As if to verify the criticism leveled by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al. that religion, and specifically “Bible-based” Christianity, is hurtful and destructive, pastor Wiley Drake of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park has “called on his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State,” according to a Los Angeles Times story from a few days ago. Drake’s targets apparently asked the IRS to investigate Drake for violating tax laws by using church letterhead to campaign for a specific presidential candidate (which compromises the congregation’s non-profit status).

Coincidentally (or “providentially,” if you prefer), at church this past Sunday we were studying the passage in the book of James where the writer scolds Christians who try to bless God with their speech, but use that selfsame faculty to curse humans. Meanwhile, over on Jim West’s Biblical Studies Discussion List, a discussion of Psalm 137 (which includes the horrifying lines, “O daughter Babylon … [h]appy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks”) has witnessed an erudite attempt to defend that nasty imprecation.

To justify his praying of curses against Joe Conn and Jeremy Leaming, Drake appealed to a different psalm, Psalm 109:

“God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God’s church,” he said. “The Bible says that if anybody attacks God’s people, David said this is what will happen to them. . . . Children will become orphans and wives will become widows.”

So far, I haven’t seen much reaction to this story among bibliobloggers. Ben Witherington takes Drake to task for missing the “heart of the gospel.” Duane Smith took note of the situation but limited himself to one brief remark. Ed Brayton has given more attention to the situation than all bibliobloggers combined, if we’re just counting posts.

There is much that could be said about this, and one starting point is just about as good as any other. I’ll state from the outset that I think Drake’s curses are evil, and his actions embarrass me as a Christian. But the whole situation raises interesting questions beyond the obvious vitriolic spitefulness. I invite you to continue reading if you’d like more analysis of the situation and larger issues that arise from it.

Faulty Exegesis

As a Christian, indeed as a human being, I’m repulsed by Drake’s vitriol. As a biblical scholar, I’m annoyed by his loose use of the psalm’s text. In the quotation above, Drake claims that “The Bible says that if anybody attacks God’s people, David said this is what will happen to them. . . . Children will become orphans and wives will become widows.”

Well, no, that’s not what Psalm 109 says. In the first place, the imprecation found in Ps 109:6–19 is a wish for harm to come to the speaker’s (or speakers’; see below) target. It is not a promise from God that such a thing will happen, and still less a command from God to pray in such a fashion.

Second, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the imprecation in Ps 109:6–19 is actually the thought of the main speaker in the poem. You might note that the NRSV, NIV footnote, NLT, NCV, and ESV add “They say” or something similar at the beginning of v. 6. Those words do not appear in the Hebrew text, but there is a very good reason to think that vv. 6–19 are a “quotation” attributed to the psalmist’s enemies rather than stated by the psalmist himself (and I use the masculine gender purposefully). In vv. 1–5, it is quite clear that we have a singular “me” complaining about the actions of a plural “they.” Verses 6–19 are a wish for harm to come to a singular “he.” In vv. 20ff., we once again encounter a singular “I” who is complaining about how “they” (plural) are treating him. The shift is highly significant. Biblical Hebrew has no punctuation (though the particle כי can sometimes act as a kind of introductory quotation mark), so one must be sensitive to various other nuances. The shift of grammatical person that I noted above is strong evidence that vv. 6–19 are “spoken” by a different “voice” than are vv. 1–5 and vv. 20ff. NRSV, etc. are thus exegetically correct to take vv. 6–19 as a kind of quotation in which the psalmist puts curses against himself in his accusers’ mouths. Thus, the psalm doesn’t necessarily endorse the imprecation at all. And furthermore, it’s worth noting that if the adversaries really do want the psalmist dead, they don’t want God to make him magically drop dead; rather, as v. 7 clarifies, they want him to be found guilty in a court case.

Admittedly, the psalmist takes the opportunity in v. 20 to play “I’m rubber, you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Yet it’s hard to see him as really wishing their deaths, when he says in v. 29, “may they be wrapped in their own shame as in a mantle.” Being shamed doesn’t mean much when you’re dead. (Loren will probably have something contrary to say about that.) Moreover, I’m pretty sure that when the psalmist wishes for his accusers’ “shame” and “dishonor” in v. 29, he specifically means that he wants the charges they’ve brought against him in court to be proved false.

Now I cannot say that I am happy with the psalmist’s “I’m rubber, you’re glue” attitude, and I do not endorse wishing ill on those who wish you (or me) ill. But there is a great deal of nuance in this psalm that Drake simply misses because he wants justification for his own pettiness. I suppose I should not expect more from a man who could, apparently in all seriousness, make such a self-contradictory statement as, “I don’t believe in the separation of church and state and I believe the IRS should stay out of church business.” Go figure.

Faulty Hermeneutics

As much as the faulty exegesis noted above annoys me, I think the stakes are bigger when it comes to hermeneutics and “application.” Drake seems to think that if a biblical writer spoke in a particular manner (e.g., imprecatory prayer), that’s a divine endorsement command for Christians today to speak in like manner. Curiously, this puts him in the company of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—three outspoken critics of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Let me single out Harris, whose work I’ve read most recently. In Letter to a Christian Nation and the longer, better-argued The End of Faith, Harris seems to operate on the same supposition as Drake: that imitation is the only faithful way to respond to biblical statements. This reminds me of my own denominational heritage, with its inordinate attachment to the song “Trust and Obey”:

Trust and obey,
for there’s no other way
to be happy in Jesus
than to trust and obey.

