Helen Paynter, God of Violence Yesterday, God of Love Today? Wrestling Honestly with the Old Testament (BRF, 2019)
Helen Paynter is a Baptist minister and Old Testament scholar based at Bristol Baptist College. This is her second book. Her first, a version of her PhD, was Reduced Laughter, looking at how to read the books of 1 & 2 Kings. This second book, written for a broad audience, engages with the thorn of subjects violence in the Old Testament. It arrives at the same time as the work of the Centre for the Study of the Bible and Violence (CSBV) begins, of which Paynter is the Director. The book comes in two parts. The first establishes some 'foundations' — reading the Bible as God's word, how to read the Bible well and what is meant or encompassed by the word 'violence.' The chapter in reading the Bible well is especially helpful in offering some important lessons. The second half of the book seeks through 5 chapters to engage with the most serious of questions around the Old Testament and violence.
These 5 chapters make a series of important points. When violence is described, it is not always (often?) being endorsed. An example is given in the story of Samson. Paynter provides a different way of reading the book of Judges that pays attention to how the book is narrated. When violence is implored, as is the case of a good number of Psalms, there is a cry for justice and handing over of that desire for vengeance to God. Violence against animals is not as wanton as might be supposed. Paynter offers some helpful readings of the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9 and the place of sacrifices within Israel's worship. The fourth and fifth chapters explore violence as divine judgement and violence as commanded (e.g. the herem passages in Joshua). These questions are more difficult to address, and Paynter acknowledges, that this is not her last word on them, but almost a first foray into these questions, in conversation with wider scholarship. She takes us carefully through the importance of justice, the meaning of the law of talion (eye for an eye), a reading of the death of Uzzah (2 Sam 6) and in the latter chapter the meaning of the word herem.
A final chapter suggests that God's great plan in the Old Testament is shalom (peace) and we read it with trajectory in mind.
This is an excellent book, which wears its scholarship lightly. Paynter has a great way of explaining and the book is an easy read, although exploring difficult questions. The book seeks as its subtitle suggests to 'wrestle honestly' with the violence found in the Old Testament. It doesn't have, and doesn't promise, a magic solution, but does show that a surface level reading will miss or overlook at more subtle ways the Bible describes and responds to violence. I look forward to future explorations that I'm sure will be forthcoming from Paynter and the CSBV that will continue to reach a broad audience. It is good to see Baptists engaging in these questions and for how Paynter is continuing the good track record Baptsits hve in Old Testament scholarship (Henry Wheeler Robinson, H. R. Rowley, Ron Clements, Rex Mason, David Russell, Ernest Lucas, Deborah Rooke).
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