her cantatas on Youtube, but there's a selection with the apposite title "Cruel Gods" from her opera "Cephale et Procris" to give you a sense of her creative powers:
Both Tarabotti and Jacquet de la Guerre recast the immediate framing of the story in Judges, performing what the literary critic Judith Fetterley called "resistant reading." These examples furthermore show that reading against the grain is something people have been doing for centuries; looking closely at the ways in which people have read the Bible subversively is a genuine alternative to simply setting the Bible aside and making large generalizations about the collusion of biblical and clerical authority to stifle the human spirit.
Why a Sacred Text?
So far, the reasons I've given for engaging this text can be shared by religious and secular folk alike. But as a theologian who works out of the Protestant Christian tradition, my job description involves wrestling from this story something that clarifies how we think about God. But note that the theological task doesn't simply rest on the idea that "It's the word of God because it's in the Bible." The close attention to the various contexts - political, historical, literary - that shape how the text came into being, how it has been interpreted, and what agendas we bring to interpreting it ourselves is a a precondition for thinking about how to discern a broader theological message from it. And these multiple contexts prevent one from settling into any one single meaning or message as ultimately definitive.
With the caveat that a story, unlike a scientific experiment, is not about coming to a single conclusion, a major point I take away from this story is that thinking about God, or whatever it is that names our highest values for those whom anything within a light year of a theistic vocabulary is like unto ipecac, is a warning that our ideals are always susceptible to deformation, and that these deformations can make their way to the heart of how we approach things. We see these deformations in action when religion motivates violence or exclusions, a pattern we see already in the Bible and in subsequent history.
In this sense, critics of religion are motivated by a profound ethical sense that offers a basis for co-operation across the divide of religious and secular commitments. The combination of a quest for justice and an ability to see things from many sides gives anyone committed to a biblical faith a sure warrant to engage in precisely this kind of work between believers and unbelievers. And at the same time, the self-critical work religious folk are bound to undertake in the quest for fulfilling their own commitments to pursuing peace and justice goes for those committed to a secular ideology as well. After all, if we manage to blow up the planet in nuclear armageddon or civilization collapses under the strains of Global Warming, the myths underlying a secular vision of a union of scientific and moral progress will look fairly weak.
And no theology is worth much if it doesn't translate into precisely a deepened commitment to stand with the victims of history, so I'll leave you with some reminders of the work of Pretty Bird Woman House, The Children's Defense Fund, and Mujeres de Juarez (you'll have to click on a British/American flag to see the text in English).
Suggested Readings
1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations
1. Jorge Pixley, Biblical Israel: A People's History
1. Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? and for a different view, Thomas Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel
1. Phyllis Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel
1. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives
1. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges
1. Archangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny
1. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
1. Carol Adams (ed.), Violence Against Women and Children: A Theological Sourcebook
1. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us