Philip Jenkins of Penn State covered the basics of violent scripture in the Sunday Boston Globe:
Dark passages
Does the harsh language in the Koran explain Islamic violence? Don't answer till you've taken a look inside the Bible
By Philip Jenkins | March 8, 2009
WE HAVE A good idea what was passing through the minds of the Sept. 11 hijackers as they made their way to the airports.But have you met the Christian Bible?
Their Al Qaeda handlers had instructed them to meditate on al-Tawba and Anfal, two lengthy suras from the Koran, the holy scripture of Islam. The passages make for harrowing reading. God promises to "cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks!" (Koran 8.12). God instructs his Muslim followers to kill unbelievers, to capture them, to ambush them (Koran 9.5). Everything contributes to advancing the holy goal: "Strike terror into God's enemies, and your enemies" (Koran 8.60). Perhaps in their final moments, the hijackers took refuge in these words, in which God lauds acts of terror and massacre.
The richest harvest of gore comes from the books that tell the story of the Children of Israel after their escape from Egypt, as they take over their new land in Canaan. ... the full orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war [is] in the Books of Joshua and Judges. Moses himself reputedly authorized this campaign when he told his followers that, once they reached Canaan, they must annihilate all the peoples they find in the cities specially reserved for them (Deut. 20: 16-18).After reading this, I poked around some of the plethora of anti-Islam sites. You can find these on your own. Sure, they have an answer for why Islam really is more violent today. If a commentator does understand the violent passages of the Old Testament, the argument usually goes that Christianity has evolved from these specific events of the past, while the Koran places violence at the core of Islam for all time.
Joshua, Moses's successor, proves an apt pupil. When he conquers the city of Ai, God commands that he take away the livestock and the loot, while altogether exterminating the inhabitants, and he duly does this (Joshua 8). When he defeats and captures five kings, he murders his prisoners of war, either by hanging or crucifixion. (Joshua 10). Nor is there any suggestion that the Canaanites and their kin were targeted for destruction because they were uniquely evil or treacherous: They happened to be on the wrong land at the wrong time. And Joshua himself was by no means alone. In Judges again, other stories tell of the complete extermination of tribes with the deliberate goal of ending their genetic lines.
In modern times, we would call this genocide...
We can argue about what the words mean for today, but personally, I can't see the distinction. Jenkins wants us keep perspective.
Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions . . . all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Koran. At every stage, we can argue what the passages in question mean, and certainly whether they should have any relevance for later ages. But the fact remains that the words are there, and their inclusion in the scripture means that they are, literally, canonized, no less than in the Muslim scripture.
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