TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE VIOLENCE THAT SURROUNDS US: ENGAGING THE BIBLE AS OUR CONVERSATION PARTNER
The Mother of Sisera Looked Out a Window, Albert Joseph Moore, 1861. Public Domain.
Some kinds of violence are immediately intelligible. Or at least we often think we understand what has happened to us and to others who have experienced violence. We experience the pain of violence enacted upon our bodies and minds and we register that harm. We see others experience physical, emotional, or spiritual harm in our proximity, sometimes even as a result of our own actions. We read about an experience of violence that has occurred in another part of the world or about a violent event that occurred in the past and we absorb that data, the numbers of people killed, harmed, or impacted. These encounters with violence happen with shocking regularity. Even when we read the Bible, we encounter violence. We encounter violence attributed to God, such as texts in Joshua in which a whole city is condemned to destruction. We encounter texts that contain the threat of violence that pulses beneath the surface of the story, such as in the story of two migrant women in the book of Ruth. And we encounter those texts that seem, on the surface, to contain no violence at all and yet have been used by later interpreters in the most violent ways, such as the curse of Ham story in Genesis 9, which was employed by pro-slavery advocates in America. We also encounter sensitive biblical portrayals of violence and its effects. These texts help readers to see and interact with the trauma of the past, both the authors’ and their own. All of these encounters are a relational offering, an invitation to self-reflection, a conversation with the characters of the biblical stories we read and the authors of those stories and with the communities in which we live and move and have our being.
The prevalence of violence in our world is often overwhelming and the need to understand it more clearly is a pressing need. One day this January as I was driving to work, I happened to be listening to an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air in which host Terry Gross talked with reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff. Gibbons-Neff is The New York Times’ Kabul bureau chief and was earlier a reporter in Afghanistan for the Washington Post and The New York Times. He is also a veteran, a Marine who served as an infantryman in Afghanistan from 2009-2010. His discussion with Terry Gross came as the United States was withdrawing from a twenty-year presence in Afghanistan and Gibbons-Neff offered his reflections about having been a soldier, the friends who were killed there, his opportunity to interview a Taliban leader who he had almost certainly fought against, and what it is like to go back to Afghanistan as a reporter many years later. His comments were delivered in a dispassionate way. Yet his reflections about why he chose to return to Afghanistan as a reporter many years after he fought there were deeply moving. Listening to his words provided me with important insight about my experience of reading the biblical portrayal of violence, and what I see as the urgent ethical importance of engaging the Bible as a conversation partner as we struggle to comprehend more fully the experience of violence and its effects. Gross asked Gibbons-Neff about why he agreed to go back to Afghanistan as a bureau chief after having fought there as a soldier. In response, Gibbons Neff said most people assume he works in Afghanistan because he knows so much about the country and its recent experiences. To the contrary, says Gibbons-Neff:
[G]oing there as an infantryman in the Marine Corps with
little understanding of the culture, you leave with little
understanding of the culture because you're kind of just
focused on not dying and your friends not dying. And
that's really it. So I guess you learn a lot about violence.
You learn a lot about what American foreign policy looks
like at the edge of the empire, I like to say.
But it's tough to leave a country that you spent, you know,
almost two years of your life in and not know really anything
about it or understand why you were there or what you did
and - especially to the people of Afghanistan. So I didn't
know I wanted to be a reporter when I left in 2010… I've kind
of just built this time machine - right? – where I can go back to
Marjah and figure out why everything went the way it did. (https://www.npr.org/2022/01/20/1074393810/a-marine-turned-journalist-returns-to-afghanistan)
Several things about Gibbons-Neff’s words are important to me. He engages in his work as a reporter not because he feels a sense of expertise due to his time as an American soldier in Afghanistan, but because of his ignorance about his own experience in that country. He does not know what he needs to know to understand that transformative time in his life. He learned a lot about violence, but he knows that that education in violence needs to be contextualized, examined, studied, and reflected upon. Why did his friends die and is he in some way responsible for or accountable to those deaths? What are the goals of American power in international contexts, “at the edge of the empire?” How did his presence there affect non-military Afghan people? I do not know Thomas Givens-Neff and I do not know if these are his questions; yet his desire to build a “time machine” to examine the world that he participated in creating, in Afghanistan and also in America by virtue of his contribution to American Empire, has become an important metaphor for me as I think about and teach the violence of biblical texts.
