Uncovering Violence: Reading Biblical Narratives as an Ethical Project

By Amy Cottrill

It is no surprise that the Bible is filled with stories of violence, having come into being through the crucible of trauma, cultural conflict, and warfare. But the more obvious acts of physical or sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible often overshadow its subtler forms throughout Scripture and belie the variety of perspectives on violence embedded in biblical narratives. This hinders readers' ability to recognize the full spectrum of human engagement with violence, both in texts and in their lived experiences.

Uncovering Violence: Reading Biblical Narratives as an Ethical Project seeks to provide a theoretical vocabulary for the various forms that violence can take—including textual violence, interpretive violence, moral injury, and slow violence—and to offer a fresh ethical reading of violence in the biblical text. Focusing on four narratives from the Hebrew Bible, Cottrill uses the approach of narrative ethics to lay out the many ways that stories can make moral claims on readers, not by delivering a discrete "lesson" or takeaway but by making transformative contact with readers and involving them in a more embodied dialogue with the text.

Exploring the narratives of Jael’s killing of Sisera, the toxic masculinity of Samson, environmental devastation and failures of legal systems in Ruth, and Abigail’s mediation with King David, Uncovering Violence presents strategies for reading that allow for this close encounter. In doing so, it helps prepare readers to better recognize, interpret, and even respond to violence and its many effects within and beyond the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646982189

Amy Cottrill

Amy C. Cottrill is Denson N. Franklin Associate Professor of Religion at Birmingham-Southern College, and the author of Language, Power, and Identity in the Lament Psalms of the Individual.

Book preview

Uncovering Violence

Uncovering Violence

Reading Biblical Narratives as an Ethical Project

Amy C. Cottrill

© 2021 Amy C. Cottrill

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are the author’s translation.

A version of chapter 1 previously appeared as Amy C. Cottrill, Moral Injury and Humanizing the Enemy in Judges 5, in Moral Injury: A Guidebook for Understanding and Engagement, ed. Brad E. Kelle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020). Reproduced by permission of Lexington Books.

Book design by Sharon Adams

Cover design by Eric Walljasper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cottrill, Amy C., author.

Title: Uncovering violence : reading biblical narratives as an ethical project / Amy C. Cottrill.

Description: First edition. | Louisville, Kentucky : Westminster John Knox Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Seeks to provide a theoretical vocabulary for the various forms that violence can take-including textual violence, interpretive violence, moral injury, and slow violence-and to offer a fresh ethical reading of violence in the biblical text— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021038198 (print) | LCCN 2021038199 (ebook) | ISBN 9780664267117 (paperback) | ISBN 9781646982189 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Old Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Violence in the Bible.

Classification: LCC BS1199.V56 C68 2021 (print) | LCC BS1199.V56 (ebook) | DDC 221.8/3036—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038198

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038199

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For Ken, Hannah, and Lydia

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction—The Challenge: Recognizing and Encountering Violence and Its Effects

1. Sisera’s Mother at the Window in Judges 5: Warfare, Moral Injury, and the Humanization of the Enemy

2. Samson, Masculinity, and Violence in Judges 13–16

3. The Slow Violence of the Book of Ruth

4. Abigail and the Poisonous Knowledge of Violence

Conclusion—Bearing Witness to Biblical Violence: A Final Reflection

Selected Bibliography

Scripture Index

Subject Index

Acknowledgments

I have had the opportunity to read and discuss the texts I explore in this book with many insightful students at Birmingham-Southern College. Those conversations inspired this book and are woven throughout these chapters. I am thankful for my students’ passion and commitment and the ways they shared their thoughts and shaped and challenged my own.

Along the way, many generous people have read chapters, commented on outlines, offered bibliographic suggestions, or made key suggestions that improved my thinking and my writing. I am especially grateful to Carol Newsom, David Carr, and Brad Kelle, all of whom helped me ask generative questions that sharpened my thoughts. Several anonymous reviewers of the manuscript also offered comments that improved the book, for which I am grateful. Colleagues at Birmingham-Southern read, commented, advised, and encouraged me throughout the entire writing process, especially Clare Emily Clifford, Emily Klein, Mark Schantz, and Keely Sutton. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Julie Mullins, as well as the other helpful and skilled staff at Westminster John Knox Press, who read attentively, made useful suggestions, and supported this project. I am incredibly thankful for the care with which they approach their work, and I know my manuscript is better for it.

