(no subject)
Mar. 19th, 2010 01:50 amIf you place the Bible and the Koran side by side and compare them, which is the bloodier Scripture? That's the question we put to NPR's Barbara Hagerty.
That's the opening NPR decided to go with for a piece on a new book by Professor Phillip Jenkins comparing the attitudes toward violence in the Christian and Muslim traditions. As if it were a game that could have a winner! But don't worry, the fail doesn't end there!
Hagerty consistently mispronounces "cherem" as "herem", without the beginng chet sound, reflecting the overall way that it is clear that she never once talked to a Jew about how Jews understand the difficult Old Testament passages that have suddenly been 'discovered' by the Christian scholars in this report. She refers several times to the "Judeo-Christian tradition", as if that were a phrase that held relevant meaning. She generalizes things that "all religions" do from a single or handful of examples.
Jenkins, supposedly a religious historian, says "Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible." But this is almost too mindboggling to be believed. Jenkins must clearly have never read the Bible if he thought that it was all about peace and love and understanding. Part of being a student of the Bible involves sorting through passages that do not mesh well with modern ethical theory and figuring out how to understand them. Making sense of these passages is a responsibility for a competent religious scholar. How could this possibly come 'much to his surprise'?
Jenkins continues, "There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide." It's called "cherem", though as I mentioned, Haggerty calls it "herem" and each time I heard the word pronounced over the course of the report, I got angrier and angrier. It refers to holy war, prescribed by God and meant to be complete in its destruction. It's not undertaken lightly- performing a war of cherem defiles the warriors so that they can't enter the Temple or Tabernacle until they've been ritually purified. And it's not undertaken to wipe out unbelievers. It's undertaken to defend God's people against existential threats, to destroy nations so morally corrupt that God wants them removed from the planet.
Like Amalek, the example the radio report cites. They first appear in Scripture as the first nation to attack the Jews after they left Israel. The Bible notes that they specifically attacked when the Israelites were weakened from their escape, and they particularly attacked the weakest members of the Children of Israel. The Amalekites last appearance in the Bible is in the Book of Esther, when Haman the Agagite tries to have all of the Jews killed in a single day of genocide.
And in the middle, of course, is the example of Cherem that the Jews carry out on the Amalekites. King Saul is ordered by God through Samuel to wipe out this evil people, and he goes out and wages war, but he spares Agag the King of Amalek. 70 year old Samuel is left to kill Agag and eventually Saul loses his Kingdom to David.
Genocide, to be sure. But not without context. The Israelites were striking out a tenuous existence on the end of the era of Judges, constantly under attack by the Philistines and other tribes. The Amalekites had proven themselves to be a persistent threat, a people who saw it as their duty to destroy the nation of Israel. When Jews read this story, we use it to set up the story of Esther, whose enemy Haman was descended from the saved King Agag. Always it's about the reminder that there really are threats to our very existence, that the enemies of the Jews are not to be underestimated. It's still a challenging passage, one that has made Jews for centuries ask what the meaning of God's plan is. But trying to understand it in without the rest of its Biblical context is a surefire way to miss the mark offensively.
But Jenkins says, even though the Bible is violent, Christianity and Judaism today are not for the most part.
"What happens in all religions as they grow and mature and expand, they go through a process of forgetting of the original violence, and I call this a process of holy amnesia," Jenkins says.
Maybe incompetent religious scholars forget the original violence, but the Jews haven't. It's the reason![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roga refused to cut out the section on the genocide at the end of the Book of Esther in her otherwise goofy Adam Lambert Purim Spiel. It's the reason that my Shabbos table, from time to time, is punctuated with loud familial shouting matches about the meaning of these very verses. It's the reason a lot of liberal Orthodox Jews are secretly comfortable with Israel being a relatively secular state, so that the dangerously complicated forces of theocratic law won't take hold over the land. When you're a Jew, beset on all sides by enemies even in America the land of the free, you can't afford to forget the original violence. Holy amnesia is a privilege of the comfortable.
