Episode 139: Dr. Matthew Lynch on Divine Violence

Matthew Lynch talks with us about his new book Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (IVPress 2023). We cover how the question of violence has to be considered canonically as well as dig into the weird stories of the Nephilim.

Purchase Flood and Fury here.

Timestamps:

1:50- Violence in the Old Testament

10:53- Problem of Apparent Divine Favoritism

27:10- The Conquest of Canaan

42:53- Old Testament and Personal Vengeance

Episode Transcript:

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello, and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. This week I'll be talking with Matthew Lynch, about his book flood and fury, Old Testament violence and the shalom of God with InterVarsity. Press, and 2023. And Dr. Lynch and I talk through a little bit about the sort of canonical shape of the question of violence. That is, how does a reading of Genesis and the whole scripture help us understand the question of violence in the Old Testament? I also include a question from a student of mine, who I taught Hebrew to had some questions about personal violence, and Dr. Lynch was gracious enough to answer some broad questions. So I just want to thank Dr. Lynch, for coming on. And I hope that you enjoy this conversation, please do rate us and review us on iTunes. And that helps other people find the show. So we have a lot of shows coming up. We have Matthew Lynch, we have Zack Hicks, who's going to talk a little bit about the Reformation and Thomas Cranmer. We're gonna have Dr. Henley key back on. He's going to discuss with us Samuel stuff on a su ski and his 20th century sojourn just a lot of things coming up on the podcast. So thank you for listening. And without further ado, here's my conversation with Matthew Lynch. Today, we have on a history of Christian theology, we've got Dr. Matthew Lynch. And Dr. Lynch is professor of Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver. And he has recently written flood and fury Old Testament violence in the shalom of God, with IVP. Press or InterVarsity. Press. And we're very grateful to have Dr. Lynch on.

Matthew Lynch 1:50

Thanks, Chad. Good to be here.

Charles Kim 1:51

Yeah, I and also sometimes should I would you prefer me just to call you Matt or doctor? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We're grateful to have Matt here. And it for for those of you who don't know, Matt, Matt also founded the on script podcast of which I am. I don't know if I'm a regular listener, I'm maybe more of an occasional listener. But I've enjoyed it for a long time. So

Matthew Lynch 2:16

yeah. Glad to hear. It's been fun. Good,

Charles Kim 2:19

good. Well, so here we're talking. As I said, we're here to talk about his new book. And I one of my questions. Actually, a couple of my questions almost start from I found out about the book because I have students who I was teaching Hebrew to who were asking me questions about Old Testament violence. And I was thinking about it, even this morning, I teach an intro to theology class, and I have them read a little bit of Genesis and Exodus. And immediately the students say, man, God is just so angry. In the Old Testament. And, and there was a real challenge. It's always a challenge to be like, you know, well, that's this, you know, as Christians, we believe it's the same God. You know, there's none of this, like God's angry here, but nice here. And you kind of talk about that at the end of the book a little bit. But yeah, maybe talk a little bit, because I think from what I remember from the book, a lot of this was occasioned by conversations that you've had with people about some of these questions.

