sex and violence in the Bible

after teaching a class on the Old Testament narrative books, one of the things that sticks out (again) is how much sex and violence is in the Bible.

I've touched briefly on the question of exactly what happened when Ruth came to Boaz on the threshing floor and lay at his feet in a previous post, back during the time when I wrote a paper on how the book of Ruth shows how Torah is lived out. The Bible is not clear about what happened there nor does one have to assume that Ruth did anything inappropriate, although the fact that Ruth left early before anyone could see her should make the reader aware that her presence on the threshing floor would have been suspicious and questionable. But although acknowledging that some people think that Ruth did a lot more than politely discuss marriage with Boaz on the threshing floor might be quite a topic of discussion in a Seminary class, it's hardly the most difficult topic to look at when discussing the Old testament.

There are so many passages in the Old Testament narrative books that include violence and things difficult to understand. One of problematic part (to many) is Israel's total annihilation of so many other peoples. Some people get around the problem by saying that Israel didn't actually destroy the people in Canaan (or along the way) but just absorbed them into Israel - in this way, it seems a lot more gracious and loving. Judges 1-2 seems to indicate that Israel actually didn't totally destroy the people living in the land, like the book of Joshua seems to indicate. Yet, if you look a bit closer, you'll read that the other people being still in the land (whose survival and presence is an appropriate sign of grace and mercy) is actually a problem - a sign of Israel's disobedience and a source of much problems in the future. So, even if practically Israel didn't destroy the people there, the fact remains that there's not really a way to read the text where you come up with anything other than that the ideal that God had for the Israelites was to destroy completely all those living in the land. And that makes most people uncomfortable.

There are explanations for this destruction. Some would say that the people were destroyed in order to help Israel - so that they would not be tempted to worship false gods. Or would not be tempted to have revenge against Israel. Others might say that anything other than a total destruction would have shown God to be weak in a culture where power and strength spoke the loudest and our culture has changed so we don't understand the cultural norms today. Yet, these explanations seem to argue that God needed to accomodate Himself to the culture of the day and they don't seem to leave much room for a gracious and compassionate God, which the OT does indicate that God is (Ex 34.5-6). So there is a tension, and there is something about the command towards annihilation that should make most of us uncomfortable. Even if we can give somewhat reasonable explanations for why this might have been, they don't completely deny the tension and uncomfortable questions that the text ought to raise. There is no perfect explanation nor do I believe there can be, although an honest look at the text and discovering the tension in it is good to do. The tension reminds us that God doesn't quite fit the picture we have of Him, He does not always work in ways that we understand, and we do not always have adequate explanations for why things are or were. And thus, some of these obscure and confusing events speak to us today, in the midst of things we do not understand and in the midst of violence and despair and messiness that even if God does not condone, He does not do (as much as) what we often would like to work in and against what is not the way it should be.