To which I say, “Baloney.” (That’s too mild, but I try to keep the blog family-friendly.) Ben Witherington put it this way in his post on Drake’s antics:

I don’t know what seminary this pastor went to, but boy has he misunderstood those psalms. They don’t reveal the will of God in such matters, rather they shed God’s light of truth on what is in the wicked heart of human beings, including in David’s heart, that old murderer and adulterer.

Don’t get distracted by the appearance of a facile acceptance of Davidic authorship for Psalm 109. Witherington is raising the important concept of voice in a biblical text. Many Christians want to apply a Qur’anic dictation-style model of “inspiration” to the Bible, but the biblical writers did not themselves make any such claims. It should be clear to just about any reader that the majority of the psalms, at least, represent human speech to God, not divine speech to humans. ^[1] Recording such speech doesn’t qualify as endorsement.

Of course, one might be able to grant this observation in the case of Psalm 109, and even Psalm 137, but it becomes harder the more that examples multiply, especially when narrators attribute such violent speech to God. In the storyline of the book of Joshua, for example, God issues a disturbing number of frankly genocidal commands. The laws for “holy war” given in Deuteronomy 20 are not particularly “enlightened” from our point of view. They are by no means “peaceful,” and are attributed in the texts to God. One might argue that the texts are simply wrong to attribute such statements and attitudes to God, but of course most Christians anywhere in the conservative-evangelical-fundamentalist cluster will be unlikely to accept such arguments, no matter how cogently they might be made. Therefore, I will not argue in favor of that point here.

Suppose that the genocidal commands in the book of Joshua, the rules for “holy war” in Deuteronomy, and even the texts of Psalm 109 and 137 perfectly represent commands given to the Israelites by God, or at least models offered by God for the Israelites or Judeans to follow. Would that then mean that—as Drake and Harris seem to agree—the only truly “faithful” response is to endorse and imitate such violent and hateful language?

I argue that it does not. Harris might retort that I have simply compromised biblical principles because of a greater de facto commitment to a modern liberal ethos, but I don’t think that’s really the case. Scripture itself provides ample warrant for resisting destructive divine speech. Consider Job. He argued that God was treating him unfairly, that he could win against God in an impartial lawsuit … and at the end of the book, God agreed with Job, over against Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar who sought to justify God against Job! Consider Moses, who twice talked God out of destroying the Israelites and starting over with Mushites. Consider Abraham, who objected to God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Consider Habakkuk, who argued against God’s use of the Chaldeans as an instrument to punish Judah. Consider Amos, who when shown visions of a coming destruction, exclaimed, “No, God! Not that!”

There is a deep and powerful stream of resistance—even to divine initiatives—within scripture, and in many cases such resistance is precisely where faithfulness dwells. In fact, if one believes that God exercises sovereign control over the cosmos, then every act of “intercessory” prayer is in fact an objection, mild or strong, to something that God has set in motion. The great “objectors” to divine decrees are the heroes of scripture: Abraham, Moses, Job, various prophets. To be sure, such objections are sometimes misguided, as in the case of Jonah, but one can hardly derive “trust and obey, for there’s no other way” from the others just listed. It’s funny; the closer you are toward the fundamentalist end of the spectrum, the more likely you are to have trouble with the concept that faithfulness to God might actually consist in adopting the stance of “loyal opposition.” But have you never read in scripture,

Moreover I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the LORD.

This passage has a funny effect. “Funny strange,” not “funny ha-ha.” If you’re a critic of Judaism or Christianity, this passage agrees with you: sometimes, the Judeo-Christian deity issues abominable orders (in this case, child sacrifice). If you’re on the conservative end of the Christian spectrum, you might wish to pooh-pooh this passage, but your doctrine of scripture won’t let you. So the Sam Harrises and the Wiley Drakes of the world end up in the same place. In this passage, Ezekiel has God take credit for giving destructive, life-sapping laws, up to and including child sacrifice. But why, according to Ezekiel, did God do this? Precisely to provoke revulsion. Had Ezekiel’s forebears found such laws repulsive, and resisted them, the laws would have done the job Ezekiel says they were given to do. But if folk like Wiley Drake had been in charge, child sacrifice would have run rampant.

(By the way, this passage suggests a whole different take on the akedah than one usually finds. I have explored these possibilities in my book Dynamics of Diselection and my essay “Triangulating Responsibility: How Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac Offer and Refuse the Gift of Death, and to/from Whom,” in Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida.)

In sum, even if every single word of scripture was indeed dictated by God (which I don’t believe for a second, based on the bald statements of the biblical writers themselves), then it still would not be the case that the “only way” to respond faithfully to scripture is to “trust and obey.” Resistance can be a form of faithfulness, and indeed, sometimes it may be the only appropriate form of faithfulness. When the psalmists ask God to curse their enemies, we may rightly and faithfully say, “No.” When Ezra tries to break up marriages because of the ethnicities (or merely citizenship) of the husband and wife, we may rightly and faithfully say, “No.” And were we to think that God had said to us, “Go kill all your neighbors and live in their houses,” we might rightly and faithfully say, “No.”

[1] There do seem to be a few passages in the psalms that represent oracles spoken in the name of God. Prominent examples appear in Psalms 2 and 50.