There is nothing special about this text. It just happened to come up today in the course of my reading and rereading my favorite book. Many other Old Testament texts have similar features. But as you will see, if you read on, this text, read in light of current events, left me with a question.
The text
“When Asa heard these words, the prophecy of Azariah son of Oded, he took courage and put away the abominable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin and from the towns that he had taken in the hill country of Ephraim. He repaired the altar of the LORD that was in front of the vestibule of the house of the LORD. He gathered all Judah and Benjamin and those from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who were residing as aliens with them, for great numbers had deserted to him from Israel when they saw that the LORD his God was with him. They were gathered at Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa. They sacrificed to the LORD on that day, from the spoil that they had brought, seven hundred oxen and seven thousand sheep. They entered into a covenant to seek the LORD, the God of their ancestors, with all their heart and with all their soul, and whoever would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman. They took an oath to the LORD with a loud voice and with shouting and with trumpets and with horns. All Judah rejoiced over the oath, for they had sworn with all their heart and had sought him with their whole desire, and he was found by them, and the LORD gave them rest all around.” —2 Chronicles 15:8–15 (NRSVue)
The question
American Christians today have different ways of reading the Bible. Some are “inerrantists” and “literalists.” That’s how I grew up. For people like this, it’s funny what seems bothersome and what doesn’t. For many, worries about how many days creation took and whether Jesus literally walked across the surface of a lake have been more bothersome than the antepenultimate (next to next to last) sentence in this section. That worries me now.
Did you notice that sentence? “. . . and whoever would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.”
If you and I disagree on questions like the days of creation and the meaning of the miracle stories, we can live together, maybe even worship together, unimpeded. But what if one of us worships a God who we believe ordered his people two or three millennia ago to kill their neighbors with whom they had religious disagreements? Even if we say, “Ah, that was a special commandment for that moment, which does not apply to us,” but we also affirm that God does not change, and that the Bible is the inerrant, unchanging word of the unchanging God, have we not thereby affirmed that at some times, under some circumstances, the God whom we worship might conceivably order us to exterminate our neighbors as expression of our own fidelity?
What—you say that could never happen?
But what if, meanwhile, we remain silent, or even approve vocally, when (just to take one example, one thing that is disturbing to some of us out of so many things that are wrong in our world) our government leaders deliberately persist in supplying bombs and bombers to a nation that asserts a claim to the terrestrial inheritance promised in the Bible to the people who were given the license and command to kill quoted above? And if it is incontrovertibly evident that this modern nation, called Israel (!), has systematically been driving another people from that claimed land, using the bombs that we send them for the indiscriminate killing its noncombatant men, women, and children?
If that doesn’t bother you: can you understand why your neighbors of a different faith, or of no faith, might be worried about how living with you is going to work out? Especially if the public face of your religious faith is currently symbolized far more often by people waving guns and Bibles (books that apparently in your mind justify religious terrorism and genocide) than by, for example, people kneeling at the foot of the cross of Jesus to repent of their selfishness, sinfulness, and violence against others?
For myself: for some time now—I do not know exactly how long, it was a decades-long process—I have been unable to believe that the God I worship ordered ancient Israelites to slaughter men, women, and children of other ethnicities and religions. Unable? Yes; also unwilling. The plausibility of such a notion collapsed entirely. I certainly do not believe that the God I worship (or the God worshiped by faithful Christians and Jews) has given modern Israelis license to dispossess and slaughter the Palestinian people. The God I worship is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. The God I worship is love, and love does not license theft and murder.
Further consequence: I cannot accept people who worship an authorizer of theft and murder as fellow worshipers of the same God. I must see them as idolaters. Which—fear not!—does NOT make me think that God might want me to kill them.
I promised a question for you. It is a pointed question. If your hermeneutic—your way of interpreting and applying the Bible, whether or not you use words like “inerrant” and “literal”—ends up making you OK with theft and murder as long as it’s being done by rather than to “us,” do you think you might need a new hermeneutic?
The art: Jan and Hubert van Eyck: The Ghent Altarpiece – The Killing of Abel (1425–29, Oil on wood, Cathedral of St Bavo, Ghent)
Verba Sparsa 