(no subject)
Mar. 19th, 2010 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIf 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 reasonroga 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.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 04:44 pm (UTC)It reads to me as if he's talking specifically about Christianity and their New Testament / Old Testament thing, wherein older holy books are deprecated in favor of the newer ones, which sets them up to forget original/older anythings, including violence. (Speaking as a lesbian in a Christian society, however? I laugh at the idea that Christians have forgotten Old Testament violence. And I damn well know that LGBTQ people aren't the only ones who are dealing with Christians using the OT to justify violence.)
That this is a process of "all" religions, however? That sounds a lot like Christian privilege-induced ignorance talking, where he's assuming that his religion's process of forgetting/putting-aside older stories is general to all religions. I fail to see his justification for that. I want data.
And referring to amnesia about past Christian violence as "holy" is just... *shudder, non-verbal noises of protest* ...It is not "holy" for people in a position of privilege to just forget things they feel like forgetting. Not holy.
But while I can easily tell that there's a lot that's suspect in Jenkins' position on this, that's a completely different matter than knowing how it's specifically wrong in the case of Judaism. And I thank you for elaborating on that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 04:54 pm (UTC)Over in the LJ version of this post
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 04:15 pm (UTC)And thanks for the link; it and its connected posts were an excellent morning of reading.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 11:51 am (UTC)Comparing violence between different historical cultures and mythologies is a valid exercise. One could just as well compare violent traditions from ancient Greece and Rome. There's nothing inherently offensive about asking that question. On the contrary, it seems natural to want to investigate historical violence in the two traditions which came to dominate the world, especially as that history is usually left out of polite conversation. The religiously inclined are likely to be aware of it, but the less-involved and most of mainstream culture are likely to be ignorant of it. Similarly, there's no reason to restrict such inquiries to violence - it would be interesting to compare historical traditions of marriage, law enforcement, culinary traditions - any and everything. These are interesting topics.
Jenkins says that he;s surprised that the Bible seems more violent than the Koran, but you dissect the statement as if he'd implied that he was unaware that there was violence in the bible. Jenkins doesn't seem surprised that there's violence in the bible, but that he finds it more violent than what's in the Koran. Specifically, he says that "many people will find it a surprise", which seems undisputably accurate. There is nothing to indicate that "he thought that it was all about peace and love and understanding", and to say so seems to be a mis-characterization of his remarks. The phrasing makes it seem like Jenkins is professing ignorance of the Koran more than the bible - that his initial impressions of violence in the Koran were more extreme than his research later suggested. Still a sort of ignorance, but the opposite of what you're accusing him of.
On the subject of pronunciation - I obviously do not speak Hebrew, so I'm probably totally out of my depth here. But apparently spelling Cherem beginning with a heth is acceptable, and can be pronounced like this, this or this. Hagerty's pronunciation seems like a not-too-badly anglicized pronunciation of either of the latter two, and not an unforgivable mangling for a non-native speaker (in the opinion of this non-native speaker).
On the subject of the biblical story of the the Amalekites, it's utterly unsurprising that the people carrying out a genocide would record history as the other people attacking first, and specifically targeting their children. That's true of pretty much every genocide in history. The Native Americans were attacking Christian children, the Armenians were doing terrible things to Turkish children, and everyone who's ever been a scapegoat minority has suffered from the a blood libel. Trying to justify a genocide through the reports of the victors is extremely suspect at best.
You say that by focusing on the genocide instead of ongoing threats to the Jews is to "miss the mark". Why does there have to be only one mark? Is the polite thing to do to ignore the violence because someone else would rather focus on a different aspect of the story? I'm sure that this story is usually used to set up the story of Esther, but so what? Your argument seems to be "the story as is usually told focuses on the long-term aftermath of the genocide rather than the genocide itself, so talking about the genocide is missing the mark offensively". It's possible I'm badly misreading you, and if so please forgive me and help me out with the understanding here.
Lastly, I think Jenkins as assertion that that modern portrayals of these texts do tend to gloss over the more violent bits is accurate. People who are passively or marginally involved in their religion, or people who are aware of a religion only through general popular culture, will miss out on these things entirely. They're not highlighted, not widely discussed, and generally only known to people who, like you, are intimately involved with their religion.