Matthew Lynch 3:21

Yeah, for sure. It definitely comes up with with students quite often. And, and I think it it can lead to real disillusionment, because they're kind of paying attention to the Bible in an intentional way for the maybe the first time or in a in a space where they're kind of freed up to think through things. So it can lead to disillusionment, or, or even cynicism about the Bible. Or a kind of negative view of the Old Testament and a thought that maybe a sort of nagging thought that I wonder if all we're doing when we read the Bible is just pick out our favorite texts, and string them together and build our theology off that. So part of what I've been challenged by is, as an Old Testament scholar and teacher, is to bring students into those hard texts as an opportunity for discipleship and a part of journeying with God through the hard stuff, and I think, I think that's important. And part of that is helping them think through the hidden costs of, of either dismissing some of those hard texts or trying to resolve them too quickly. And, and to see that maybe what seems like a solution, like a nice clean solution, say, just saying, well, Old Testament writers misunderstood God. Alright, that seems like a nice solution to a really thorny, difficult problem. That that has hidden costs too. But so you're, so I want people, whatever direction they go in sort of, and at the end of the day, I want them to at least have have read this theological and biblical fine print to what they're signing on to, because I think there are a lot of there are a lot of books and and, you know, popular podcasters, and writers out there who, who do propose, like kind of nice totalizing solutions to the problem of violence. And so I want them to think through things like if you get rid of a wrath, what else comes with that? Right? And, you know, that's in many cases, in the Old Testament, Wrath is the engine driving God's concern for justice, or the, the tendency sometimes to try to resolve a problem, having only done a kind of preliminary diagnosis of the problem, right? So you take a quick reading of the text, and then ask the question, alright, how are we going to deal with this, and it might turn out that you're trying to resolve or solve a problem that the text is has like a much, much more nuanced complex view on. So it's that kind of thing that that's really spurred me on, and increasingly, I've seen it as a key part of the discipleship process. To to, to wade through and to struggle through some of the hard hard stuffing. And as you know, Chad, from studying theology, like when you're doing Trinitarian theology, I'm sure it's a not not an exact same parallel, but there's a, an analogy, I guess, in, you know, a lot of the work you're trying to do is to preserve a particular mystery. And also to help people not only understand something, but also to avoid certain errors or to avoid saying other things that might have hidden costs and consequences that you might not consider up front. Right, right.

Charles Kim 7:04

Right. Yeah. Like what Yeah, I think sometimes use the language like putting a fence around the mystery, like, well, we don't want to make that error. We don't want to make that error. But it's hard to say exactly what the thing is. We're trying to define, you know, sort of the problem of apophatic ism and Qatif as that is theology and positive theology. But, yeah, well, and I really appreciate in the book I've I as I think I said this in the email, but I have recommended it to several of my friends who are pastors, just because I think it feels like you're kind of your sort of discipleship voice or your your teachers voice comes across very clear when you like, you front load the difficulty without resolving it. And so I thought it was a very helpful and, and surprising way, you know, a lot of times books that talk about violence and stuff like, yeah, we want to, we want to get to the thing that's going to make us feel okay about it. And, you know, put a nice little bow on it. But you kind of like say, here's all the problems now take a minute, and then let's do something else for a minute. And then we'll get back there.

Matthew Lynch 8:10

Yeah, sometimes you have to first go like scream into your pillow. As a as a first step, right?

Charles Kim 8:17

Yeah. Yeah, well, I so I felt like that was a very intentional way as part of like seeing this through and I think that can be a difficult thing in writing is like, how are you going to like to get the reader to trust you? And it feels like you're kind of like building up that rapport with the reader. Before you get into the real difficult. Yeah, the real difficult stuff.

Matthew Lynch 8:42

Yeah. And that's, you know, part of what I was also doing there in the intro, I am trying to front the problem, so that people face it squarely. Right. So you're not you're not kind of whitewashing things, and sugarcoating the Bible. And but I also wanted to talk through some of the proposals for dealing with violence in the Bible, and to kind of one by one talk about the sort of benefits and drawbacks of those approaches, so that people can both empathize with a particular angle on wrestling through violence and scripture, but also think about some of the problems with adopting a particular approach as your one or dominant approach to the issue of violence. And, you know, just as an example, one of the most one of the approaches that appeals in some circles and is apparent in others is Divine Command Theory. Sure, which is basically that if God says, a particular action is justified, it's by definition, just so if God says go wipe out the Canaanites down to every last one, then that's just and so a lot of people they hear that and they're like, that's You know, what kind of God is that and that's reprehensible. But I also want people to say, okay, I can see what you're trying to protect there, you're trying to protect the notion that there's some standard above God that God's beholden to. And that, you know, that places a standard higher than God, right. So I can, I can see, like the need to preserve that. But then on the other side, I want people to think through that, and and see, like, if we're called to be just as God is just as, as Isaiah calls us to. How can we imitate divine justice? If there's no correlation between our notion of justice and God's? And what about all those texts in the Bible where people question God's justice? Yeah, right. So there's, we can't just stop at God says it, that settles it. Right. But we can at least listen to that approach and say, I see what they're trying to preserve. Yeah. Yeah.

