Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

We invent a God who notices when we fail. He witnesses us at our worst; compels us to witness him at his worst; reminds us of the consequences we impose on ourselves. In that sense God's violence may be intended--by us, not by God -- to convince ourselves that even we are not fictive: our acts have consequences.

As individuals, we do not particularly need God as our witness. A human other is more convincing and less ambiguous, and will teach us humaneness not by invective but by example. Indeed a human other can be our witness against a violent God. But the biblical pattern is not individual, not even quite personal; it is collective and schematic. At the collective level, a sane and gentle human other can seldom get a hearing. God's voice is the only one loud enough to convince a large group that there is some other way to live.

Even then, the method is likely to backfire: the word "repent" always sounds louder than the words "do justice," and it is always the men who are proud to resemble God who shout it the loudest. And they always shout it at women who leave their control: at women who support themselves, at women who think for themselves, at single mothers.

For God--and for Israel--the tragedy is that Israel is not God's witness: "she" is merely somebody else, who accepts the covenant in fear and gratitude but is essentially intent on being that separate self whose autonomous life so enrages the batterer. She is not really the receiver of his gift. She is not altogether convinced that he is real. God calls her behavior disobedience, and punishes accordingly, but it is merely incomprehension; she is minding her own business, which is not his. So far as the marital metaphor applies, God has taken a wife when what he needs is an audience.

Job may have been the witness: playing Cordelia to his comforters' Goneril and Regan, he spoke the truth about God. The essence of his complaint was God's injustice -- Job, having always dealt justly with the poor, had done nothing to deserve punishment--and God endorsed the complaint (thus witnessing Job in return). Scorning exoneration -- relieved, perhaps, to be seen as he really was -- God confirmed that suffering is not always deserved. His bragging display of his works seems designed to tell Job that suffering may have no moral meaning at all. Perhaps it is a mere by-product of all that energy: consider behemoth, leviathan, staphylococcus.

God does not speak again in the Hebrew Bible after he speaks to Job. The Song of Songs follows: the reconciliation, the allegory of love between him and his people. Once the witness appears, what is left is the mad attraction, the erotic release. At last God and humanity have heard and understood each other, and what do they do but chase each other all over the town and the fields. They have no sense of propriety about how a couple behaves after a long and shattering quarrel. What are they doing together? What does she see in him?

And then (again, as Jack Miles notes) God disappears: he "loses interest," he dwindles. He who began in "activity and speech" ends in "passivity and silence," [19] and the people are left on their own. (Or he waits, suddenly immobilized by Job's challenge and by the erotic release, like a lover now afraid to make the first move, having discovered what is at stake: a full human relation with a confident other, whom he can no longer bully or punish. He has taken a wife and she is becoming a lover: he is chastened and wary.) But outside the biblical text he does not disappear: he falls into a kind of hibernation or dormancy, from which he emerges in two parallel and competing forms--in the New Testament, where he emerges as from the chrysalis of Mary's womb in a human body, and in the Talmud, where he is a kind of eavesdropping presence on the circle of scholars, brought back as it were domesticated and ready for civilized marriage.