The Bible offends contemporary sensibilities in almost every imaginable way. But some of the greatest offenses are God’s curses against groups of people. A case in point is the curse at the center of the book of Ruth, which we are studying on Sunday mornings at Bethel Grove.
Because a Moabite king tried to destroy Israel (Nu 22.1-6), the Lord excluded Moab from Israel’s assembly to the tenth generation, even prohibiting Israelites from seeking Moab’s peace or prosperity (Dt 23.3-6). This law placed Ruth the Moabite in danger as she tried to live in Bethlehem with her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi. How would she be treated?
At one level, this curse offends many people today who believe that, in any situation, the individual is the only genuine moral agent. Ruth’s decisions are the ones that God should care about, not what some Moabite king did centuries before. God is unjust for cursing all Moabites.
At another level, the whole notion of cursing is void today.
Most contemporary Western people do not have a category for words that shape reality either for good (blessing) or for bad (cursing). We automatically judge this kind of act to be superstitious. Words of cursing from God’s mouth are no more legitimate than if some shaman utters them.
Most deeply of all, contemporary society has rejected punishment as a right response to evil. We try to explain evil actions as expressions of hurt. The agent is not evil but wounded. We rationalize evil actions as cries for help. The right response is therapeutic and restorative, not punitive. Punishment only perpetuates the harm.
We might deal with these offenses the easy way, by ignoring the implications of what we read in Ruth and reimagining the book in postmodern terms. It’s a love story about interracial marriage. A couple overcame prejudice and superstition. Yay.
A more difficult way is to ask, “Are we right to take offense?”
For example, what if ancient cultures understood something about the locus of evil that we choose to evade? An evil act is beyond remedy. The act is done and cannot be reversed. Send a man into surgery, remove a bullet from his shoulder, give him physical therapy, and pay all the bills. Restore his condition as close as possible to the status quo ante. None of that restoration touches the evil act itself: someone aimed a pistol at the man and pulled the trigger.
Punishment addresses the evil, which is located in the act, not in the situation resulting from the act. Ancient cultures would accuse us of doing additional harm to the shooting victim by refusing to acknowledge the evil that came upon him. They would say our posture of compassion toward the evildoer is shameful.
Further, what if ancient cultures understood something about the nature of evil that we also evade? Evil cannot be seen or measured. Yet it is real. We can see a bullet lodged in a man’s shoulder. We can measure the bullet’s impact on his body. We can also see that the bullet has been removed and can measure the man’s recovery.
What scope do we use to see evil in the shooter? We know the evil is present because he did the act. But where is the evil? How big is it? How would we know it has been removed?
In contemporary society, we have agreed that because we can’t see or measure evil it must not exist. It must be a superstitious explanation for the shooting, not a rational explanation.
As we behold the carnage evil acts are wreaking on our society, it is fair to ask whether the ancients were as ignorant as we imagine.
Maybe we are the ignorant ones—and culpable because our ignorance is in willful defiance of long human experience. Maybe their curses were a rational response to moral reality, while our flippancy concerning the weight of words compounds our guilt.
Even further, what if the ancients understood something about moral agency that we acknowledge only hypocritically? If a king of one nation curses another nation, his evil act pervades the decision-making of his own people. He codes the ethical software for his citizens. They take actions accordingly. The ancients would treat corporate evil as obvious.
We only acknowledge corporate evil when it is convenient. The customer service representative speaks for the corporation that is cheating me. My ideological opponent is merely part of an oppressive elite. The system is evil. But I’m not part of anyone else’s decisions. I cannot be held responsible for what those people did in another place or time.
Individual accountability for me. Corporate accountability for thee.
Again, it is not clear to me that the ancients were as ignorant as we imagine. We have chosen to be ignorant of corporate guilt. Our postmodern sensibilities are a kind of moral alchemy—endless technicalities in pursuit of ethical fantasy.
Here’s the problem we confront in studying Ruth. If evil must be punished, if curses express moral reality, and if groups of people are morally culpable, then how can we resist the accusation that we are all guilty of evil?
And a final question. If the Bible is proclaiming this kind of guilt, how can any individual be rescued?