Charles Kim 10:55

Yeah, I and one thing I was thinking about, just as you as you talked about that, as a teacher, sometimes I'm worried that so like, you talked about front loading the difficulty and showing the drawbacks. Yeah. And sometimes I'm afraid that I'm going to set up a problem too big that I don't know what the solution is, and then that's gonna be like, I'm gonna lose my students. It's gonna disillusion them that's like, oh, man, you put that forward. So clearly, now what? I want you to feel the tension. But I don't want you to be disillusioned.

Matthew Lynch 11:25

Yeah, exactly. And I, I am very aware of that, as I, as I've written and on and taught on this subject. And I often say to people, if you don't have a big problem with violence in the Bible, I'm not interested in making sure that you do and, right. But at some point, you're going to have to, as a reader of the Bible, go deep enough so that you've at least thought about the issue for the person who's sitting next to you, in in church or in your community, who is struggling with that. And so I'm not interested in sort of fostering a faith crisis for everyone to demolish naive faith and so on. Because I think for some people, they just trust God in this. And it's a kind of simple trust. And I think that's beautiful. And so it's that balancing act of trying not to just, you know, precipitate a faith crisis, because I think that does lose trust. And I don't think it's ultimately helpful. And I think people can sense when someone's trying to do that,

Charles Kim 12:32

right. Yeah. Well, so to kind of dig into the book a little bit. So as I've kind of mentioned, you don't exactly just jump right to the Canaanite genocide and judges, but you take a kind of bigger view. So could you just say a little bit about maybe even how you came to that approach? Or like, what led you to thinking through the problem? And this larger scope?

Matthew Lynch 12:57

Yeah. Yeah, one of the questions that's always in view for me when wrestling through a problem like this, or any other theological problem is, is the question. Is there a way that the Bible itself is guiding us through this problem? You know, like, does it because I think Scripture, the writers of Scripture are tuned to the kinds of dilemmas that, that the life of faith includes, right and, and granted, some of those are going to be different based on our sort of unique cultural moment, and context. But some of those are perennial as well. And just as an example, the way that I think the Bible sort of sets up and also helps us think through a problem is, is Genesis four, where you have the Cain and Abel story. And, and the story doesn't start out with the problem of violence. It starts out with the problem of apparent divine favoritism. And where you've got God accepting April's offering and rejecting canes, and it doesn't really give a rationale for that. Right? There's some maybe hints in the text, but not really. Right. So so we as readers are in the same position as I mean, Cain and Abel, and that sense of being like, what's going on here? Why are you just favoring one and not the other? And I think Genesis is fronting that for us, because the life of faith will include the problem of apparent divine favoritism. And, but it doesn't leave things there because God comes alongside Cain, who wasn't favor and says there is a pathway toward in Hebrew literally uplift or favor, but it comes through mastery of your anger. And so so it both fronts the problem but also provides at least a way of of navigating the life of faith in that even though it doesn't resolve, like, Why did God favor one over the other? Right. And so that's that's kind of what got what guides my thinking in the problem of violence as well. And, and so I talked through those different approaches that I mentioned in the introduction, but then I say they have benefits and drawbacks, there's some that are wholly reject like Maurice, Ian's, you know, getting rid of the Old Testament. And some I definitely don't prefer, but we can learn from each approach. But at the end of the day, I think the approach that to me is most important, is, is deep sensitivity to the text, to read it slow and prepare to be surprised. So that's sort of the, the the summary of my approach. And and that's a kind of that requires a sort of field adaptive sensitivity to the contours, the terrain, the nuances of the text. And then continual reflection on what implications that might hold for this question that we bring, namely, what do we do about violence in the Bible? Yeah. Right. So so that that leads, I guess, in some ways to a more as one person put it kaleidoscopic approach. Right. So I don't have like, a a single model that I sort of cut through all the problems with. Yeah, but I think what I provide now use the analogy in the end of like, a multi strand rope that's dynamic has flexibility to it, and doesn't put all the weight on any one of those strands. Yeah. And I think that's the way we have to, to handle the load of a problem as as big and challenging and complex as violence in Scripture. Yeah.

