Stephen Young, “Donald Trump’s Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical” (2.23.26), religiondispatches.org. Accessed 2.24.26.
The Bible gets even darker in its norms for warfare. Deuteronomy’s law code tolerates one exception to the genocide of the conquered: if the vanquished are from a city outside of the promised land, then the women and children can be spared … for enslaving! Several paragraphs later Deuteronomy even clarifies that these surviving young foreign women get to become the “wives” of their conquerors. In other words, as the biblical scholar Mónica Rey explains, they’re subjected to genocidal rape. A later text further normalizes the fantasy of sexually assaulting vanquished young virgins by putting it into Moses’s mouth as a command from God.
Decades ago the womanist Hebrew Bible scholar Renita Weems showed in sophisticated detail that prophetic texts in the Bible imagine God punishing via sexual violence. For example, in Ezekiel God punishes Israel by arranging for her to be gang-raped. God himself is even the violent and degrading sexual assailant in passages from Jeremiah, Nahum, and Hosea.
The earliest writers about Jesus did not “upend,” to use Leighton Woodhouse’s term, these sexually violent values. The culminating book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, personifies God’s final enemy as a “whore” for whom he arranges a vicious sexual-assault. She is then devoured and burned. In an earlier passage of Revelation, as numerous scholars have argued, the Son of God even punishes “Jezebel” by raping her (see Sarah Emanuel’s powerful reading).
The Amateur Exegete 
An interesting (and brutally honest) take on disturbing biblical passages.
While some people have tried to downplay the sexual violence in the Bible or insisted that the practices of the surroundings nations had little impact on the ancient Hebrews (other than as encouraging deviation from the “pure” righteous laws given to their forefathers), a thorough look at the actual verses tells a very different story.
(On a side note, there was also a recent comment by someone on Paul’s NIV mistranslations page regarding the possibility that the “Song of Deborah” in Judges contains a reference to gang-rape by the victorious soldiers.)
That being said, I tend to subscribe to the idea that the original conception of “Yahweh”/”El” (at least among the earliest Israelites) was similar to that of male Near-Eastern deities in general: capricious, needing appeasement, and prone to wrath: so their understanding of him fits right in with the whole cultural milieu rather than being a uniquely violent aberration. You could even find similarities to how the ancient Greeks thought of Zeus (i.e. capricious storm deity demanding justice).
When you get to the New Testament, it’s hard to say whether the relative scarcity of violent passages is really due to the fact that the majority of early Christians were neither soldiers nor in positions of political authority.
The one significant fault (pertaining sexual violence) that I note in the teachings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels has to do with the implications of his command not to divorce one’s spouse.
Even if Mark’s version were original, he denies what would probably be the best way for a woman to get away from an abusive husband: leaving him or demanding that he leave her.
There’s also the problem that the whole “turn the other cheek” command seems to encourage victims to suffer “for the sake of righteousness,” no matter how threatening the assailant.
He could’ve at least allowed them to escape or get away from the situation. But he seems to have let his apocalyptic worldview get the best of him….
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Stephen Young’s article presents a thought-provoking thesis by drawing parallels between the current political landscape and texts from the biblical tradition. However, for a deeper analysis, it seems important to consider some nuances that the author’s approach may have left in the background.
One point that stands out is the risk of anachronism: by applying contemporary legal categories to ancient law codes, one may lose sight of the original function of these texts in their own historical context. Moreover, interpreting prophetic metaphors too literally can distort the literary genre of these passages, which often employed shocking language to communicate specific theological and political messages. Finally, by focusing on passages of extreme violence to define what is “biblical,” the author ends up offering a view that may not do justice to the diversity of traditions and voices present in the canon.
In this sense, some questions could help clarify the author’s position:
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I think the point Young may be making in the original piece is that while the New York Times article he is responding to criticized Donald Trump as a “bible-style” villain, his attitude actually corresponds to that of certain biblical passages and (implicitly the way that the biblical God is portrayed in certain passages).
He seems to be arguing that we need to recognize that the Bible reflects its cultural milieu and that we could treat is as being exceptional in its moral standards.
Your appeal to understanding things in context is reasonable (and is a key part of biblical studies) but doesn’t address the fact that a modern-day political figure was being judged against the Bible (as if it were the ultimate standard for determining who was “righteous” or “evil”).
The article Young refuted went beyond Bible studies and attempted to apply principles it thought were derived from the Bible to a modern circumstance as a sort of arbiter for evaluating the behavior of present-day individuals.
So it’s ultimately a question of why we are privileging the biblical passages over other texts from the ancient world (e.g. The Epic of Gilgamesh) in a case like this, especially when we know the authors were influenced by ideas from Canaan, Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc.
Like the Bible, there are other collections of works in the ancient world that both reflect the brutal realities of the ancient world and yet show unease about them.
For example, there were instances in which a deity in a ancient pantheon committed a heinous crime (such as rape) and was put on trial by his fellow deities. (Sort of like a divine “trial by jury”)
In the final stage of biblical monotheism, there would be no one to determine if God himself violated moral principles other than the people who worshipped him (or anyone who heard the deeds ascribed to him.)
And the Code of Hammurabi begins with the king decreeing that he has received authority to enact righteousness so that “the strong should not harm the weak.” He seems to appeal to a deity for his authority as well.
Even the style of monotheism that arises in the Bible (through subordinating other deities and historical development) results in us having to ask what makes its deity morally superior to other deities from the world he came from.
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Sorry made a typo.
I accidentally wrote “He seems to be arguing that we need to recognize that the Bible reflects its cultural milieu and that we could treat is as being exceptional in its moral standards” in the second paragraph.
Instead, wanted it to read “we should not treat it as being exceptional in its moral standards”.
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What’s funny is that inerrantists will always claim that our interpretation, which makes their god look bad, is incorrect because it doesn’t take into account something true about ANE culture or mindset, such as hyperbolic language. But they forget that ANE culture/mindset also involved belief in gods that were violent and capricious. When our interpretation fails to cohere with some ancient Semitic truth like the use of hyperbole, they accuse us of being idiots for not doing our homework. When our interpretation is perfectly consistent with the ANE tendency to view the gods as sadistic lunatics, then suddenly, our interpretation must be incorrect because Genesis 18:25 says the judge of the whole earth will surely deal justly. Nothing is a better example of irreversibly living inside your own head, than the inerrantist who will instantly trash any and every interpretation of a bible verse, for no other treason than their perception that our interpretation would conflict with something elsewhere in the bible.
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