As It Is Written . . .
Dark Passages of the Bible
by Patrick Henry Reardon
Not long ago, in a Q&A session following a lecture, someone inquired of me, "How do you reconcile children to the violent stories found in the Old Testament?"
My response went along these lines: "I believe this is a bogus problem. In truth, I have never met a child disturbed by violence in literature. In my experience, on the contrary, children take narrative barbarity very much in stride, whether in the Bible, or the Brothers Grimm, or anywhere else."
For example, children expect a bad wolf in a good story to fall to the sword or the ax—they depend on it—whether on the last page of "Little Red Riding Hood" or at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
When I was a boy, our book of "Bible Stories" portrayed young David holding up, by its hair, the gory and justly severed head of Goliath. If memory serves, I found the picture downright reassuring. That Philistine's bloody fate bothered me no more than the demise of the giant at the end of "Jack and the Beanstalk." After all, slaying giants is what healthy little boys aspire to.
In short, I think the violence in children's literature—including the Bible—will probably cause no harm to a normal child. The real problem is more likely a prissy parent.
My childhood's sympathetic response to literary violence has lasted a long time, and I will doubtless die with it. It requires considerable effort for me to take seriously what some folks regard as major stumbling blocks in Holy Scripture: accounts of murder and incest, narratives of the earth opening up to devour the wicked, commands to seize the property of infidels, psalms that curse them, and divine injunctions to put them to the sword—to slay innocent children along with their
parents.
I have sometimes wondered why I don't find these stories personally distressing, and I suspect the answer is this: I don't really have—as something of my own—
a moral sense apart from Holy Scripture. My moral formation is derived mainly from Sacred Literature.
In other words, I have no independent place in my mind on which to stand and take issue with a single syllable of what the Bible asserts. Everything I know about right and wrong comes from the canonical Scriptures.
If these have shaped my whole moral sense, how can that moral sense turn around and pass judgment on them?
On the other hand, we all know the Bible is a book of history, and the ongoing moral development of the People of God is an important component of that history. Now, the very notion of a moral development implies some measure of imperfection in the earlier stages.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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