Charles Kim 16:56

Yeah. I, just as you were talking it, it made me think a little bit about like, you know, churches that I've been in, and maybe trying to sort of think through, like, how is it that we come to this problem, and I know many people, myself included, you know, I read the Canaanites story, and I go, man, that's pretty awful. I can't believe that's in the Bible. What am I supposed to do with that? I wonder if, and I mean, I'm going to offer a little solution. But I'd be interested in or suggestion, I'd be interested in what how you understand like the kind of American church or maybe the English speaking church, like, why is this such a problem for us? And my thought, My firt, the first thing that came to mind was the way that we preached the Old Testament is often very fragmented or not at all. And so it makes it really tough then when every now and then you may be nosedive into a specific passage. And you're like, Oh, well, there's that's pretty weird. All right. Well, let's go back to the Gospels.

Matthew Lynch 17:53

Yeah, and I like to point out that you can nosedive into the New Testament and have the same problem. You know, Jesus saying, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. And it's like, well, this Jesus guy seems like a pretty violent dude. And, and so, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a good, a good point. And, you know, someone said, or, I can't remember if I brought it up, but like, one of the problems of, of, like, contemporary discourse, is that it's, it's dominated by sound bites, and tweets and short memes and so on, that, that are almost like put you in an impossible situation, right? So if, if you see a quote, leave nothing alive, that breeds right, it with regard to the Canaanites and Joshua, like every last man, woman, child and animal? Like, how on earth? Can you respond to that? With equal concision? Yeah, right. So if the, if the terms of discourse are that concise and pithy and short, I mean, what are you gonna do quote back love your neighbor? Like, then you're in a war of verses? Right. So. So I, I almost feel like we have to opt out of that sort of discourse. And just acknowledge that this is not something that can even really be engaged at that level. And, and be willing to sort of take a fewer but deeper approach. So like, walking with a few people through the complexities and challenges rather than trying to hit everyone with your kind of like Blockbuster, concise, one line response. Yeah. And I think I think that requires facility with the entirety of the Old Testament at some level right. None of us have total facility, but it requires genre sensitivity, historical sensitivity, literary sensitivity. And all these things take time to develop and, and patience. Yeah. And, and I don't think you have to have a PhD and, and read 1000 books on the subject. But it does require that patience and, and hope and a willingness to read the Old Testament as Jesus Bible, right and think, okay, somehow this is what I mean by hopeful approach somehow this Hebrew Bible was the sort of formative curriculum for Jesus. And it so formed Him that He lived and taught as he did. So what is it about this, that leads to a life and set of teachings like Jesus's? Yeah, and that's, that's what I mean by hopeful approach. And we might not be able to answer that with regard to every single verse on its own. Yeah. But hopefully, with regard to the broad, broad contours, the Old Testament will have something to say. Yeah, but that requires that sort of broad contoured awareness.

Charles Kim 21:08

Yeah. I mean, it strikes me as we've been talking, even going back to the Cain and Abel example. Essentially, what we've been dealing with a little bit back and forth is the problem of particularity. And universality. Yeah. And so it's like, in a sense, like, what what you've just outlined, I think, is a beautiful picture of like, why we need to be in the particular for a while, like, you know, you're like, it's like almost like God's saying, Come along, we're gonna start small. And I'm not gonna give you the full picture, and you need to end and it's gonna be frustrating, and you're not gonna like it. Yeah, a lot of us want that, like universal one kind of answer. But the life of faith has never been that easy. Yeah.

Matthew Lynch 21:50

Yeah. And I think there's an expectation that on the Bible's part that it's going to be hard to trust. Yeah. So like, think about Abraham, and Sarah. They're called out of their homeland, away from all those sorts of social, economic, religious, political support systems of their extended family, their, their elderly, they're told to go migrate to this land. So they do it. And then it says in chapter 12, as soon as they get there, now, there was a famine in the land. Right, like that. That's brutal. And, and so I think I think that sort of a sort of short snapshot of what faith is going to involve. Yeah. And so the, like scriptures deeply aware of how hard it is to walk by faith. Yeah. And I think that includes reckoning with the, the experience of and depiction of God as well. Yeah. No, I don't think it leaves it there at hate. It's just hard. And you're gonna think God's a monster. I don't I don't think that's what the what the Bible presents or teaches, but it does acknowledge the difficulty. And it had various like key junctures. Yeah.

