Lord Have Mercy: Unlearning Biblical Violence
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
A long while ago I had lunch with a new friend who was a distinguished Jewish scholar of religion. In our lunch conversation we talked some about our common concern about Israel and the land of promise. And then he said, “I wish all Palestinians were dead.” He had no sense of irony or embarrassment about his statement. I was shocked and dumbfounded.
That conversation has led me to reflect on the Biblical testimony to herem, the Biblical notion that what belongs to God must be offered as a burnt offering with nothing held back in reserve from God. The term herem is closely linked to our term “harem,” the notion that women will be devoted singularly to the wants and needs of the king. Thus the term can be translated as “devoted,” but since it involves a sacrifice of burning, it is also rendered as “utterly destroy” or “exterminate.” The oldest usage of the term in the Bible has to do with the worship of other gods that detracts from the singular sovereignty of YHWH:
Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction (Exodus 22:20).
This claim is reiterated in Deuteronomy 13:12-18 with the term reiterated in verses 16-17:
All of its spoil you shall gather into its public square; then burn the town and all of its spoil with fire, as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. It shall remain a perpetual ruin, never to be rebuilt. Do not let anything devoted to destruction stick to your hand, so that the Lord may turn from his fierce anger and show you compassion, and in his compassion multiply you, as he swore to our ancestors (Deuteronomy 13:16-17).
That usage concerning YHWH’s sovereignty, however, easily morphed into land seizure, since the land of promise was regarded as “holy to YHWH,” a status that required the destruction of all of the inhabitants of the land who did not worship YHWH. Thus already “in the wilderness,” the term is used at Hormah (The name of the site consists in the same three root letters as herem = “destruction”):
Then Israel made a vow to the Lord and said, “If you will indeed give this people into our hands, then we will utterly destroy their towns.” The Lord listened to the voice of Israel, and handed over the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their towns; so the place was called Hormah (Numbers 21:2-3).
With the entry into the land the term pertains, in turn to Jericho (Joshua 6:17, 21), Hazor (Joshua 11:11-12, 20-21), Sihon (Deuteronomy 2:34), Og (Deuteronomy 3:6), Makkedah (Joshua 10:28), Eglon (Joshua 10:34-35), Hebron (Joshua 10:36-37), Debir (Joshua 11:29), and eventually the whole land (Joshua 10:40). In a quite stylized way the term is applied to the “seven nations,” that is, all the non-Israelite peoples:
—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you—and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show no mercy (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).
You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded (Deuteronomy 20:17).
The latter usage is intensified by an infinitive absolute. The claim is made that all those who do not worship YHWH are idolaters, and so are to be offered up to YHWH in what is taken to be an act of uncompromising obedience by Israel. In highly stylized ways, even prophetic poetry can belatedly assert the rule of YHWH over the nations through such destruction:
For the Lord is enraged against all the nations,
and furious against all their hoards;
he has doomed them, has given them over to slaughter (Isaiah 34:2).Go up to the land of Merathaim;
go up against her,
and attack the inhabitants of Pekod
and utterly destroy the last of them, says the Lord;
do all that I have commanded you…
Come against her from every quarter;
open her granaries;
pile her up like heaps of grain,
and destroy her utterly;
let nothing be left of her (Jeremiah 50:21, 26).
It is clear that such radical obedience both requires and gives warrant for Israel to destroy its enemies in violent, wholesale ways that are justified as obedience to the rigorous demands of YHWH for singular loyalty. The equation of “idolatry” with illicit “land occupation” provides motivation for Israel’s relentless violence.
There is one other text that takes up the matter of herem. The extended narrative in I Samuel 15 suggests a closure to or an emancipation from the notion of “utterly destroy” in obedience to YHWH:
Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey (I Samuel 15:3).
This command is congruent with the command of Deuteronomy 25:17-19 that occupies the final, ultimate position in the law corpus of Deuteronomy. We may, in these texts, take the Amalekites as the paradigmatic enemy of Israel. Saul obeys the command of Samuel and utterly destroys the Amalekites, except that he spares King Agag and the best of what was valuable: sheep, cattle, fatlings, and lambs. That is, he compromised the command and did not fully obey the instruction to do herem. Saul declares his obedience to Samuel:
May you be blessed by the Lord; I have carried out the command of the Lord (v. 13).
