Reading literature like literature
The Bible is a work of literature. Discussions around the Bible being divinely inspired usually acknowledge this fact. "Inspiration", in the classical Christian sense, does not mean that the Bible was dictated, word-for-word, by God to the writers. Rather, their words as human beings are very much on the forefront. They used their words to explain the revelation of God they received, and their words were constrained by language, context, and even culture.
It seems to me that Jesus very much makes the claim that Moses' revelation of God was not a complete revelation, but that Jesus Himself is the complete revelation of who God is. This is really the orthodox understanding of Christianity - that what it is is a more full, complete revelation, and the Old Testament deals in "shadows" and "types". The book of Hebrews talks a lot about that.
This gives us a way to look at violence in the Old Testament and bring all the options theologians and scholars have used to talk about this subject into one. In the last podcast, I mentioned the top nine options, and I will now try and bring them together.
Bringing them all together
Yahweh and the Father of Jesus are the same God, but Yahweh, as depicted in the Old Testament, was characterized by ancient Israel's tribal tendencies and misrepresented because of their ideas of what a god is.
Bear in mind, that it seems Judaism went through major reform in the time of Ezra, about 480 - 440 BCE, becoming a much more clearer monotheistic belief system. This fact shows us that earlier renditions of God in the Old Testament appear to be clouded by earlier interpretations - I would say, clouded by the surrounding cultures and the culture of Israel itself, which is influence by its surrounding cultures.
In the same way Israel wanted a king to be like the surrounding cultures, it frequently interpreted the surrounding cultures' gods to be like their own. When you study the idolatry of Israel, you notice that they tend to mix Baal worship, in particular, with Yahweh worship. This was easy to do because many of the religious ideas were the same at face value. That doesn't mean to say that God is the same, what it shows us is that humanity is the same. Much study has been done to show that a lot of imagery in the Old Testament (the "archetypes") used to describe Yahweh is borrowed from Sumerian or Babylonian imagery used to describe their gods.
It was easy for the Israelites to fall into idolatry at the feet of mount Sinai, creating a golden calf while Moses was receiving the Law, precisely because Israel still interpreted who this Yahweh was through their own lens of what a god is. In their time, the gods were territorial, tribal and very much conquerors; and pretty violent. Well, a god worthy of worship would be these things. An all-loving God of grace would be unfathomable - not even on anyone's radar. So, when they make a bull, a common imagery for a god at the time, which they do on the mount Sinai, they are saying, "Our god is like the other gods, only better at being a god."
We do this all the time. Today, people have a belief of what a god should be, shaped by cultural expectations, and then frequently just re-interpret the Bible or religious texts to fit in with it. Our post-modern sensibilities in the West expect a god worthy of worship to be "all-loving" and "all-affirming", non-confrontational and giving good vibes, and so God is interpreted to be as such. None of us are actually immune to doing this in some way or form - we all do allow our culture to cloud our interpretation of who God is. Some religious conservatives, for example, expect God to be harsh and unforgiven - what a surprise that they interpret the Bible as such.
I mean, we're only human, and not able to fully comprehend an eternal being who is able to know the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end. God is so wholly other that it's really quite presumptuous for us to think we know everything there is to know. We can only say "God is like" this or that, and often we will get it wrong. But not always.
Moses therefore tends to use Israel's way of understanding what a god is to his advantage to get them to actually believe there is a real god at work with them - he sometimes accommodates their views of what a god is like by using tribal god imagery and language, while at the same time he reforms their views through the establishment of a Law that demands very different practices to the cultures surrounding them. What we're seeing in the Old Testament therefore is not a full revelation of God - rather, we're seeing a narrative unfolding.
The characters of the gods in the cultures very much dictated their societal laws, but in Yahweh's case, there appear to be contradictions. Sometimes the way his character is depicted at face value seems very different when you read between the lines. This is because God's true character is so different to what ancient Israel understood a god to be, that there are times there is a mismatch between what they expect and what is true.
A clear case of this is in the story of Jephthah in Judges 11, who vows that if God gives him victory in a particular battle he was facing, he would sacrifice the first thing that emerges out of his door when he gets home. Well, his daughter is the one who greets him first, and Jephthah, sad and very reluctant, seems to fulfil his vow. It’s clear from the story that we’re meant to see that Jephthah was wrong - he was confused about God, despite being a judge of Israel. He made assumptions based on culture.
I think that Moses himself seems to sometimes get confused as well. Even though he meets with God "face to face", as Exodus 33 claims, his revelation of this God is obscured by what he himself thinks a god should be. And we see that in the text.
This is why God continues to send prophets and teachers to Israel, to remind them to return to pure Yahweh worship (absent of the other culture's interpretations of God) and reveal to them the spirit behind the Law, the original Word, the true God stripped away from all their cultural and contextual layers. Thus, the prophets unpack more of God's intention and character as Israel's story with Yahweh becomes one of increasing revelation.
Israel eventually learned the lesson by the time of Ezra and never went back to idols. They never went back to mixing the surrounding cultural understandings of God with Yahweh after the Babylonian captivity, which is why, by the time of Jesus, they were somewhat confused as pure Yahweh worship should have saved them from captivity, yet they were back in captivity. Their hope was the Messiah, the Christ, would free them politically and once again establish a kingdom of Israel - this time one that would not be shaken.
But there seemed to be some more reforming that needed to be done. One of the major issues Jesus seems to hit at with Israel by the time He appears on the scene is nationalism. While they now rejected the cultures surrounding them and those cultural ideas of God, Israel turned that rejecting into a new kind of religion.
