We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

When the Law Demanded the Death Penalty
The Sinai covenant is significantly structured around violence. It motivates behavioral conformity by promising rewards and threatening violence. Without the threat of violence, the law looses its “teeth.” If the law is an acquiescence to sin, then the divinely sanctioned violence that is associated with it must also be considered an acquiescence to sin.
The conciliatory nature of the violence associated with the law is further confirmed, in my mind, by the fact that the violent dimension of this law parallels, in many respects, what we find among Israel’s ancient Near East neighbors. Among these cultures it was not uncommon to punish certain crimes by maiming people, stoning them, burning them alive or putting them to death in other ways. To be sure, Israel is highly unique in that its law is far more focused on religious and sexual crimes than what we find elsewhere. And as harsh as much of the law of the OT is, it is in many respects more humane, especially toward women and slaves, than what we find in other ancient law codes. Nevertheless, the basic violent mindset that permeates the law of the OT reflects the violent mindset of the ancient culture Israel was embedded in. And this, I argue, suggests that the portrait of God endorsing these laws is an accommodation to the culturally conditioned mindset of the Israelites.
The point is further confirmed when we consider how Jesus responded to the woman who was caught in the act of adultery, a crime that explicitly prescribes death by stoning (Lev 20:10-12). When asked what he felt should be done with the woman, Jesus ingeniously exposed the inherent immorality of the law by saying, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (Jn 8:7). Jesus’ point is that, apart from the question of whether or not an adulterer (or any other sinner) deserves to die, only a sinless person would be justified in carrying it out.
In a sense, Jesus is going a step beyond Paul who argued that, while the law is holy in its own right, it functions as a curse by virtue of the fact that no one can live up to it. Jesus is here suggesting that, not only is there no one who is holy enough to live up to it; there is no one who is holy enough to carry it out. And the curse of the law applies as much to the first category of people as to the second. In any event, in light of this, we can hardly imagine Jesus commanding sinners in the OT to bring the curse of the law upon themselves by bringing the death-penalty curse of the law upon others. And since Jesus reveals God’s true character and will, we shouldn’t imagine that it was God who was actually commanding his people to put others to death.
What we can imagine God doing, and what I believe we should imagine God doing, is acting like a missionary. As a heavenly missionary to a depraved and oppressed world, God patiently works with people in the sinful condition he finds them. The incarnational and sin-bearing God thus stooped to work within the fallen, culturally conditioned framework of his people, thereby wearing their distorted, Rorschach-like perceptions of him.
Given what we now know about God in Christ, we must assume it grieved God’s heart to allow—and even appear to command—people to be maimed, stoned to death or even burned alive for committing certain crimes. Yet, because God refuses to lobotomize people to conform them to his ideal, he had no choice but to patiently accommodate and bear their sin by taking on the semblance of a God who approves of such violence.
Image by tamaki via Flickr.
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Law, Old Testament, Religious Violence, Violence
Related Reading

Was the Early Church Pacifistic? A Response to Paul Copan (#11)
In Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) I argue that Jesus and Paul instruct Christians to love and bless their enemies and to unconditionally refrain from violence (e.g. Matt 5:39-45; Rom 12:14-21). Moreover, I argue that this was the prevailing attitude of Christians prior to the fourth century when the Church aligned itself with the…

Jesus and Nationalistic Violence
Throughout the Old Testament, we find Israel spoken of as God’s “chosen nation.” The Israelites were to be a nation of priests whom God wanted to use to unite the world under him (Ex 19:6). Since nationalism and violence inevitably go hand in hand, as Jacque Ellul and others have noted, the covenant God made…

Podcast: Why Does God Accommodate Divorce and Not Violence?
Greg looks at how God treats violence and divorce and speculates on why he treats them differently. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0363.mp3

How the Church Fathers Read the OT
After the completion of the New Testament, the church fathers developed theology in their increasingly Gentile post-apostolic church in such a way that many of the distinctively Jewish features of the NT’s use of the OT diminished. However, this was not the case with regard to the Christocentric interpretation of the OT that was so…

The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…

Podcast: Was Jesus’ Experience of Separation on the Cross a Hallucination or a False Belief?
Greg talks about the paradox of Trinity and Christ’s experience of separation on the cross. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0349.mp3