What do we do with the violence attributed to God in the songs of Lamentations 1 to 3?
Though, let's be honest with ourselves, this isn't just a question about Lamentations. This is a question about the whole OT. All of us wonder at some point just how violent God is.
Contradictory portrayals of God in Lamentations and in the rest of the Old Testament hinder us from answering this question. For example, in Lamentations' first poem, the reporter is towing the religious party line that Daughter Zion's suffering is God's just punishment for her sin (see 1:5b and 8a). But, by the time the second poem starts, he agrees with her. She suffers because God is abusive (2:1).
Daughter Zion, even amongst her accusations that God subjected her to sexual abuse, calls out to him to "Look" (1:9c, 11c, 20a, and 2:20). Whenever she does this, she uses a Hebrew word (rā'â) that evokes his rescue of the Israelites from slavery (Exodus 2:25 and 3:7-9). God is her enemy, and yet she still hopes that he is also her liberator.
The soldier too, in Lamentations 3, is inconsistent with how he talks about God. For sixteen verses, God tortures him in prison (3:1-16) but then, in a rare moment of hope, he recalls how God had rescued him previously before drawing close to him (3:55-57). He goes from one extreme to another.
Which God are we meant to believe in?
Is God an abuser or a liberator?
Or is he somehow both?
God’s violence is not an easy problem to figure out. It’s why we’re still debating it today, and why I’m writing books about how we can understand God to be as nonviolent as Jesus.
As I see it, we have six ways we can respond to God’s violence.