Two institutions supported the writing of this book. Birmingham-Southern College offered sabbatical time for research and writing and support for travel to conferences where I had the opportunity to meet and discuss this book with colleagues. I also thank the library staff at Birmingham-Southern, who made it possible for me to have the resources I needed in a timely manner. I am grateful for that institutional support. Additionally, I thank the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, which gave me a summer grant that made it possible for me to make strides with the manuscript. Books are personal and institutional projects, and I am grateful to have been a beneficiary of generous assistance throughout this process.

Finally, I thank my spouse, Ken Wheeler, and our daughters, Lydia and Hannah. I write these words during January of 2021, at a time when the entire world endures a pandemic and the United States, my home, contends with its history of white supremacy and violence in the institution of slavery, which has bled into other present-day forms of violence against Black people and people of color, including those who have immigrated to this country in search of political protection and economic possibilities. I hope Ken, Lydia, and Hannah know that the time I spent writing this book is an attempt to make a difference in the world in which we live, for them and for our neighbors. I am immeasurably thankful for the love, humor, and support of my family, who brings me such joy.

Introduction

The Challenge: Recognizing and

Encountering Violence and Its Effects

CONFRONTING COMMON ASSUMPTIONS

This book emerged from many years of teaching a class called Violence and the Bible at a liberal arts college in the southeastern United States. In that class, I have had the opportunity to discuss the significance of violence and its effects in the worlds of the texts and in the worlds of my students. My students come with diverse academic interests, social backgrounds, and identities. Nonetheless, I have come to recognize three dominant trends in the assumptions that students often bring to the class at the start of the semester. The first trend—less frequent—is evident in the student who assumes that the violence of the Bible is evidence that the Bible is irrelevant to modern life and might also be evidence of the danger of religion more generally. This student sees the Bible as a cause of social and personal harm that authorizes a worldview that villainizes those of different ethnic backgrounds than the Israelites and celebrates conquest and divinely authorized warfare. The second trend—much more frequent—is the student who thinks that a course on violence and the Bible will be about the Hebrew Bible exclusively; this student is initially confused by the inclusion of New Testament material in the course because of a widely held stereotype about the angry, warring God of the Old Testament as compared to the loving Jesus of the Christian tradition who corrects the vengeful, primitive religion of the Israelites. A third trend characterizes nearly all my students: most assume that the Bible is religiously and culturally important because it offers moral guidelines and ethical principles; a common assumption is that those moral guidelines are at the heart of the Bible’s status as a sacred text. For some, the ethical principles of the Bible are outmoded and irrelevant to modern culture. For others, the ethical principles of the New Testament, as they perceive them, should determine the extent to which one applies the lessons of the Old Testament in the modern world. But nearly all my students begin the class with the idea that reading the Bible through an ethical lens will result in something like a discrete list of moral principles that one might then apply to one’s personal behavior and one’s social and political engagement in the world today.

My students come by these assumptions fairly; it is important to note that these trends are current in popular perceptions of the Bible. Yet all these perceptions are problematic in significant ways and limit the potential of the Bible to assist modern readers in interacting with the biblical text in a manner that empowers a capacious sense of ethical reading and living. In response to what I have seen as the dominant trends in my students’ initial perceptions about violence and the Bible, and in collaboration with those very students who have helped me to chart a different path, I have set out to write a book about violence and the Bible, the Hebrew Bible in particular, that starts from a different set of assumptions: Namely, that the texts reflect the insights and experiences of perspicacious, complicated, and compassionate people with theological integrity who lived through and were shaped by violent experiences in which they also participated. The complexity of the violence that moves through the texts of the Hebrew Bible should not be read instrumentally, as a way to affirm constructions of Christian values, however those are conceived. Nor should these narratives be read reductively as treatises on ethics that offer transhistorical and discrete lessons for moral behavior. Rather, my working premise is that the reader’s entanglement with the violence of the Hebrew Bible offers an opportunity to interact with and be formed by challenging and multivalent narrative offerings, with all their ambiguity, alterity, and unsettling complexity. My project in this book is to uncover and reckon with the ethical complexity of biblical narratives in hopes that this engagement with violence in biblical stories will also empower readers to identify and confront violence in their own realities.

