Book Journal 2023: Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and The Shalom of God

Book Journal 2023: Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and The Shalom of God
Author: Matthew Lynch

The tagline on the back cover poses the question “what do we do with a God who enacts and condones violence”. Narrowing in on two of the most essential narratives in the Bible associated with violence- the flood story and the Canannite conquest- he works to transform that question into one more in tune with how scripture itself functions as both a sacred and literary work. If the above question is relevant to many of us today attempting to engage this work as a cross cultural movement into an unfamiliar language and worldview, learning the questions the authors and readers of scripture were asking in their world can be helpful in navigating the “challenge of violence in scripture”.

There is a good deal in Lynch’s analysis of these two central narratives that was familiar to me in terms of approach and information, albeit being one of the most concise and accessible treatments of these approaches and ideas that I have come across in a good while. And then there were some wonderful surprises. Some truly paradigm shifting surprises that left me wishing I could put this in the hands of as many people as possible. This was especially true when it came to the conquest narratives. I’ve spent a whole lot less time there than I have with the flood narrative, so that’s where I was most fully engaged.

A quick and cursory summation: central to his claims about these texts is the basic concession that part of the challenge of engaging the text is the existence of contrasting views inherent within the text operating in dialogue. This is of course the result of differing points of perspective being contained and retained and preserved with intention on the part of the Biblical editors. One of the central concerns that emerges from this process is, if God indeed spoke into and acted within history, how does this shape, and indeed reshape their understanding of their present circumstance when it comes to knowing who God is by the way God acts in and for the world.

This becomes especially complex once we begin to contrast shifting points in Israel’s own formation, locating within their story majority-minority points of view. This becomes a stepping point for navigating an important facet of scripture for us reading from our own vantage point as foreigners “into” the culture and language of their day; the role of internal critique. This becomes hugely important for engaging scripture from the outside looking in, as so often the tendency is to assume our role as judge and jury of the other, and such an act of othering, of which assumptions of our being “more” evolved and civilized and them more archaic belongs, is the best way for us to ensure that we miss and misappropriate what the text is doing in its world. A crucial point of perspective is to remember the movement present in the biblical narrative- enslavement, liberation, exile- and to understand that someone looking at this story from the point of exile is to going to be asking particular questions that a liberated or enslaved peope are not. When it comes to being good readers of scripture, and when it comes to learning how to allow these stories to shape us from our present vantage point this side of Jesus’ resurrection, we have to allow these different realities to exist in conversation.

One example when it comes to being good readers of Joshua. Noting how it speaks from the perspective of having arrived in the land and having been unsettled from the land, and how this perspective writes, using an intentional literary design, the “conquest” story in the light of the Exodus narrative, can help bind us to the bigger picture of a people contending with both promise and failure. This only becomes more apparent when connecting the conquest with the flood narrative, illuminating how it was that the ancient readers and authors saw a world to be in contention with the enslaving “spiritual powers”. This plays the connection between Joshua and the Exodus in direct relationship to the true conflict. It also gives us a way of teasing out how it is that we make sense of seeming points of contention when it comes to violent acts commanded by and attributed to the hand of God and a voice that witnesses to the character of God pointing to a different and opposing way of acting in and for the world, including the Canannites. If God did indeed speak into and act within the world in a revelatory fashion (as their convictions held to be), the question that follows, in line with the flood story (itself connecting us back to Geneis 1-5), is how does this character shape the way we live together in our present context. This is what we find in careful readings of the ever changing rules that follow an established people being prepared to take residence in the land within a world filled with violence. As readers of scripture it might feel puzzling at first glance to imagine a seemingly violent text being opposed to such violence, and yet as careful readers such a vision can come alive in transformative ways when we become attune to the larger narrative at play. Not least of which is reckoning the “”liturgical” presence of Joshua, a liturgy bent not on the story of displacing a people but in displacing the idols that hold the world in the grip of violence. Joshua on this front becomes a story of the completed Exodus, one that leads straight into the reality of exile on the basis of these same idols shadowing the greater vision of a liberated creation. Which of course leads to a new Joshua (Jesus), which careful readers can note is told through a Gospel story patterned after the Exodus and the Exile, the very thing that translates it as a “new covenant” story. A completion of both stories brought up together in God’s liberating work for the whole of creation.

A brilliant book, which blends important scholarly interest with pastoral intent. Especially formative for those who struggle to reconcile the sacredness of scripture with pertinent and important questions about the problem of its seeming violent depiction of God. It appeals to a narrative approach mixed with literary and historical criticism, but in a way that upholds the central conviction in the revelatory act of God in and for the world. It holds scripture as sacred, and is intently interested in the question of who God is based on how God acts in and for the world. The character of God should be at the forefront of the narrative, and when we allow the text to speak on its own terms it should draw us closer to knowledge of who this God is. Books like this are an extremely helpful resource then for learning how to become better readers and more faithful adherents to the story contained within in.