God’s Word – Hang The Innocent

September 25, 1990
Musings 1991

The 21st chapter of 2nd Samuel contains a woeful example of lex talionis, the law of revenge – an eye for an eye, a life for a life, blood feud continued for generations.

There was a three-year famine in the land. King David “sought the face of the Lord, and the Lord said, ‘there is blood-guilt on Saul and on his house because he put the Gibeonites to death.’” King Saul was dead, of course, so he could not be the object of the revenge. King David gathered the Gibeonite remnant and asked them, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make expiation that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?”

The Gibeonites wanted neither silver nor gold, but said to King David, “The man (Saul) who consumed us and planned to destroy us ... let seven of his sons be given to us so that we may hang them up before the Lord at Gibeon.” King David agreed. The Gibeonites hanged seven sons and five grandsons of Saul. Then after some strange rituals of collecting bones, the Lord brought good weather to end the famine in Israel.

To anyone who has any sense of fair-play, hanging the innocent for the crimes of the guilty is a travesty, an unconscionable perversion of justice. There was another example of such parody of justice in King David’s life. For his crime in sending Uriah, the husband of Bath-Sheba to be killed in battle, the Lord caused the infant son of David and Bath-Sheba to die. Strict interpretation of law of revenge would have required that King David die. But, the scriptures indicate, David had a special relationship with the Lord, so the Lord took an innocent life instead.

Are such unjust, inhumane acts the Lord’s Will and Way?

If I believed that a supreme God could and would slaughter the innocents, then He/She would have to be renamed the Evil One. As I am agnostic about God and the Gods, what Protagoras said in the fifth century B.C.E. suits my understanding, “About the gods I can say nothing, neither that they exist nor they do not exist, nor what their nature is. Many things prevent us from knowing this – the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”

In my view, David agreed to the execution of Saul’s sons and grandsons for personal, political or dynastic reasons now buried in an impenetrable legendary fog. Later apologists, or perhaps David himself shifted the responsibility, passed the buck, “God did it because of Saul’s blood-guilt.”

How convenient to shift the blame to one's God! Many bloody crusades, purges, pogroms have been labeled “God's Kill.” The massacre of the Albigensians was ordered by Pope Innocent III (what an ironic name – Innocent). He was obeyed because he was “God’s Vicar on Earth.” Consider the moral dilemma faced by the English who colonized this continent. The original inhabitants, the Indians, were in the way of land-expansion and development. How justify our cruel ways? The noted Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather, came up with a theological rationalization, “Probably the Devil decoyed the Indians to America in hopes that the gospel of Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.” (Quoted by Walter LeFeber, AMERICAN AGE, p.11) You can't top that for finding “religious” reasons approving the exploitation, abuse and displacement of other peoples in order to get rich.

But, campers, it just won’t wash. Any God worth His/Her salt would have arrived in Boston pronto and belted Cotton Mather across the chops when that Puritan preacher concocted that self-serving “theological” lie.

One acts; one is responsible. Speaking for myself, I have no more virtue and no fewer vices than the average guy. But I take the onus, the “rap”, if you will, for whatever I have done or will do. I promise not to put the blame on Mame, or God, or Allah, or “my” Karma.

Human nature is a puzzling compound of heritage, feeling and thought developing in a Universe of apparent stability and regularity; but also, paradoxically, of dynamic change. Human nature is an enigmatic union of pre-conscious, latent instincts of our buried past; subterranean layers of old and new cultural conditioning, experience, the consciousness of self and others, and for too many of us, an ego which causes troubles for ourselves and others.

That diagnosis won’t spur anyone to cartwheels of joy about the human venture. But, the saving word, the liberating emotion is Hope – a persisting hope that cherishes the vision of what could be better and more just in this eccentric world. And, too seldom, but often enough to keep the embers of hope glowing, there are persons who do make a difference, almost always at great cost to themselves.