Charles Kim 23:18

Okay, so this one's a little off kilter. But it was one of the things that I hadn't thought of for for a long time, but you talk about the Nephilim. And their relationship to the what goes on and Caden, and it just reminded me, like the other thing about the reading the Old Testament, because it's our Bible, we think it should be kind of, you know, contemporary, or I don't know, like, sometimes we have misconceptions about what it is. But it just reminded me that sometimes the Bible is really weird. And I and like, I'm in a place in my life, where I'm okay with that, like, I have more fun with it. But there are times when I'm presenting it to students who I don't know, you know, where they are in their life of faith. But I'm like, I don't know if I really want to believe up that we talked about the sons of God and the daughters of men are like, I don't know if I really want to go into that weirdness. But yeah, I don't know. Well, and you just you connect the Deaf believe, to the Canaanites. And I, I don't know, maybe I just wasn't paying attention in my old testament class. But I had never seen that connection drawn out.

Matthew Lynch 24:22

Yeah, the we are in sort of the weird and bizarre corners of the Old Testament in talking about the naphthalene, but also kind of interesting and perhaps important to you know, I don't this isn't sort of the, the main thread on or, you know, pagan, which I hang my entire argument, but it's an interesting piece of listening to the tax that I think's important. So, the naphthalene are this group that are associated with the offspring have this group of they're called the Sons of God in Genesis six, who I think they're depicted as raping the daughters of humanity. Okay? Now that on its own is just already strange, troubling and weird. And it's part of this sort of boundary crossing dynamic you get in Genesis one to 11, where like humanity is trying to be like God, and in the Tower of Babel bring, either ascend to heaven or bring the gods down. And, you know, they're the way sin plays out is causing fractures between humanity and creation between male female, humans and creatures, etc. So all these sort of boundaries are being broken and crossed, and including Heaven and Earth, even, right, the Nephilim, these, these sons of God coming into the daughters of humanity. And it says in Genesis six, now, the Nephilim, were on earth, the earth in those days. And these things called the GIBBO regime, or the the kind of warriors were born to the daughters of humans, after they were raped by the Divine sons. Okay, so you've got the GIBBO rrim, the mighty warriors, alongside the Nephilim. And the fall in Hebrew means fall, right? So the fallen ones. So I think that we're to imagine, were to make a mental association between the ancient warriors, and these giants, the Nephilim. Well, it turns out the Nephilim are also in the Promised Land, in numbers 13, when the spies go in, and they're like, there's giants in the land. And, and they sort of exaggerate it, and they say, they're giants in every city, right, like they're all over the place. And historically, probably comes out of like, in the, in the late bronze era, you know, you could go into the land of Canaan and see some of the giant walls old crumbled, but still present walls of the Middle Bronze period, which, you know, they had big city states back then. So, they have this idea that the land is occupied by the Nephilim, and their offspring who are called the ANA kites, and there are all sorts of other offspring, zams, Amin, amin, reffering, and a few others, I'm forgetting so. So there are all these sort of giant races that are seen to be offspring of this corrupt act of these divine beings. Now, it's, they show up in the land in numbers, but also in Joshua, where it talks about Joshua conquering these demigod rulers of the land of Canaan. And I guess what interested me in that is that there is a sense in sort of foregrounding these, these Anna kites, who are the offspring of the methylene, that that Joshua recognizes that there are kind of semi spiritual forces animating the kings of Canaan. At Joshua 11, toward the end of the chapter, the writer summarizes the campaigns in terms of the removal of the antiochene, as if like that captures what was happening in the conquest. And this is by no means an attempt to resolve the problem of violence. But there's an analogy here, at least between Jesus in the way that he comes into the land and the forces he confronts very physically, almost, are the demonic forces that hold the people captive. And, and these like, yeah, there are a lot of other pieces to this. But one more important piece in terms of how ancient people thought about kings, is they often thought about them as divine or semi divine, as really giant as well. So when in artwork when they would depict kings, they would often be like two or three times the as the height of an ordinary person. Now, obviously, they weren't actually. But that's the sort of It's a statement about status. Yeah. So there were these these Canaanite Egyptian backed Canaanite kings ruling the land who thought of themselves as or who were seen to be demigods. That become the kind of prime object of of this campaign against the North and Joshua 11. And, and I think that's a little window into like the spiritual portrayal of the conquest that this was not just a fight against flesh and blood, but it against principalities and powers, that, that through the Imperial grip of Egypt held the land captive. I'm sure that leaves lots of questions, but that's a few of the pieces of what I discussed in that chapter. Yeah,

Charles Kim 30:15

well, I don't want to give it all away. But I just thought I'd bring it up because I was like, I totally like, Yeah, I mean, I had Dr. Second felled for Old Testament at prints. Okay. I don't remember. And then I had Dr. Olson for another one, too. But, yeah, I'm just like, I don't remember talking about how far down that goes.