Actually, in this I think both you and Jenkins are making an over-generalization error. Jenkins extrapolates from a lack of popular knowledge of ancient violence to his "holy amnesia" hypothesis, even though it completely fails to account for an ongoing acute awareness of these details among the devout. I think you're making the same mistake in reverse - assuming that an ongoing recognition among the devout means that there's been no erosion in awareness whatsoever.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 04:27 pm (UTC)There's nothing wrong with comparing the tradition of violent action in Christian and Muslim law, but there is something wrong if your goal is to determine a clear 'winner' and 'loser'. Violence in religion is something that a survey would show waxes and wanes over the course of history- I'm in the middle of a really scholarly book about Islam that suggests that Islam's violent movements have a history of becoming powerful for a couple of generations and then moderating or becoming marginalized. If you go into the exercise trying to show that one religion is 'more violent' than the other, you're going to produce an answer that offends people. No matter what your result, no matter what your methodology, because it is inherently a bad question. That's why I went into their report looking to tear into them, because I knew they were starting off with a scary-bad premise. If you looked at the online comments on the report, it was a flamewar about whether Islam or Christianity was more violent. Because the report was flamebait, and nothing more sophisticated than that.
And look, hearing a so-called religious historian admit that his fundamental knowledge of the Holy Scriptures of the largest religions in the world was inadequate before he started writing this book is always a red flag. When I want to learn about Jewish history, I hunt down the religious scholar who's been studying the subject the last thirty years. When I want to learn about Islamic history, I hunt down the scholar who's devoted their life to the subject. I don't want a johnny-come-lately popping in from the Christian world with biases and the belief that if he reads the book a couple times he'll be as qualified to comment as anybody. The Koran is a complicated text that I can't claim to be an expert on, which is why I completely left my critique of his discussion of the Koran out of the post, but suffice to say that to my inexpert eye there were plenty of problems there, too.
The pronunciation thing is a minor point. The big point is that Hagerty only cited Old Testament verses in proving that Christianity's Holy Scripture is violent, yet never consulted a Rabbi or Jewish religious scholar to provide context. Her only sources in this report were Muslim and Christian, as if Jews couldn't provide insight into their holy books. As if our ownership of our holy books has been appropriated by the Christians. Also, as if the New Testament didn't have any violent passages that could have been cited.
And my point with regard to the genocide in the Bible wasn't to try to diminish the act of genocide, and if I did that I'm sorry. I was saying that this is a passage with which all Jews struggle, it's a passage that Jews have struggled with for the past 2000+ years (as far back at least as the Talmud), and to just say "Oh, look, genocidal Jews" without exploring any of the approaches we've developed to the textual problem, without giving us a chance to defend our religious texts, is to erase our relevance from the story. And that's offensive.
I linked in one of the above comments to a post about the stereotype of the Vengeful Old Testament God and the bloody, violent Old Testament. It's a stereotype that's formulated by focusing intently on specific Old Testament passages while ignoring the ones that advocate social justice, divine mercy, and related to this point, RULES OF WAR. Fighting just wars is an important religious tenet for Jews that is missed if you focus on the concept of cherem. We have lengthy passages about the proper, moral treatment of prisoners, about who is and isn't allowed to be killed, about how one goes about declaring war responsibly. And this violent Old Testament stereotype is a stereotype which is dangerous because it has fostered anti-semitism for the past two thousand years. "How can you worship that vengeful Old Testament God when Jesus is pure mercy? I think I will torture you until you find Jesus."
And lastly, your gloss on Jenkins's 'holy amnesia' does not seem accurate, because it suggests that what happens isn't holy amnesia at all, but just liberalizing of a portion of the members of the religion. If it's the case that traditional observers of a faith still remember its core violence, where is the amnesia involved? I can't believe that's what he's trying to say. And as
Moreover, my hypothesis isn't at all that there's been no erosion in awareness. Rather, as I briefly mentioned above, this is something which has been demonstrably cyclical over history, and to try to make it teleological is kind of loony.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 04:52 pm (UTC)I'd amend your "waxes and wanes" description of violence over time with a long-term decrease, such that modern waxes tend to be less corrosive and widespread than ancient waxes.
There was a book I read a few years ago, which I sadly can't remember now, which made a compelling case for turning the vengeful-old-testament/merciful-new-testament stereotype on its head. Which I think I actually got from a Professor of Buddhism. Maybe you know it? I really wish I could remember it right now. In any event, know that I mostly agree with you about the vengeful-old-testament, nice-new-testament paradigm being mostly bunk.
Good talk :-)