Some of these articles
may be pointing out surprising things in scripture that you may not have previously noticed. Israel's assault on Canaan (and all the other "ites") is certainly not one of those. That episode is both a very well known story and is also not without some fairly obvious explanations. So too is this next story. But this one is the most shocking of all, at least in my view.
God ordered Abraham to kill his son. It kind of amazes me how readers, myself foremostly included, can become inured to what is going on here. Rather than being shocked, we settle in to rationalizations (nodding approval) which surface due to the typology of the cross event that we readily see here. Then, rather than being shocked at the cross event, we noddingly approve of what is going on there also.
The question is how can it be that in one breath God orders the execution of Abraham's child and in a later breath lays down the law that says if a parent executes his child to the god Molech, that parent shall be executed? It should go without saying that this sort of murderous killing had long been excoriated. Are you satisfied with the argument that the typological purpose of this episode justifies the killing of one's own child?
If you stick with me, this project's aim will come clear. I have just a couple more examples after which I will wrap it up with the point.
1 comment:
You are writing at a time when I don't have the time to respond thoughtfully, what with the wedding coming up and guests arriving and writing to be done and all, but just off the top of my head a recollection: during the the 2004 COW "dialogue" over the book Abraham by Bruce Feilor sponsored by the college and the local rabbi, our most rabid and liberal rel. studies prof (referred to in my space before as espousing the intolerace of the tolerant) angrily denounced God for telling Abraham to kill his son. That's where Christians get justification for their warmongering, he claimed. I was stunned, never having heard this point of view before. Of course he was simultaneously gleeful, but his extreme view (and extremely opposite the comfortable acceptance styles) does not obliterate the mountains of careful and thoughtful discussions of this, including probably most famously Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Don't let me forget to come back to this later....
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