Matthew Lynch 30:33

Yeah, yeah, it's, well, one of the interesting things is that in there's Uber ridic text, which is so gar, it was a Canaanite kingdom to the north of Israel, not actually in the land that became Israel. And, and they talk about the fact that they're in, in his erratic text, that there are these spiritual sort of animate, Ghost, a ghost of of old kings who were living in particular towns that Joshua also locates them in. So it's crazy, like the so Israel share, it seems to share this idea with its neighbors that in Deuteronomy also mentions them in the same town. shares this conception with its neighbors that these like spiritual forces were occupying particular towns like this, they both have the same towns they mentioned.

Charles Kim 31:34

Fascinating. Yeah. Well, my my kind of switch gears question that I asked most of my guests is, what is one thing that you held to be true, but now think is false? Or vice versa? And oftentimes, they relate it to like what they're researching in the book. But I've also had kind of off the wall question. Alright. Yeah, answers, including someone's love for hockey was one of them. That changed. I grew up playing hockey, and so I think they might have known that, but but they yes, that they loved it. But yeah, anyway, yeah. So one thing that you kind of, like bait did a total 180 on.

Matthew Lynch 32:16

Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes, like, you hold to something when you're little, let's say, like, I remember my friend, like really kind of being really into this idea that, that the, all the symbols on the dollar bill, like represent the Illuminati or something like that. And I was like, Wow, that's so cool and crazy. And, but it's not like I had a moment where I was like, It's all wrong, I just sort of like stopped believing it at some point. And then there are things like, literal creation and flood that I used to not only hold you but argue for, and, and that also, that's what I had to think through but came to a different view on but one that I was thinking about was, I think, and this carried on into grad school that I used to see a real antagonism, almost like unnecessary antagonism between systematic and biblical theology. And, and I think I saw that to be a biblical scholar, I had to kind of stand against systematic theology, because the caricature was systematic theology tries to put everything in a box. Yeah. And, and, and give nice, clean, neat answers and proof texts all the time. Now, there are forms of systematic theology that do that. So it's, you know, in a few cases, a fair caricature. But I, I've done a 180 on on that one. Oh, such that, I think, systematic theology is, is very important for reading the Bible well, and also for thinking through what to do with the Bible. Yeah. In a way that that doesn't, necessarily quash the diversity of Scripture, or silence, you know, the range of voices that we have in the Bible. That was the fear I had, right? That you'd lose the sense of the dynamic, conversational dialogical qualities of Scripture. And but at the end of the day, like we, we worship one God. And so while I can emphasize say, you know, as biblical scholars like to talk, Matthews, Jesus marks Jesus Luke's Jesus, John's Jesus, yeah, I follow one Jesus, right. So I need these various voices, but I also have to think through what together they might say about Christ, right. So I, there's always that need For a synthetic move that preserves these distinct voices. So anyway, that's one thing I've done in one ad on.

Charles Kim 35:09

Yeah, that's really helpful and interesting. It kind of raised the question a little bit for me to like, what? So is that some of the question about like creation and that sort of thing? Is that what got you into studying the Old Testament? You know, I mean, I know, like, whenever I look at job boards and stuff, there are a lot of openings in Old Testament for it. So not as many people are rushing to the Old Testament, PhDs and yeah, jobs job world.

Matthew Lynch 35:37

I was drawn into it not through that question, per se, although the topic interest me, but I was I was drawn into it through studying early Jewish literature, actually, I went to Israel as an undergrad. And when I was there, we were looking at extra biblical stuff from around the time of the New Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls and Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. And, and we were looking at how they read the Old Testament. And, and it just amazed me, I was like, so fascinated by the, the, both the different ways that early Jewish writers engaged the Old Testament and also how the ways that they read it were analogous to ways in New Testament writers read it, who were, of course, also early Jewish interpreters. So that that kind of sent me back to the Old Testament, and I started never escaped. And I ended up you know, also, of course, like, individual people play a big role. I had really good professors in that. And, and that was very formative.

