In my previous post on the narratives of the Old Testament, I talked about God’s complete intolerance with the “other” – the non-Israelite who might influence his people to worship other gods and not obey his laws.  The other had to be destroyed in order to preserve the purity of his people.  It did not matter if some, many, or most of these others were decent, loving human beings who cared for their children and did acts of kindness, doing the best to help others and be good people.  They were to be destroyed.  Every one of them in the city of Jericho: man, woman, child, and, well, the animals for good measure. The taking of Jericho is the first major battle of the book, and others follow suit.  To illustrate, here is the one that comes next, less known to Bible readers today but equally instructive (and gruesome) (and with an interesting military tactic). Again, this come from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press).   ******************************   The [...]

  In this thread I have been discussing the wrath of God as manifest in the writings of the Old Testament, in preparation for a later discussion of the divine judgments meted out in the New Testament book of Revelation. In a number of Old Testament narratives God asserts his raw divine power not because he is angry at the disobedience of his people but because he does not want them to be corrupted by outsiders, the “Others” who will lead them astray.  In one sense I suppose God could be said to be angry with these outsiders, but it is a little difficult to see why, since he has not revealed himself to them and they are simply worshiping the gods they and their ancestors have worshiped from time immemorial. But in any event, the outsiders need to be destroyed to prevent them from badly affecting the Israelites.  Nowhere is this theme played out more consistently and graphically than in the book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Hebrew Bible (right after the [...]

As I pointed out in my previous post, the “purity” of Israel was seen as massively important to most of the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, including the various sources that eventually came to make up the Pentateuch and the other books (Joshua – 2 Kings) that describe the history of ancient Israel.  Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in narratives about the children of Israel as they journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, after God delivered them from their slavery at the Exodus under their leader Moses. Once Israel escapes (Exodus 1-15), Moses leads them to Mount Sinai, where he is given the Law -- starting with the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 all the way through Leviticus).  Much of this law is about how Israel is to worship and live, now that they have been chosen by God to be his people.  Once they receive the law, the Israelites journey to the promised land, but they sin en route, and God judges them by forcing them to remain in the wilderness [...]

  In my previous post I began to explain the book of the prophet Amos, the earliest named author of the Bible, in particular his portrayal of the coming “wrath of God.”  My ultimate reason for dealing with Amos is to set up a later discussion of the book of Revelation, where the portrayal of God’s wrath is even more stunning.  But Amos’s message was certainly stunning enough for his original readers, the Israelites living in the northern kingdom of Israel.  Amos was telling them in rather direct and uncomfortable terms that God was soon going to wipe them out in an act of judgment. Prophets were rarely the bearers of good news.  But their condemnations were always brought against people precisely because they had sinned and God was soon to do something about it.  Here is more of how I describe Amos in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2017). ****************************** Amos stresses that the coming suffering for the nation will derive not from the accidents [...]