Judges 4-5 serves as such a “time machine,” a textual war memorial that offers readers the opportunity to encounter violence, reflect upon the ways violence is remembered and portrayed, and perceive more clearly the multiple ways that warfare effects both soldiers and non-combatants. In these chapters, Sisera, the military commander of a Canaanite army, has been defeated in battle by Barak, the army commander of the Israelite chieftain, Deborah. Sisera flees on foot from the final battle in which all of his soldiers are killed (Jdg. 4:12-17) and seeks refuge with Jael, who he comes upon as he is trying to escape. Jael, alone her tent, offers Sisera shelter and sustenance, and while he sleeps, she puts a tent peg though Sisera’s skull, thereby delivering to Israel the decisive end to this battle. For her deeds, Jael is celebrated in the poetic account of this story in Judges 5 as “Most blessed of women in tents (Jdg. 5:24).” Thus far in the story, this appears to be a memorialization and celebration of a victory by unlikely conquerors, both Deborah, the only female judge, and Jael, a woman who acted quickly and decisively to deliver a victory to Israel.
This textual time machine introduces complication and discomfort, however, inviting the reader into a more complex consideration of the violence of warfare, who participates in it, and who is affected by it. The story of a war between the Israelites and the Canaanites becomes uncomfortably intimate, as the reader must contend with the reality that war often spills over into the lives of non-combatants. Jael’s vulnerability when a panicked and desperate soldier comes to her tent reflects the reality of many women who are proximate to war and find that larger social conflicts invade their homes and threaten their bodily safety. The presence of other women in this chapter further complicates a tidy perception of war as actions that are neatly categorized and contained in a predetermined script with expected characters, such as soldiers, commanders, victors, vanquished. At the conclusion of Judges 5, after the repeated celebration of Jael’s victory over Sisera, the poet introduces a brief encounter with Sisera’s mother at the window, anxiously awaiting the text of her son from war (Jdg. 5:28). Out of nowhere, the reader must contend with the image of an anxious mother who awaits her son’s return from war, a sympathetic image that injects a story of wars between tribes with personal and emotional implications. The reader knows that Sisera is dead, which means that the reader knows that Sisera’s mother’s worry is about to turn to grief when she learns of her son’s demise. The text soon reveals that Sisera’s mother is comforted by the idea that her son is probably late because he is engaged in raping and pillaging after achieving victory, which immediately creates distance from any sympathetic emotion the reader has for Sisera’s mother, and quite possibly fosters a sense of disgust and repulsion about the mother’s moral barbarism. Yet the image of a mother anxiously awaiting her son is not an image that is easy to dislodge from the reader’s encounter with this story. It haunts this celebration of war, inviting questions about the corrupting influence of warfare on all who are touched by it, the ways that people are formed within violent systems and come to desire and participate in actions that are damaging to themselves and others.
Judges 4-5, I believe, offers what Gibbons-Neff describes as a central objective of his journalism: a means to travel through time to investigate ourselves and the worlds that we actively participate in or benefit from. We need conversation partners to help us perceive the experience of violence and our participation in violence more clearly. We need texts that invite us to self-examination and humility, not to confidence in our expertise. We need to “figure out why everything went the way it did.” With these questions in mind, I hope to follow in the path of those, including Thomas Gibbons-Neff and the biblical authors themselves, and examine my participation in the cultures of violence I have inherited, those that I have participated in, and those that I would like to challenge more effectively. The biblical tradition offers a means to do this work, texts that show readers violence and asks them to contend with its implications and reverberations in our lives. We need those texts. And we need the conversations within and about the communities in which we live that help us to see ourselves and our actions more clearly.