Charles Kim 36:41

Yeah, yeah. It's amazing the difference going to Israel makes and I think it was my first year of seminary, I went to Israel with Oh, did you? Yeah, with a group of rabbinical students. So we had Christian seminarians and rabbinical students. And I, I so fell in love, like when they would talk about interpretation and how they kind of came to understand things like the first time I realized that you couldn't eat a cheeseburger. And like, but like how that connected to the Old Testament, I'd like didn't get, but then they explained it. And I just loved you know, because like, and this is a negative caricature, but when I was like, oftentimes, I felt like when I was growing up, and I would have questions, it was sort of the Bible says that I believe, by believe it, that settles it. But it obscures the interpretation and the negotiation. Yeah, you know, and then, and then when I met these Jewish people, I was like, Oh, you've got the meek wrote, get the load you've got. You got all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Hope you navigate these problems. Yeah. So I was like, I guess I must be Jewish. And I'm not because I love Jesus. But I was like, Yeah, and I What's the same? So that's actually how I ended up in doing Patristics. Right. Oh, interesting. Primarily. I do Patristics because I was like, Oh, we do have, you know, generations of people thinking through these things. Yeah.

Matthew Lynch 38:02

Yeah. Yeah. It's that's an interesting pathway into Patristics. And, and it's, it's interesting to, to think about how within Judaism, like the citation of sages, is built into, you know, the core sacred texts in a way that for, for Christians, there, they're not really you know, so you have to intentionally pursue it. Like they are in another sense. And we are part of a tradition, right, that has a certain pressure on us, that's, you could say is authoritative, but it's a different dynamic in the way that you know, Rabbi, so and so says this rabbi, so this is this, like, you just, you're confronted immediately with, with the citation of, of the sages, yeah.

Charles Kim 38:57

Yep. Yeah. Well, um, so I want to be attentive to not give away the whole book. But I did. I did, like how you went through the minority and the majority reasonings of Joshua, could you just say something a little bit about how that helps us kind of begin to kind of work through the difficulty of that text?

Matthew Lynch 39:20

Sure, yeah. The Book of Joshua, and arguably other parts of the Pentateuch as well talk about the conquest in two distinct ways. And when I sort of wrote something up on this, and my friend Brad read it, and he's like, Oh, that's that minority and majority reports that I got that language from him. And the majority report is, as I'm dubbing it, there is, is the idea that the conquest involves the total destruction of the Canaanites that they in fact left nothing alive that breathes men Haven't children animals were destroyed. And there are several summary statements to that effect in chapters 1011 and 21. That give this kind of Deuteronomy like, summary and say that not one of God's promises failed, everything he said came true. It was a success, thumbs up, way to go. And those that's a kind of totalizing rhetoric. But then there's this other strand of Minority Report that runs its way through the book that acknowledges that, of course, Canaanites are still running around all over the place. And many, many of them survived. Yeah. And that's that minority report I consider closer to the on the ground historical kind of reality of the complexity of Israel's emergence in the land. And so then the question is, all right, if we've got these two versions, are they just contradictory? Is the is the book incoherent? And I don't think so I think they have to be considered in terms of distinct forms of rhetoric. One, and they're both important in terms of how we appropriate the book of Joshua. Well, I think the totalizing Majority Report is an important call for Israel to reject the Canaanite way of life, characterized by its kind of powerful kings. It's militarism, it's idolatry and so on. But then, and that sort of, in your face totalizing rhetoric, finds resonances in the teachings of Jesus to where he was like, you know, if your sin if you're, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out your foot, cut it off, right? You to be my disciple, you must hate your father, mother, sister, brother. Yeah. So that's, that's the kind of call that we find in the majority report. Yeah. In terms of how I think Josh was meant to be taken out by readers. Yeah. Now, you don't, you don't get out of that rhetoric by saying, like, Oh, we don't have to really take it seriously, because they didn't really mean it. Right? Because Jesus meant it at some level, but not a literal level. It's to be taken seriously, but not literally. Sure. And I think that for the majority report, yeah. And then Minority Report gives us a kind of more accurate picture of what happened historically. And I think knowing sort of which register you're in, as you're reading is, is helpful. Yeah. And that's kind of that's why I tried to unpack that.