Violence Is Complex and Critiqued within the Bible Itself

First, it is important to recognize that the Bible does indeed contain problematic, and sometimes appalling, portrayals of violence. Much of the Hebrew Bible originated in political, religious, and cultural conflict, and many biblical texts reflect and respond to those experiences, traumas, and memories.¹ Though there are certainly examples of violence that are affirmed within the Hebrew Bible, the presence of violence need not indicate that the authors or the community that received the text celebrated the violence in those depictions.² In fact, the presence of detailed and complex depictions of violence is often evidence that the producers of these writings were acutely aware of the way violence informed and shaped their realities; they used their textual traditions to explore the contours and implications of that violence. To be sure, readers must reckon with the presence of violence in the biblical text. Violence is not only to be encountered in the warfare texts of the Hebrew Bible that are perhaps the most widely recognized, but is also present in more subtle ways, such as representations of distorted and unequal power relations; threats of social marginalization, oppression, and poverty; and traumatic memories. One assumption of this book is that violence is a multifaceted, complex, and often indirect phenomenon. A primary goal is to provide readers with a vocabulary of violence that expands the ability to recognize and respond to violence. Readers must simultaneously reckon with the complexity and subtlety of the depiction of violence as well as its reception among later readers.

Relatedly, it is important to recognize that the Bible is multivocal, with a variety of perspectives on violence. Moreover, the Bible contains what Ellen Davis calls an inner biblical hermeneutic, an ongoing dialogue in which biblical authors responded to, interpreted, and creatively appropriated the tradition they received, especially the biblical traditions that became morally difficult to later interpreters.³ As Davis says, The artful negotiation of difficulty was a primary factor in producing the biblical books as we have them, as tradents struggled in faith (I am convinced) to preserve and pass on what they have received as authoritative, while at the same time they registered for their own and future generations profound changes in the understandings of faith.⁴ Understanding the Bible to have developed as the result of dynamic—not static—processes of ethical reflection and creative reinterpretation of the past even while maintaining connection to that very tradition is itself evidence that people in the past often perceived difficult texts to be sources of ethical possibility and theological engagement.

For Davis, engaging with the difficult themes of the Bible in a way that produces change and connection simultaneously is a theological enterprise, motivated by a central question: What should we in the Church do with biblical texts that do not seem to accord with a well-considered understanding of the Christian faith?⁵ As someone who identifies as Christian, I certainly value this question. Yet as someone who thinks about and discusses difficult texts with people of diverse religious backgrounds or no traditional religious commitments, I assert that the Bible offers significant insight into the experience of violence and that careful engagement with it is relevant to everyone. My hope is that ethical engagement with violence in the Bible will be of vital interest to those with theological commitments and also for those who, like my students, want to make the world a less violent place, who are interested in the possibilities of ethical engagement in textual interpretation as a way of fostering greater awareness of and responsiveness to the ways human beings are made and unmade by subtle and direct forms of violence. To that end, I write this book for readers who are interested in developing a process of engagement with biblical texts that involves attentiveness to the particularity of biblical storytelling, critical and compassionate listening and responses to texts, and recognizing that biblical storytelling and interpretation of those stories is always a process of revision and re-creation, a process that occurs both in the Bible itself and in later reception. Such a process-oriented, relationship-centric mode of engagement with biblical texts is an ethical project that, I believe, has implications for ethical reflection and action in nontheological arenas as well as in theological circles.

