Like other archaeologists, I have been saddened by the destruction of ancient ruins and artifacts in the ongoing and increasingly complex turmoil in the Middle East. On a trip to Syria many years ago, I visited Tadmur -- ancient Palmyra. At that desert oasis, I walked down streets and into stunningly well-preserved temples of the early Common Era. Two of those temples and a magnificent arch have recently been blown up by the militant group known as ISIS. This is just one example of the vandalism and looting that has been taking place not just in Syria, but in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere in the region.
We in the West are not just innocent bystanders. Looted artifacts smuggled out of the Middle East and elsewhere regularly end up for sale at tony auction houses and shops in London and New York and on eBay, as in fact they have for many years. Nor are looting and iconoclasm just modern phenomena. Tomb-robbing has been a profitable enterprise for thousands of years, and desecration of artifacts for avowedly religious and political reasons is ancient as well. It also occurs in the Bible, and with divine sanction. According to the book of Deuteronomy, God commanded the Israelites:
You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree. Break down their altars, smash their pillars, burn their sacred poles with fire, and hew down the images of their gods, and thus blot out their name from their places (12:2-3).
Two kings of Judah, probably influenced by Deuteronomy, are reported to have done exactly that. In the late eighth century BCE King Hezekiah "removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole [the symbol of a Canaanite goddess]. He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it" (2 Kings 18:4). A century later his successor Josiah did likewise: he destroyed "the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun" and "burned the chariots of the sun with fire." Josiah went on to defile "the high places that were east of Jerusalem... He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the sites with human bones" (2 Kings 23:11, 13-14). Biblical writers praise both kings for their piety.
While I deeply regret that spectacular ruins are being destroyed and museums and archaeological sites are being looted, I consider much more tragic the rapes, loss of life, and displacement of populations engulfing the Middle East today. Such tragedies too have troubling parallels in the Bible, especially in laws and narratives dealing with the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. According to Deuteronomy, God commanded them: "As for the towns of those peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them" (20:16-17). And according to the book of Joshua, that is what they did: "So Joshua defeated the whole land...; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded" (10:40). In some texts, men, women, and children, as well as animals, could apparently be captured alive rather than killed. Captives were made slaves, and captured women could become their captors' wives.
Some scholars think that the accounts of ethnic cleansing and wholesale destruction in the book of Joshua and elsewhere in the Bible are historical fictions -- that they never in fact occurred, or at least not to the extent described. Some passages in the Bible support such a view, but that does not soften the divine commands. Violence against others -- rape, murder, deportation -- is divinely commanded, and sometimes divinely carried out.
Some Christians might argue that the New Testament moves beyond such horrible violence. This conveniently ignores that the Old Testament is part of the Christian Bible, as well as the violence in the New Testament itself. In the book of Revelation, for example, God is not just violent but sadistic, more than he was during the plagues in Egypt. In the seer's vision, when an angel blew his trumpet locusts were authorized to torture "those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads... for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death but will not find it" (9:3-6; compare Exodus 10:12-15).
Like the stories of conquest in the Old Testament, the apocalypse described in Revelation may be merely symbolic, although both have been and continue to be interpreted literally. Symbolic or not, the divine origin of the violence in the Bible is undeniable. My reason for recalling these biblical examples is to remind us that the atrocities now taking place in the Middle East are not unprecedented: some are enshrined in the Bible itself. We are certainly right to condemn present-day vandalism and violence by others, but we should also reject vandalism and violence found in our sacred texts.
Religious fanatics in both the past and the present have justified their actions by claiming that they were commanded by a violent deity. But that is not the only characterization of the deity in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures: in all three God is merciful and loving as well. Every chapter of the Qur'an but one begins with these words: "In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate," echoing a repeated biblical phrase. Whoever accepts those scriptures as authoritative must choose which understanding of the deity is to be embraced. In my view, for human survival, if not salvation, imitation of divine compassion is the only moral stance.
Michael Coogan is a lecturer on Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School and editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible. His most recent book is The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text (Yale, 2014).