There are many answers to the question of why we accept God's violence as part of our theology. We could talk about our perception of God's holiness or our theory about the cross or our concept of the afterlife. We could also consider the role that influential evangelists, pastors, and authors play in our understanding of the Bible.
In the end, though, all our answers come back to a fairly simple premise: We believe God must punish sin because that's what we read in the Bible.
It's there, plain as anything, in Lamentations 1.
For the LORD has punished Jerusalem
for her many sins.
— Lamentations 1:5b NLT
Why we accept divine violence is something we'll be exploring and countering in future articles, but why is not the most interesting question to ask first.
At the beginning of our journey, a much better question is how.
How can we accept God's violence?
And so we're starting A Nonviolent God by looking at the book of Lamentations.
A brief recap of Lamentations 1
The reporter (or narrator) in Lamentations 1 spends the first nine verses of the poem telling us that the destruction of Jerusalem is the fault of Daughter Zion (the female personification of the city).
It is her lovers (2b), her many sins (5b), her nakedness (8b), her filthiness (9a), and her fall (9b) that means we believe God acts justly to punish Jerusalem by destroying the city and enslaving its people.
The male reporter speaks first, so it's his voice we take as gospel. After nine verses of the first poem, we find ourselves thinking, If only she had made better life decisions, she could have averted this tragedy.
Daughter Zion's first cry
Daughter Zion unexpectedly interrupts the reporter's narration with a single line. What would your first cry be here?
Would you want to know where God was?
Would you cry out for answers why this was happening?
Or would you cry out for God to save you?
Daughter Zion's cry therefore catches us by surprise. She wants none of those things. She simply wants to be seen by God.
"Look, LORD, on my affliction,
for the enemy has triumphed."
— Lamentations 1:9c NIV
[Daughter Zion] does not beg for relief, for vindication, or for restoration. She does not ask for the return of her children, for freedom, or for the return of past splendour. She asks only that God will look, see, take into consciousness what the enemy has done to her. She wants God to see her pain.
— Kathleen M. O'Connor
Lamentations and the Tears of the World, p.22
Daughter Zion's second speech
When neither the reporter nor God responds to Daughter Zion's first cry, she interrupts the reporter a second time.
"Look, LORD, and consider,
for I am despised.
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look around and see."
— Lamentations 1:11c-12a NIV
The first two times, when she cries out to be seen, she asks God to notice her suffering. When that fails to produce a response, she turns to the people passing by. "Look around and see," she begs of them, desperate to be noticed.
Daughter Zion fears people not seeing her pain. In verse 16, she openly talks about how she weeps because, "No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit" (NIV). It's not a fear we share in our western culture. Typically, we want as few people as possible to witness our pain. By privatising our grief we go uncomforted, and, if Daughter Zion is correct, our spirits go un-restored.
Daughter Zion's last words
By the time that Daughter Zion speaks for a third time, the reporter has mentioned three times that there is "no one to comfort her" (17a, see also 2a and 9b), and has twice declared her "unclean" (17c, see also 8c) and therefore untouchable by another Jew. This reinforces her sense of isolation.
Her anguish is now so acute that any random stranger witnessing her pain will do.
"Listen, all you peoples;
look on my suffering."
— Lamentations 1:18b NIV
And then, just a few lines later, when no-one responds to her cry again, she once more calls on God to see.
"See, LORD, how distressed I am!
I am in torment within...
— Lamentations 1:20a NIV
There's an escalation each time she asks to be seen. First, it was that the "enemy has triumphed" (9c), next it was that she is "despised" (11c), and then it was "my suffering" (18b). This last time, she is both "distressed" and in "torment" (20). She is in severe mental and physical pain and is desperate for God to notice.
Daughter Zion's consistent demands for a witness go unfulfilled. Her words appear in twelve verses across this first poem, and in eight of them, she complains about not being seen or heard.
In verse 21a, she ends up echoing the reporter's repeated refrain: "They heard my groaning / yet there is no one to comfort me" (ESV). The poem ends with her declaration that "My groans are many / and my heart is faint" (22c NRSV).
How can we accept God's violence?
There's only one way we can accept God's violence: we do not look at the victims.
Let's think about the story of Noah's Ark for a moment. God brought every oxygen-breathing creature (over 2.1 million species) to the brink of extinction by punishing human sin with a worldwide flood. Yet we do not see the victims of this flood—human or animal—because we concentrate on the few who are saved.
