Gordon K. Oeste - Bloody Brutal and Barbaric?: Wrestling with Troubling War Texts

BLOODY, BRUTAL, AND BARBARIC? Quite the question for any book. Admittedly so. Yet the title fits because this book wrestles with the ethics of holy war in Scripture. To be clear, our answer is unabashedly yes. Yes, the biblical war texts are bloody, brutal, and barbaric. There are good reasons why these war texts are so deeply troubling. But that daunting reality is not the whole story. There is a powerfully intriguing side that is often missed. This book presents a search for better answers to the troubling war textsanswers that legitimately reduce their ethical challenge by noting what is often (wrongly) understood and by highlighting redemptive aspects of these difficult texts. Welcome to a fascinating journey.

It has taken fourteen years to write this book. Its reputation as long overdue has become a standing joke. I (Bill) have often laughed with various InterVarsity Press staff (particularly with Andy Le Peau) at my exceedingly prolonged efforts. In my defense, however, those years were hardly wasted. Along the way several key events shaped my thinking on the war texts. First, during these war-text years our older son, Jon, slowly slid downhill with a degenerative brain disease; from being a healthy, normal young man he gradually became a quadriplegic with the cognitive ability of a preschooler. He passed away on Saturday, June 8, 2013. That parental, crushed-love journey broke me over and over and over again. It was so intensely painful (still is at times) that I cannot describe it. But a surprising thing happened during these years. The painalmost debilitating at timesallowed me to see the extent of my own brokenness and the brokenness of the world around me. Even more important, it allowed me to see with new eyes the connection between our brokenness and the intense grief and greater pain felt by God himself, and I wrote one small piece of theological reflection that helped me wrestle with the agonizingly slow, month-by-month, grindingly gradual loss of Jon. It is a sermon titled Tears in Heaven: Four Portraits of the Suffering/Crying God.

That tiny sermon opened large windows through which I could look and then think about God differently within the war texts. On the one hand, understanding Yahweh as a tearful, crying God affected this book when I began to see passages of Scripture that describe Yahweh weeping about war destruction. Yahweh cries for his own people when he brings war against them, and he cries a river of tears even over the war destruction that he brings against his and Israels enemies (this concern for enemies is nothing short of amazingquite unlike the behavior of ANE gods). On the other hand, this discovery prompted me to search for a whole range of what one might call subversive war textsones that, like the crying texts, in some manner subvert or undermine the standard war texts. (Important note: I am using the terms subvert and undermine in a positive sense because these alternative-to-the-norm war portraits help us realign our thinking with a fuller and more complete understanding of all the war material in the Bible.) Biblical texts such as the ones describing Davids bloody hands and numerous others (see and appendix H) caused me to rethink my understanding of the better-known portraits of Yahweh as a warrior God. This collection of subversive/antithetical (in a good sense) war texts was crucial for relating Yahweh of the Old Testament to Jesus of the Gospels, resulting in a Yahweh-and-Jesus portrait that makes sense.

Second, I stepped away from writing the war book for a few years and worked on other projects that unexpectedly helped me better understand the war material. I had started having nightmareswaking in a cold sweatfrom researching the larger ANE war context and especially the gruesome war atrocities that were part of the ancient world. So I transferred my efforts for a while into writing Corporal Punishment in the Bible: A Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic for Troubling Texts.) and find it compelling and encouraginglike discovering a cluster of beautiful, fragrant flowers growing from a dung pile in the desert.

Third, Gord Oeste joined me about halfway through the fourteen-year journey of writing this book, and I thank God for Gord and for our seven years of working together. On three occasions we taught a course on holy war ethics at Tyndale Seminary, which provided a great laboratory for testing ideas. He works relentlessly at seeing the war texts first through the lens of an ancient Israelite and ANE world and then adding other helpful lenses. What makes me especially humbled and honored to work with Gord is that I know something of what it cost him to write this book with me. In short, it cost him his job. When faced with the alternative, he made the painful but deliberate decision to keep writing. That choice speaks volumes about the rigors and perils of rethinking traditional views. Some choices are difficult but worth making.

The chapters that lie ahead have been transformative for us. They have enabled us to think differently about Yahweh and Jesus in ways that have renewed and deepened our faith. The journey has led us to new and sacred places in our thinkingbeautiful landscapes with open horizons and fresh air that restore feeling after spiritual numbness and rejuvenate the troubled soul. We hope that readers who share our struggle with the war texts of Scripturethe utter ugliness of genocide and war rapewill find a new sense of joy in thinking more deeply and accurately about Yahweh as holy warrior and Jesus as apocalyptic warrior.