But Samuel, in his vigilance, detects that Saul has compromised his command to do herem (v. 14). Saul promptly blames his compromise on the people:
They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the cattle, to sacrifice to the Lord our God; but the rest we have utterly destroyed (v. 15).
Samuel reiterates his command:
And the Lord sent you on a mission, and said, “Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed” (v. 18).
Saul pleads his innocence, but Samuel is uncompromising and unforgiving. Samuel himself kills Agag (v. 33). And he declares that “the Lord has taken the kingdom of Israel from you this very day” (v. 28). That is, the violation of herem is so serious that it bespeaks the end of Saul’s rule. We may judge that Saul’s action was a move away from old tribal practice to a more “rational” approach to governance. But Samuel, with his immense authority, defends the old practice and insists upon the most radical Yahwism he can muster. The confrontation is between two modes of governance and here the old tribal order prevails.
Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.
The meaning, extremity, violence, and specificity of herem are fully clear in this array of texts. The notion of herem justifies extreme violence against Israel’s enemies according to the will of YHWH. That is, we have nothing less than a divinely ordered habit of genocide. According to this provision, YHWH is uncompromising in a demand for sovereignty. Consequently, the Land of Promise, that is holy to YHWH and given to Israel as a possession, must be purged of all idolaters. The usage reflects a stunning combination of divine sovereignty and land provision for the chosen people.
The meaning of the practice is clear. The more difficult question is what to make of it in our interpretation. When one is completely committed to the cause of the state of Israel, the matter is not problematic. Thus Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scientist, can assert with great innocence:
From the point of view of mankind’s humanistic morality we were wrong to take the land from the Canaanites. There is only one catch. The command of God ordered us to be the people of the land of Israel.
While that judgment may reassure some, many other interpreters, including Jewish interpreters, are bothered by such divinely ordered violence, and so the inclination of scholars is to tone down the matter to say that herem is exaggerated, fictional, or metaphorical:
It is exaggerated. While there was some violence required for occupation, it was never wholesale or comprehensive.
It is fictional. Such violence never happened, but it is asserted in order to connect land-taking to YHWH.
It is metaphorical. It is not to be taken literally, but is only violence that is textually performed.
What is lacking in such a detoxification of the text is recognition that the image of herem is shot through with ideology, that is, reality distorted on behalf of a specific interest. In his wise exposition from a while ago, Patrick Miller notices the ideological component in Israel’s historical memory:
The roots of ideology in Israelite thought are to be found in the earliest period, particularly in the election and covenant theology of Israel. A fully articulated and worked-out ideology, however, does not really manifest itself until the Yahwist’s presentation of Israel’s history when it becomes considerably retrospective. The notion of a chosen people and the belief in divine promises, which are at the center of his interpretation, contain almost by definition ideological qualities. For here is a group, in this case an ethnic and later national group, pictured as bound together in common cause, assuming for ideological reasons a common origin, Abraham, and having moved toward a common goal—the “utopia” of the Promised Land. In this context faith and ideology are closely intertwined (Patrick Miller, “Faith and Ideology in the Old Testament,” Israelite Religion and Biblical Theology: Collected Essays (2000, p. 634).
Miller, moreover, specifically links the matter of ideology to the tradition of herem:
An important element in Israel’s early sacral wars and in the ideology growing out of them was herem, the ban, according to which the booty and captives where consecrated to Yahweh and totally destroyed….Thus in light of the later situation the role of the herem in Israel is reinterpreted, giving it a more significant and fundamental place and transforming the early conflict of the conquest into a forthright Religionskampf with the herem at the center as a divine command to avoid Canaanite contamination. The real purposes of the herem and the conflicts have been covered over as an ideological interpretation of Israel’s beginnings has developed….The ‘gift’ of the land to Israel is for two reasons: (1) Yahweh loves Israel (Deut. 7:8); and (2) Yahweh is driving out the nations because of their wickedness (Deut. (9:5). There can be little doubt that Israel or elements within Israel took the last reason at face value and were convinced both of the accuracy of the statement and the legitimacy of Yahweh’s action. But the ideological acquisition of the needed land cannot be ascribed to its own faithfulness, and it is apparently not enough to say that Yahweh gives the land out of love. The present occupants of the land (i.e. prior to Israel’s occupation) are wicked and deserve to lose the land through divine wrath although one might be hard-pressed to prove the greater wickedness of the Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Perizites, and so on (Miller 640-41, 643).
