Normative?

For today's write-up on Rosemary Ruether's Gaia and God, I'll feature a couple of items from the endnotes.

The first item is from page 276 and concerns fundamentalist claims that the Bible is inerrant:

"Although Christians received the whole canon of the Hebrew Bible (in two versions) as their Old Testament, Pauline Christianity particularly assumed that much of the Levitical codes were no longer normative revelation. Since the New Testament is built on this selective use of Hebrew scripture, Christianity, by its very nature, cannot claim to use the entire Bible in both Testaments as equally inspired, despite fundamentalist claims to do this."

The second item is on page 288, and it concerns homiletical comparisons of marginalized people with the Amalekites, whom God commanded the Israelites to slaughter in the Hebrew Bible---leaving no man, woman, or child alive. In the seventeenth century, American Puritan Cotton Mather likened the Native Americans to the Amalekites. Martin Prozesky, a professor of religious studies in South Africa, recalls that as a child "he frequently heard the Zulus compared to Amalekites in sermons". And there are rabbinic pronouncements that compare the Palestinians to Amalekites.

I don't know if these religious leaders supported completely slaughtering the group that they considered a threat. But such a comparison certainly dehumanizes the "other," and their audience probably knew that, in the Hebrew Bible, God supported the complete extermination of the Amalekites.

The second item makes me wonder if the religious leaders' stances on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible played some role in their appeal to the biblical example of the Amalekites. As Ruether notes in her first item, there are plenty of Christians who believe that the New Testament supersedes the Hebrew Bible, and some draw contrasts between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. But there are others who think that, in some way, shape, or form, the Old Testament is still authoritative. The American Puritans were like this, for they had laws that echoed the Old Testament. I'm curious as to whether or not Martin Prozesky heard the sermons about the Zulus in a Calvinist church, for Calvin believed that the Old Testament law had some authority over people, including Christians. And hard-core right-wing Jews think that the Hebrew Bible still is authoritative.

But one can believe in the authority of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and think that God's command for Israel to slaughter the Amalekites concerned the Amalekites, and them alone---not any later people-group. Moreover, there are Jewish opinions that try to lessen the severity of the Conquest. Even many Christians who hold that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament maintain that God was still the author of the Old Testament, and so they attempt to account for his seemingly unjust acts in some manner, or they say that we should "just have faith." But they don't think that they are commanded to slaughter entire people-groups nowadays. There are many Calvinists who would say that such a command concerned the Canaanites and the Amalekites only, not anybody else. I disagree in part with Ruether's first item in that I think that conservative Christians can believe that the entire Bible is divinely-inspired, without holding that all of it is still normative for today.

A final point: In Deuteronomy 20, God distinguishes between two groups of people whom the Israelites are to conquer. The first group consists of cities outside of the Promised Land, whereas the second group consists of the Canaanite nations within the Promised Land. The Israelites are to offer the first group terms of peace. If this group agrees to serve Israel, fine, but if it doesn't, then the Israelites are to kill every male, while taking the women and children as plunder. As for the second group, the Canaanites, the Israelites are to slaughter each and every one of them---man, woman, and child. I have problems with the Conquest period, but here's a question: Why did God require the Israelites to kill the Canaanite children? The Israelites could have preserved their lives, as they were to do with the women and children of the non-Canaanite cities.