That's the opening NPR decided to go with for a piece on a new book by Professor Phillip Jenkins comparing the attitudes toward violence in the Christian and Muslim traditions. As if it were a game that could have a winner! But don't worry, the fail doesn't end there!
Hagerty consistently mispronounces "cherem" as "herem", without the beginng chet sound, reflecting the overall way that it is clear that she never once talked to a Jew about how Jews understand the difficult Old Testament passages that have suddenly been 'discovered' by the Christian scholars in this report. She refers several times to the "Judeo-Christian tradition", as if that were a phrase that held relevant meaning. She generalizes things that "all religions" do from a single or handful of examples.
Jenkins, supposedly a religious historian, says "Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible." But this is almost too mindboggling to be believed. Jenkins must clearly have never read the Bible if he thought that it was all about peace and love and understanding. Part of being a student of the Bible involves sorting through passages that do not mesh well with modern ethical theory and figuring out how to understand them. Making sense of these passages is a responsibility for a competent religious scholar. How could this possibly come 'much to his surprise'?
Jenkins continues, "There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide." It's called "cherem", though as I mentioned, Haggerty calls it "herem" and each time I heard the word pronounced over the course of the report, I got angrier and angrier. It refers to holy war, prescribed by God and meant to be complete in its destruction. It's not undertaken lightly- performing a war of cherem defiles the warriors so that they can't enter the Temple or Tabernacle until they've been ritually purified. And it's not undertaken to wipe out unbelievers. It's undertaken to defend God's people against existential threats, to destroy nations so morally corrupt that God wants them removed from the planet.
Like Amalek, the example the radio report cites. They first appear in Scripture as the first nation to attack the Jews after they left Israel. The Bible notes that they specifically attacked when the Israelites were weakened from their escape, and they particularly attacked the weakest members of the Children of Israel. The Amalekites last appearance in the Bible is in the Book of Esther, when Haman the Agagite tries to have all of the Jews killed in a single day of genocide.
And in the middle, of course, is the example of Cherem that the Jews carry out on the Amalekites. King Saul is ordered by God through Samuel to wipe out this evil people, and he goes out and wages war, but he spares Agag the King of Amalek. 70 year old Samuel is left to kill Agag and eventually Saul loses his Kingdom to David.
Genocide, to be sure. But not without context. The Israelites were striking out a tenuous existence on the end of the era of Judges, constantly under attack by the Philistines and other tribes. The Amalekites had proven themselves to be a persistent threat, a people who saw it as their duty to destroy the nation of Israel. When Jews read this story, we use it to set up the story of Esther, whose enemy Haman was descended from the saved King Agag. Always it's about the reminder that there really are threats to our very existence, that the enemies of the Jews are not to be underestimated. It's still a challenging passage, one that has made Jews for centuries ask what the meaning of God's plan is. But trying to understand it in without the rest of its Biblical context is a surefire way to miss the mark offensively.
But Jenkins says, even though the Bible is violent, Christianity and Judaism today are not for the most part.
"What happens in all religions as they grow and mature and expand, they go through a process of forgetting of the original violence, and I call this a process of holy amnesia," Jenkins says.
Maybe incompetent religious scholars forget the original violence, but the Jews haven't. It's the reason
roga refused to cut out the section on the genocide at the end of the Book of Esther in her otherwise goofy Adam Lambert Purim Spiel. It's the reason that my Shabbos table, from time to time, is punctuated with loud familial shouting matches about the meaning of these very verses. It's the reason a lot of liberal Orthodox Jews are secretly comfortable with Israel being a relatively secular state, so that the dangerously complicated forces of theocratic law won't take hold over the land. When you're a Jew, beset on all sides by enemies even in America the land of the free, you can't afford to forget the original violence. Holy amnesia is a privilege of the comfortable.