One thing I love about being a teacher is that I don’t have to know everything. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer to a student’s question, and I’m not afraid to admit as much. I follow that admission with a promise to find out, or, in some situations, I suggest to the student to do a little research herself.
When you’re a priest leading who knows how many thousands of listeners through 365 days of Bible reading, you’re going to encounter some troubling passages. You’re probably going to do your best to explain them, and sometimes, the explanation might be reasonable. But statistically speaking, you will eventually say something that is so completely outrageous that you’d probably wish you hadn’t said it.
Today Fr. Mike had just such a day reading Numbers 31. It tells the story of God’s command to the Israelites to wipe the Midianites off the face of the earth. What was the Midianite crime? Well, they’d introduced the Israelites to the false god Baal, and the Israelites became so smitten with this new god that at least two of them conducted a fertility ritual in the Holy of Holies — the holiest place on Earth, Fr. Mike explained. It’s a troubling passage, and Fr. Mike struggles to explain it from God’s point of view:
You have to go to battle against the people who have already corrupted you. … You have already been corrupted, so you have to put an end to this. That’s one of the reasons why the warfare there is, like, ‘kill everybody,’ which is really hard for us. And it’s not because God wanted everyone to die. That is not the case. In fact, that kind of warfare would not have existed — this is important for us to understand — that kind of warfare would not have existed if the people of Israel had been faithful. This is so critical for us to note, that that is not the plan of God.
The first problem I have with this is that it’s almost as if Fr. Mike has forgotten the reading from just the other day from Deuteronomy 28.63:
And just as the Lord took delight in making you prosperous and numerous, so the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction; you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to possess.
Killing and bringing things to ruin seem to be what this god enjoys, and he seems to boast about how much he enjoys it. How does Fr. Mike reconcile these two passages? Simple. He doesn’t. He probably didn’t even notice it.
Second, what about the responsibility of the Israelites? If they went astray, the Midianites certainly had something to do with it, but ultimately, it’s the Israelites who went astray, not the Midianites. Fr. Mike is essentially saying that they deserve total eradication because they tempted the Israelites to idolatry. But Fr. Mike tries to deal with this:
They are so weak that they worship other gods. It’s because of the people’s weakness that Moses has to command — and I say, ‘has to command’ because it’s just, like, no other way around their weakness than the kind of total destruction of the Midianites here. We’re going to see this warfare again and again. It can be troubling for us, and that’s okay that it’s troubling for us because it’s not good, right? It’s not good. It’s not what God would ultimately want.
There’s no other way around their weakness?! This is an omnipotent, omniscient god we’re supposedly talking about here. Surely he could figure out another way to deal with this that doesn’t involve wholesale slaughter. Hell, I’m just a stupid human, and I can probably come up with at least half a dozen other ways that don’t involve genocide.
It’s as if Fr. Mike’s version of the OT god is sitting up in heaven going, “Dang, I wish they hadn’t done that. I don’t know what I’ll do about it. Well, I can’t see any alternative to killing them all.” It’s ludicrous. But Fr. Mike doesn’t see the box he put this god into. He just has to explain it.
He can’t say, “I don’t know. I just don’t get it. It seems brutal, and I can’t really understand it myself.” That’s not an option if you approach the reading with an a priori assumption that this book is the perfect word of a perfect being. That assumption forces you into saying utterly stupid things like Fr. Mike.
There’s another little treasure in the reading that Fr. Mike didn’t mention: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31.17). “Keep the virgins for yourself,” is what this god is saying.