Rejection of Negative Comparisons between Violence of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament

The Christian tendency to read the Hebrew Bible negatively in comparison with a presumably more peaceful New Testament has a long and tragic past in biblical studies, often perpetuating anti-Semitic claims about the validity and value of Christianity over and against Judaism.⁶ As Susan Niditch observes in her now classic work, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, understandings of war in the Hebrew Bible often intermingle uncomfortably with generalizations about Jewish world-view, perpetuating the stereotype of the violent ‘Old’ Testament, of law vs. gospel; justice vs. mercy; judgment vs. love.⁷ The failure of attention given to the violence of the New Testament among Christian interpreters is directly related to a centuries-long anti-Jewish bias, famously evident in the early church figure Marcion of Sinope’s second-century argument that the Old Testament God and the New Testament God are essentially different, the first a god of vengeance and violence and the second a god of mercy and love.⁸ Marcion’s legacy has been replicated in interpretations that have assumed that New Testament texts are somehow above the fray and not deeply connected to the violence of Christian history.⁹

In fact, violence is a feature of the New Testament texts (and reception of those texts) in authorizations of slavery (e.g., Eph. 6:5–8, Col. 3:22–24, 1 Tim. 6:1–2, Titus 2:9–10, 1 Pet. 2:18), the subordination of women (e.g., Col. 3:18, 1 Tim. 2:11–15, Titus 2:3–5), images of Jesus as a warrior (Rev. 19:11–16), and anti-Jewish language (e.g., John 8:44). The mistaken dichotomy between the violence of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is entrenched, however, and readers should confront and challenge it at every turn lest it continue to produce dangerous misunderstandings of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as well as Judaism and Christianity.¹⁰ Fortunately, in addition to increasing scholarship on Christian anti-Semitism, violence in the New Testament is currently receiving important scholarly attention, correcting mistaken assumptions about violence in both scriptural traditions.¹¹ While I focus on the narratives of the Hebrew Bible in this book, I do so because the Hebrew Bible is my area of professional training and interest, not because I believe violence is a unique problem in the Hebrew Bible as opposed to the New Testament.

Reading Narratives Requires Its Own Mode of Ethical Engagement

I am sympathetic with my students who anticipate that an ethical approach to the Bible will result in concrete and specific understandings about ethical action, something akin to normative ethical claims that they can use in their lives in a more or less direct way. I do not think such an approach to biblical interpretation is by definition impossible or inadvisable, yet the model of ethical interpretation I employ is linked to the genre of the material I address, biblical narratives, which do not conclude with summaries of their ethical significance, nor do they result in a set of ethical principles one should adopt. Narratives are unlike legal codes, which feature commands and direct advisement about behavior, such as Do not kill (Exod. 20:13) or Do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk (Exod. 23:19). This is not to say that legal codes do not require interpretation. Yet the generic conventions of legal material and narratives are different enough that explicit attention to the way one reads narratives through an ethical lens is required. How does the reader join recognition of the conventions of narrative texts—such as plot development, characterization, and ambiguity—with a model of ethical reflection that recognizes the particularity of stories and their resistance to universal ethical claims that one might associate with the goals of ethical inquiry? In what way is reading and engaging with violence found in the Bible an ethical project? I offer a more fully developed response to these questions below.

In the following sections, I discuss conceptual equipment that will prepare the reader for later chapters. First, I briefly introduce the ongoing scholarly conversation about violence and the Bible to orient readers. Second, I present concepts of violence that help readers understand its complex permutations. Third, I introduce a theory of reading as ethics that is the methodological framework for my analysis. Finally, I explain the selection of texts analyzed in subsequent chapters and explain what is to come. My intent is to offer an approach to engaging with the violence of the Bible that does justice to the many ways violence may be encountered in biblical narratives and to offer examples of reading as ethics that reflect the particular way in which stories provide narrative space for ethical reflection.