There can be no doubt that Israel’s justification for land seizure, whatever the historicity of “the conquest,” is permeated with self-serving congratulations. That ideological force made it possible to connect Israel’s eagerness for land with the savage rule of YHWH. While it is impossible to sort out the ingredients of “faith” and “ideology,” there can be no doubt of an element of self-serving in the ideology of herem. The outcome of such self-justification on the one hand is that it gave Israel full authorization for the wholesale violence against its neighbors. On the other hand, and more seriously, it implicates YHWH in the practice. YHWH now has a partisan partner in Israel for the enactment of violence on a grand scale. It is certain that we are not permitted innocence in the matter, not even by the most fervent Israelite interpreters of the Old Testament.
Thus we may choose to deal with the presence of herem in the text by concluding that the matter is exaggerated, fictional, or metaphorical. But there the evidence stands in the text, ready to be taken up by later generations of interpreters for various nefarious purposes. It may be that herem was never an actuality for ancient Israel. But now, in our contemporary circumstance, we are witnessing something like herem as Israel conducts its violent assaults on Gaza. On the day I write this, the number of murdered Gazan inhabitants is 21,300. The assault of Hamas against Israel on October 7 is horrendous and unacceptable, and Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel’s response to that violence, however, is disproportionate and amounts to nothing less than herem, a wholesale slaughter of enemies for the purpose of securing the land of promise. And while the announced purpose of the onslaught in Gaza is to kill Hamas, one might readily suspect that in fact the intent is, to “kill every Palestinian.” Thus the “collateral damage” enacted by Israeli forces is without restraint or limit. Such action is taken to be fully justified by the Israeli government. Indeed the government of Netanyahu might decide, echoing Shlomo Avis, “there is only one catch.” Such a sentiment is breathtaking in its “innocence.” It is all the more breathtaking when it comes to reality in the form of dead Gazan inhabitants. The scene of slain Gazans is a reiteration of the conclusion to Israel’s ancient tale of emancipation:
Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore (Exodus 14:30).
Methinks it is the work of faithful preaching and faithful teaching to make visible the deep, deep contradiction that is offered in the Bible between the force of violence attributed to YHWH and our inclination to stress and embrace the claims for Yahweh’s generous love. Adjudication of this contradiction is the hard, inescapable, insoluble work of interpretation.
Before we finish, we may pause to ask whether Israel in its seeking and claiming the land of promise might have had an alternative to such unrestrained violence. Perhaps we may find a clue in the harsh command of Moses:
You shall devour all the peoples that the Lord your God is giving over to you, show them no pity (Deuteronomy 7:16; see also Joshua 11:20).
The practice of herem is exactly and precisely the exhibit of “no mercy.” Thus the alternative to herem is likely to be mercy (rhm). The claim of divine mercy looms large in Israel’s covenantal rhetoric. Such a divine inclination might indeed be performed in the life of the world. It is possible to imagine, against the record, that Israel might have practiced mercy toward other inhabitants of the land. In the ancient world Israel might have curbed its violence by mercy, but mostly it did not.
So now, the state of Israel might show mercy toward Palestinians, enough mercy that acknowledges and permits the full life of the Palestinian community. In the end it is only such mercy that will make a just peace possible in Israel or anywhere else. In the end, it is the same with the United States. It is possible that White people in the United States might show mercy on Native and Black people, sufficient mercy that permits them, like White people, to have a fully empowered prospect for a human future. The elimination of “the other” cannot ever succeed. It is recorded that the herem of Israel could not fully eliminate the other peoples. (See Judges 1:27-33 with the repeated refrain, “did not drive out.”) So it is with us. A very different practice is required and is possible, a practice that might lead to generous policies and neighborly practices. The unlearning of herem toward “the other” is a lesson upon which the church must relentlessly insist. In the end, Israel’s attraction to YHWH is one of mercy, the very mercy that refuses violence toward neighbors.