Charles Kim 42:50

Yeah, that's really helpful. Well, another question that that I had from a student that I didn't have a very good answer for. And it part it's just because I, I teach too many things. And, you know, but but also, I, I just didn't know, I hadn't thought about it like that. But but we live in St. Louis, and there's a lot of violence. And this guy was, was asking me about, like, we'll specifically like how, how does the Old Testament speak about personal violence? So he was, you know, it wasn't necessarily about the genocide. So your book is more about these big narratives. But But is there something that you you know, in a similar way that you read the Old Testament, larger fashion that helps you think about like maybe cases of revenge or maybe just like how we are as Christians reading this book? What could that help? How could that help us understand, like, what to do if someone in our community, you know, is falls victim to gun violence? Because that happens, sadly, quite frequently here.

Matthew Lynch 43:58

Yeah. Yeah. So I think I think the the Bible is acutely aware of the dangers of taking a personal like, of personal vendettas. Yeah. That that escalates into more and more violence. But I think the I think the Old Testament is, is pretty unanimous in certainly in the poor off of prohibiting a person's ability to take personal revenge. But it doesn't leave it there and say, just forget about it. It does say God says Vengeance is mine, that that's a notion that appears in Old Testament and the New Testament. I mean, even the Book of Revelation, which has a really sort of peaceful resistance theme to it begins with the cry of the martyrs under the altar saying how long until you avenge our blood. So committing that, um, Have you like uttering that cry of vengeance to God is very consistent throughout Scripture with a view to the idea that God does bring justice. Now, one of the ways that does happen in the Old Testament within the legal system is through the judicial system. So vengeance is God's. But he also allows Israel to, through a just legal system, and act vengeance. And when we hear vengeance, we might associate that simplistically with sort of like getting back at, but vengeance in the biblical sense is proportionate justice. And that's very important. So there's so it leaves a place for that. And there's a need for that. But, but at the personal sort of taking it yourself into your own hands, no way. Yeah. And in fact, Leviticus even prohibits you from from holding a grudge against your neighbor, right? So, but you can't just come alongside someone who's been a victim of violence and say, Hey, Bible says you can't even hold a grudge, right? Because it also acknowledges the need for vengeance. And, and this is another piece of it. Even if they don't have the voice to do it, their blood will cry out to God, and God hears that. And so God hears the chorus of shed blood crying out to Him, and is especially attuned to it. And in fact, the whole Exodus story gets rolling, in response to the cries of victims. So it says an excess to you know, you don't have a lot of God involvement and chapters one and two, but at the very end, we hear that the people grown under the weight of their burdens, and under their oppression, and their cry goes up to God, it's not even directed at God. And God hears, He remembers the covenant. He sees their oppression, and he comes down and he acts, and the rest is history. So, so God is deeply attuned to cries of victims, in the blood of victims as it cries out. And and I think another sort of places comes up to is in the life of David. And, you know, for all David's faults, especially early in his career, he's really commended for not taking personal vengeance on Saul, or when he had multiple occasions to do so. On on a ball. When, when he's about to go, enact vengeance, personal vengeance. And Abigail saves the day, she she stops him. And he's like, whoa, you've just saved me from incurring the wrath of God on me if I had taken personal vengeance. Yeah, even if at some level, he thought it was justified. Yeah. So so he's portrayed as someone who doesn't enact justice. He doesn't enact vengeance on Saul's descendants either. Yeah. But he falters at the end of his career. When he outsources it to Solomon. He's like, I didn't do it, but what's to stop you? So? But yeah, so I That's how I'd kind of think about that issue.

Charles Kim 48:23

Excellent. Well, Matt, I want to thank you so much for coming on a history of Christian theology. It has been wonderful to get to know you a little bit, and definitely to read through your book, which as I've said, I really enjoyed and we'll definitely be encouraging people to read it as they think through this difficult question of violence in the Old Testament.

Matthew Lynch 48:43

Thanks so much, Chad. I really enjoyed our conversation. All right.

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