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I have been reading the Old Testament for the first time at the age of 71 — there is a shocking amount of violence in it. If people like Moses and Joshua came back to life, would the [International Criminal Court] issue warrants for their arrest?
You’re not wrong. If the MPAA — the U.S. organization that gives movies content-based ratings, such as PG-13 — got ahold of the Old Testament, it would be slapped with a hard R, if not the dreaded NC-17 (no children 17 and under admitted). We’ll get to Moses later; the Book of Joshua, as you surely know, contains a notorious and much-fretted-over example of what we might call genocide today.
If anyone out there is skeptical about just how violent the OT is, I submit to you the fascinating BibViz project, which visually documents all kinds of problematic stuff in the Good Book. Specifically, take a look at the “Cruelty & Violence” section (you’ll need to scroll down a bit). In the five books of the Torah alone, BibViz identifies well over 1,000 verses that include some form of cruelty and/or violence.
I would guess the majority of these violent incidents are descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, the Book of Genesis isn’t telling us we should make like Cain and slay the sibling we envy. If anything, that story is a cautionary tale about the ills of letting our resentment build up until we do something awful. So it’s worth considering the context of the mayhem we encounter in the OT.
BibViz — somewhat like you, dear reader — has an easily discernible point of view. The site tips its hand by showcasing two particularly troubling verses in the “Cruelty & Violence” section. (In addition, alongside some of its content, BibViz advertises books that are skeptical or downright critical of religion.) One of the highlighted verses is 2 Chronicles 15:13, which goes like this: “That whosoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman” (King James Version). Sure, some of the harm that comes to people (or is threatened) in the OT is the writers’ way of showing readers that violence doesn’t pay. In other cases — far too many, from the perspective of heathenish sorts like you and me — biblical violence comes across as pure bullying.
Obviously, the period of time documented in Chronicles, which is both sequentially and chronologically the last book in the OT, was not like today. I’d assume that some of the people who didn’t “seek the Lord God of Israel” were committing horrible crimes in addition to being faithless. However, in the 21st century, the death penalty isn’t exactly a universally accepted practice, even in the U.S. And capital punishment for atheism is way outside legal or moral acceptability in modern times.
So yes, Moses is a vigilante who acts like Dexter Morgan when he finds an Egyptian “smiting a Hebrew, one of his brethren” (KJV) in Exodus 2:11 and goes medieval on the guy in the very next verse: “And [Moses] looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand” (KJV). True, he didn’t take a blood slide and store it behind his air conditioner, but still.
Some translations don’t even make it clear that the Egyptian was killing his victim, since they use the word “beating” rather than “smiting” or “killing.” I would expect any modern jury to sentence murderous Moses to years behind bars for dispatching the Egyptian and then hiding the body. But again, Bible times ain’t modern times, and there’s plenty of stuff in the OT we do and should completely disregard when it comes to seeking moral guidance.