Jesus makes controversial claims that would have been understandably difficult to accept. He says access to the true God would be one for every nation, and the promises given to Israel by Yahweh were now going to be promises for everyone - indeed they were promises not just for Israel but through Israel to the world. This is the same world, however, that invented idols and continued to worship such idols, while oppressing Israel. Naturally, the Jewish leaders would have been appalled at the suggestion - the nation had finally escaped from idolatry, and this probably seemed, at face value, an endorsement back.
Jesus would say that the key to the promises would be faithfulness to the Spirit behind the Law; to the person who reveals God's character as God really is; to the person who is the Word of God originally given, and continuously given. He was announcing that the Jews needed to reform again - and this time, not only the Jews, but the whole world. Believing that Jesus is the Messiah, the savior, who rescues us from the enslavement put onto us by our own idol worship - idol worship that has resulted in terrible human laws and systems that keep us down - is the key into the Kingdom of God that produces true prosperity and peace. In this way, Jesus' work, death and resurrection was indeed something that took place on a spiritual level - as his death rendered the spiritual beings pulling the levers that keep human beings enslaved to them, useless and defeated.
He did this by dying for those in Yahweh worship and those in idol worship, rather than meting justice out to them. In this way, the cycle of using violence to stop violence, which only begets more violence and bitterness, could stop.
Jesus, therefore, makes claims that the Old Testament and the Law and the Prophets were shadows pointing to Him. They were inadequate at revealing who God is, unless you are able to look backwards. He finally reveals who God is by going to the cross and taking on every sin that human beings have, in fact, claimed were done in the name of gods and God Himself. His death is violent and bloody - a perfect picture of humanity and where we always end up going. He takes on our violence, as it were, and in that moment of pure unjust violence he says, "Father, forgive them."
This moment disarms the spiritual powers behind human violence - the spiritual powers, as it were, that humanity worships in its idol images and uses to justify its own violence. It disarms them because forgiveness ends the system; it breaks the cycle of violence; it absorbs it by exhausting it and giving it nowhere else to go. If every punch you received from someone else did nothing - it didn't hurt you, nor did it make you retaliate - the other person would have nothing else to do to you. There is no other way forward for them. If you then offer them peace they would have no other option. Their options are, essentially, leave you alone, or enter into peace with you. But what if they can’t leave you alone, because you’re an omnipresent God?
This is much the same option Jesus offers human beings. The only difference is, by leaving Jesus alone, we have to go back to the systems of violence we've set up and adopted as human beings. Your choices are really further wrath and war, or to come to peace and reconciliation. Hell, a separation from God; or heaven. And every time someone chooses peace, the spiritual powers animating the violence lose.
The eternality of scripture and the evil of human beings
When you look at who God is in the face of Jesus, you are able to go back to the Old Testament and extract from it further truth. The Old Testament, therefore, is as much the "Word of God" in my view as the New. However, I don't read everything in the Old Testament at face value or literally. There is clearly information missing from a lot of its stories, and I don't think it's designed to give us every detail. But I think the violence in the Old Testament, even that prescribed to God, is, in fact, the point of those scriptures.
We're meant to see how humanity interprets God, shapes God, and uses God as an excuse to do many things. In this way, what the Bible is actually showing us is often different to what we see at face value. I think Greg Boyd makes a super useful discovery here - indeed, God has allowed himself to look violent in the Old Testament as a way of 'taking on' the sin of his own people and actually point to the violence of the cross. He allows the rhetoric, the hyperbole, as a way of exposing the heart of humanity. He allows even his own character to be marred, as a way of exposing just how far we'll go to self-justify. This can only be seen when you look at the Old Testament in a "cruciform" way.
In this way, I subscribe to an orthodox understanding of the inspiration of scripture, even if it doesn't line up to a literal understanding of every word. I believe the Bible is infallible in showing us what it intends to show us - that salvation is through Christ, who brings the true Kingdom of God, and represents who God really is.
There is some reality to the fact that the Canaanites were evil people. Perhaps, even, they were the descendants of something really weird and strange that we read about in Genesis 6. The war between Israel and the Canaanites could have had some elements of it that were just. In fact, I think that references to "completely destroying them" might not even refer to them as people, but to them as a cultural group - because those cultures were despicable, intolerably evil, and pervasive. I don't tend to feel sorry for them - they were terrible people. Within them, however, there must have been people who suffered under a tyrannical religious-political system, with nowhere to go.
There is such a thing as a 'just war' theory, and there is some element to that which makes the whole story not be 'genocide' but, simply, war. In war, people do die, but there is often (not always) a clash of ideology. There was a major clash of ideology in the war between Israel and the Canaanites, and quite frankly, the ideology of Israel was far superior to that of the Canaanites.
Even so, there is no righteousness in war. Righteousness - true righteousness - is forgiveness and peace-making. If a true righteous person were to die unjustly, and not retaliate but forgive, what then? What happens? The gospel begins to unpack precisely the answer to that question.
Jesus is the lens through which to see the Old Testament, and when you go back and see He was there all along, in types and shadows, you come to an understanding, unlike the Marcionites, that Yahweh is, indeed, the true God. Although, you are also able to see that ancient Israel Yahweh worship and Christianity are not the same thing. Christianity is, indeed, the final reformation and revelation of who God really is, this side of eternity. Yet, there is still so much we probably get wrong, and only when Jesus comes back will we probably be able to see it.
You are then also able to read into the Old Testament allegorically as a result and extract principles out of it, understanding what is really going on behind the scenes, and realize the deep principles and truth showcased in the crucifixion of Jesus - the moment that the New Testament calls, in John 1:14, the glory of God.
A New Way of Looking At Violence in the Old Testament