CONCEPTUAL EQUIPMENT: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT VIOLENCE

Since John Collins’s seminal presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 2002 and subsequent publication, The Zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the Legitimation of Violence, there has been intense interest in the study of violence in the Bible as a matter of urgent concern.¹² Though significant work on violence pre-dates Collins’s address, Collins set a course for biblical violence as a needed topic of further study.¹³ The result has been thoughtful and provocative publications that have made clear that biblical violence is a timely, relevant, and necessary subject for further research and discussion. Though I do not undertake a full history of interpretation of violence in the Bible here, I offer some heuristic categories that will help the reader situate this book within the landscape of biblical scholarship.

At the risk of oversimplification, I see three large categories of work on the topic of violence in biblical studies. These categories overlap, and the boundaries of these groupings are porous. The first grouping has theological and ethical concerns at the center, often focusing on how the violent texts of the Bible can be interpreted as canonical Scripture for the Christian church.¹⁴ There is significant diversity among such readings, to be sure, yet these interpretations are similar in that they assume the vital role of the Bible in religious communities and the hermeneutical challenges of religious communities who find the violence in the Bible to be theologically problematic.¹⁵

The second major grouping of biblical scholarship utilizes historical and social scientific methods of sociology and anthropology to understand the practices of ancient Israelites regarding violence, the political context of warfare, and cultural understandings that shed light on the way violence functioned in the ancient world. I say more about social scientific approaches to the study of violence below when I discuss ritual and cultural violence. Rather than speaking to a theological concern of a living religious community directly, social scientific scholarship illumines the culture and practices of the people who produced these texts, the societies in which they were embedded, and the political situations with which they contended.¹⁶

A third category of scholarship about violence and the Bible utilizes literary and ideological criticism, with a focus on literary features and themes, the identities and ideological commitments of authors and readers, and the ways that biblical texts reflect and create systems of power in the ancient context and in the modern world today. Because of the pervasive theme of sexual violence against women and the origins of the biblical texts in patriarchal and androcentric societies, as well as the ways the Bible has been inherited and utilized in ways that have created and/or contributed to the disempowerment of women, scholarly works in this category often address issues of sexuality, gender, and violence in ancient and modern contexts.¹⁷

Again, these categories of scholarship are not utterly distinct, and there are subtleties that are missed in this presentation of the work of scholars who are engaged in a rich and complex investigation of violence.¹⁸ I adopt an eclectic approach in this book and draw upon works that fall under each of these categories. Indeed, what I offer in this book is not an alternative to any of these approaches, but a furthering of these approaches that addresses two gaps in scholarship. First, it is important to offer a roadmap that expands the conceptions of violence that scholars address. There is much biblical scholarship that attends to direct violence, harm inflicted against another’s body, but I hope to enrich the treatment of violence and the Bible through an interdisciplinary approach to the study of violence and its effects. To that end, I present a broader range of categories of violence, drawn from various disciplines, in hopes that the ongoing discussion of violence and the Bible will grow to encompass the many subtle forms of violence reflected in the biblical text.

Second, to return to my students’ dilemma about ethical reflection when reading stories, I bring to bear an ethical approach to reading that is attentive to the particularities of narrative. My question is not, What ethical principle should I apply (or reject) to help me live in a more ethical way? My question is, What is it to read a story with similar expectations one brings to engaging a person, if one assumes—as, I think, we should—that a person has the power to influence one’s perceptions, sensibilities, and field of vision? What if encountering the particularities of a story offers the same kind of relational impact as encountering human particularity, both able to permeate one’s thinking, feeling, and sensing?

This book thus aims to make two significant contributions to the ongoing conversation about violence and the Hebrew Bible: first, by expanding the ways readers recognize violence, offering various categories, approaches, and vocabularies that will enable readers to recognize violence in its many permutations and expressions, explicit and subtle. Second, this book addresses a larger hermeneutical question that connects ethics with the reading process: What happens in the process of reading violent texts? As interpreters recognize more of the complexity of representations of violence in the Bible, an approach is required that attends to the way readers are formed within and are relationally accountable to those representations. This book introduces an approach to reading biblical violence ethically that is not based on mining the text for moral gems to be extracted and applied to modern life but on the concept of reading as encounter and witness.¹⁹ Influenced by Adam Zachary Newton’s idea of narrative ethics, I frame reading the biblical text as an ethical encounter with