There's a good reason we don't ponder the death throes of billions of creatures drowning in the rising floodwaters. Because, if we did, we would have to acknowledge how the flood is one of the most horrific acts of violence ever perpetrated on earth. And three times, the Bible tells us God was responsible (Gen. 6:7 & 13; 7:4).
Unlike Noah’s Ark, Lamentations refuses to hide the scenes of terrible violence. The shocking and gory aftermath of Jerusalem being destroyed by an invading nation who slay or enslave or starve its people is openly shared, especially at the end of Lamentations 2 and throughout chapter 4.
Yet, even though we know this is a war-torn city, we are still likely to nod along with the reporter, agreeing with his assessment that this violence has been "decreed" by God (17b) because of "her many sins" (5b). This causes us to share his lack of empathy and, instead of denouncing the violence of the Babylonians or holding them responsible, we too blame the victim.
Therefore, we do not truly see the suffering of Daughter Zion or the people she poetically represents.
But Lamentations doesn't let us look away
"See me."
"See me."
"See me."
"See me."
"See me."
A brief de-tour into the Hebrew
Daughter Zion asks for someone to look in five separate lines of the poem. Each time, she uses the Hebrew word rā'â.
Over two-thirds of the time in the Old Testament we translate rā'â as "see," "saw," "seen," "sees," "seeing," "look," "looks," "looked," or "looking." Its meaning is clearly linked to visual perception. The NIV translates rā'â in Lamentations 1 as "look" (9c, 11c, and 18b), and "see" (12a and 20a).
Twice, in 11c and 12a, Daughter Zion adds a second Hebrew word nābat that also means "to look at" or perhaps even "pay attention to" or "gaze at." The NIV translates nābat in Lamentations 1 as "consider" (11c) and "look around" (12a).
The addition of nābat, a word that essentially means the same as rā'â, emphasises her demand for a witness.
It's like she's saying, "Look, really look."
There's even more going on here
Daughter Zion's repetition of rā'â ("look") would have reminded this song of sorrow's original audience of another story in the Bible where rā'â's use is prominent: the book of Exodus.
The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked (rā'â) on the Israelites and was concerned about them.
— Exodus 2:23-25 NIV (emphasis mine)
God hears, remembers, and then "looks" (rā'â). His concern for his people's mistreatment at the end of Exodus 2 turns into action within a matter of verses at the start of Exodus 3.
The LORD said, "I have indeed seen (rā'â + rā'â) the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians... And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen (rā'â) the way the Egyptians are oppressing them."
— Exodus 3:7-9 NIV (emphasis mine)
"I have rā'â rā'â the misery of my people..." The double-whammy of rā'â emphasises that this is a God who really sees and deeply cares for those being abused.
Daughter Zion wants God to see her and her suffering, because she believes, despite of everything that's happened to her, that if he properly looked upon her, he would see the error of his ways and comfort her.
With each cry for God to look (to rā'â), Daughter Zion is pleading with him to remember himself. She needs him to remember that he is a liberator of victims not an oppressor of them.
Lamentations subverts God's violence
We’ve traditionally stood in the reporter's place: condemning sin and accepting God's violent punishment of it.
But Lamentations, despite our first impressions, doesn't allow us to accept this viewpoint. Between the repeated refrains of missing comfort and Daughter Zion's five pleas for others to "look" upon her suffering, we are being forced to witness the humanity of those being punished.
And this is how, by continuously pointing out the suffering it causes, Lamentations subverts God's violence. It makes us see—really see—the torment of the victims caught in God's wrath. Once this happens, it breaks God's punishment of sin out of the realms of the theoretical or theological and into the realm of empathy.
Can we accept a violent God when we truly witness the suffering of the people he pours his wrath on to?
I find my answer is no.
However, your answer might be it makes God's violence harder to accept, and that's a good place to be at. We're on a journey here and no-one is expecting you to change your beliefs overnight. It certainly didn't happen that way for me!
But perhaps your answer is yes. You still believe the reporter is correct and God is punishing sin. If that's you, just be aware that the reporter changes his mind in Lamentations' second poem. He accepts Daughter Zion's side of the story and begins fighting on her behalf. Are we supposed to follow the same path the reporter takes, too?
