April 11, 2022
On preaching the rape texts
In February, I wrote a post about the difficulty of reading the Old Testament and tried reminding all of us (myself included) of some basic ground rules:
This will take time.
I will need help.
This effort will prove valuable.
Of all the complexities in the Old Testament, some of the most difficult involve violence. What to do with a text like Deuteronomy 7, which commands the killing of Israel’s enemies within the boundaries of Canaan? (I addressed this on Day Eight of A Habit Called Faith, and I’m grateful to Jordan Pickering, a South African Old Testament scholar, who provided me with lots of resources to read in order to reflect on these texts responsibly. Please check out Pickering’s book, Turn Neither Right Nor Left: Re-Centering Evangelicalism.)
Besides passages like Deuteronomy 7, which might seem to support God’s bloodthirstiness, another category of difficult texts are the passages which involve sexual violence against women: the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34, the rape of the concubine in Judges 19; the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13.
In none of these passages is there as clear a statement as, “God despised the action of these wicked men.” No, these passages involve literary subtlety and require we read them with an eye for broader literary themes. To be clear, sexual violence against women is never condoned by God, and as readers of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, we’re meant to make clear distinctions between what’s being described in a text versus what’s being prescribed. A narrative involving rape underscores that the world of the Bible is not the world of the fairy tale. Terrible things happen, evidencing the impenetrable darkness of the human heart.
In recent years, I’ve grown more and more aware of the neglect of these texts in church contexts. Despite having been raised in evangelical churches, the first time I heard someone carefully explicate Genesis 34, which details the rape of Dinah, was the former discipleship director at my church, Wendy Stringer. She spoke at a women’s conference on this passage and helped us to see Jacob’s cruel passivity, after he’d learned of his daughter’s trauma and “held his peace” until his sons came in from the field (v. 5). At the end of the chapter, Wendy had us look at Jacob again, smarting from the violent revenge his sons had taken and thinking only of protecting his own hide. She had us consider the rhetorical question Jacob’s sons asked, a question that begged an obvious answer: “Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?” (v. 31). Perhaps most importantly, Wendy drew our attention to the omission of God from the passage. What seems clear, in the sordid tale, is that this is a story of human beings suffering from the impoverished resources of their own wisdom.
Biblical passages that involve sexual violence are hard to read, harder still to explain in a public setting. I am sympathetic, for many reasons, to the pastors and lay teachers who avoid the difficulty, perhaps worrying that they will cause further harm to do so. Still, it’s become my conviction that these passages offer hope to women (and men) who have suffered sexual trauma and need faith to believe that God has seen their suffering and even entered into it.
It’s why I decided to write to the hosts of the Mere Fidelity podcast—Matthew Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, Alistair Roberts, and Andrew Wilson—and ask that they consider hosting an episode on the topic. What was the value and importance of preaching on these texts? Never did I imagine, of course, that they would invite me to talk with them. But they did, and it was a good conversation. I wouldn’t say that we arrived at answers, but I would say that we discussed a helpful framework for understanding these passages literarily and thinking pastorally about teaching them.
If you’re interested in that conversation (and a couple of resources they recommended), check out the episode and others from the Mere Fidelity archive.
Yours,
Jen