Texts of Terror: Tribal violence in scripture

Episode 7: In this episode we begin a three-part series on violence in the biblical text; exploring the way that tribal violence, patriarchal violence and divine violence are portrayed. If God is love and the sustainer of all life, then what do we do with all of this violence that seems to be endorsed and promoted in the sacred text of the Christian tradition? 

Because either this tells us that God is violent, and the bible is outdated and not worth reading, or we can ask the question as to whether there’s a different approach to these stories. Not an approach that justifies the behaviour, because the violence we see in these stories is genuinely horrific and cannot be redeemed, but that allows us to come at it with a different purpose in mind.