Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Barry Moser

Throughout the Tanakh they write of abuse -- familial and fraternal -- and of violence. In the early pages of Genesis we read the story of Cain and his jealous rage against Abel, his brother. Just how Cain kills Abel isn't known. Perhaps he cuts his throat, which would be a prefigurement of all the blood sacrifices to come. Perhaps he lifted a heavy stone and crushed Abel's skull. This is the scenario I imply in my engraving of "The Death of Abel," where Abel lies dead among stones (Gen 4:8). Murdered, left naked on a shroud, a striped shroud made of fabric recalling the uniforms worn by prisoners in Birkenau, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.

And I could argue here with Mark Twain that the creation of Adam and the events that led to his fall from grace and our inherited despondency of death, was an act of violence toward Adam by God himself. After all, Adam did not know death--so how could he have fathomed its consequences? [4] Twain takes his contention and contumely one step further, noting that a modern parent who treated a son with such duplicity and contempt would be guilty of child abuse.

Three chapters later God turns truly violent. With righteous wrath and indignation God lashes out against man and all creation. We read that "all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: all in whose nostrils was the breath of life... Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark" (Gen. 7:2 1).

I think it's curious that we tell old Noah's story to children in Sunday school classes. And that commercial publishers keep printing versions of the ark story, plentifully illustrated with cute pairs of animals, tended by a portly and kind Noah. But--when the story is truly and honestly visualized, how far into the representation would we get? How real would we make it for the little ones? What would we want them to see? What would we let them see? Thousands of wicked people -- mothers and fathers, children and teenagers, brothers and sisters -- and millions of animals, all being dashed against stones and boulders, being lifted out of their homes and flushed through frenzied, murky, and blood-colored waters, their lungs filling, their eyes bulging, their drowning deaths imminent? Is this what we want to be taken from the story? Or must we sanitize the particulars in order to teach the larger, broader lesson? And if in so doing, do we ultimately enfeeble the true lesson by scrubbing the horrific details from the story?

And consider too how God, further on in Genesis, flagrantly destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with "brimstone and fire." Another Sunday school lesson that is taught with cartoon pictures, a violent story sans the violence. No close-ups, no burned and scorched flesh, no agonized mourners. Just swift, clean, unfathomable justice (Gen. 19:24).

Not long after that old Abraham is prepared to cut the throat of his beloved son, on God's inscrutable orders, intended to make Abraham prove himself. Yet another pervasive and powerful Sunday school lesson devoid of all the implications of what would have happened if God's angels had not stayed Abraham's hand (Gen. 22:9-13).