The brutal p,unishments I,nflicted on women

Who is speaking here? An ancient general? A fanatical holy warrior? A madman running amok? It is not a human being who is making this bloodthirsty speech - it is God himself who is inciting the few righteous in Jerusalem to commit mass murder against their fellow countrymen. 

This incredible story of divine anger is told in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. It takes place in the 6th century BCE. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had waged a victorious war against the Kingdom of Judah, conquered Jerusalem and installed a new king. But ten years later he broke his oath of allegiance. Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers then marched into Judah again, explains the Paderborn theologian Michael Konkel:

"In 587, the Babylonian troops had reduced the city of Jerusalem to rubble and ashes, destroyed the temple of the state god Yahweh and deported a large part of the population to Babylon. The book of Ezekiel attempts to process this experience of the collapse of the entire cultural orientation system in literary terms." "How is it possible that God has not protected us?" The book presents itself as a prediction of catastrophe - all of this will come. However, it was only written after Nebuchadnezzar's second campaign, which was unparalleled in brutality even in ancient times. 

The Babylonian soldiers acted with extreme cruelty: children's limbs were cut off in front of their mothers. For several days, there were organized mass rapes of Jewish women in the public squares of Jerusalem. For the people of Yahweh, any resistance to the largest war machine of the time was pointless. But it was not just the military defeat that was a disaster. Because of course the question arose: "How is it possible that our God has not protected us? How is it possible that this God was obviously not able to protect Jerusalem and its city, that there were mass deportations and that Israel lost everything that it thought it had received from its God? And this is what the book attempts to process in literary terms." 

"I will put you in the furnace" At times the book of Ezekiel is extremely brutal. But strangely enough, the Babylonian atrocities are not mentioned at all. Rather, it is the God of the house of Israel who appears here as the master of the slaughter and not exactly as a father who holds his protective hand over his chosen people. 

On the contrary: Jerusalem is to become a gigantic place of execution according to Yahweh's will: "As silver, copper, iron, lead and tin are gathered together in a furnace and the fire is lit under it to melt everything, so I will gather you in my anger and wrath, I will put you in the furnace and melt you. I will put you all together and let the fire of my anger flare up against you.”

Violence and the image of God

For the Innsbruck theologian and violence researcher Wolfgang Palaver, such passages tell of attempts to overcome trauma. Of the distress of people having to deal with the actually incomprehensible: having been abandoned by God.

“What does my image of God look like in defeat, in despair, when there is neither power, nor military success, nor violence is successful. And that is where an image of God develops in Jewish thought that is important for us today, that is detached from power, detached from the usual human ideas of violence. A completely different image of God emerges. An image of God that then helps even when worldly concerns end in complete catastrophe.”

The experience of violence that is mentioned in the book of the prophet Ezekiel is no exception. In ancient times, especially in the Near and Middle East, the principle in military conflicts was always to fight the enemy as cruelly as possible and to kill the defeated in a bestial manner. The brutal consequence was that forgiveness and reconciliation were almost impossible in the face of such warfare. Instead, it was always about revenge and retribution. What impact did this have on the image of God? What echoes do we find in the Bible?

Markus Witte, an expert on the literary history of the Old Testament at Berlin's Humboldt University, says:

"The interesting thing about Old Testament literature is the phenomenon that revenge is transferred into the actions of God. That is, these are desires for revenge that are not carried out by the individual human being, but are delegated to the actions of God or God's actions in a different way. This does not minimize the violence, but it does show that the control and responsibility and competence are not seen on the side of man, but on the side of God. Of course, one can then problematize the image of God