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| Artwork showing Samson knocking down the pillars, causing the roof to collapse onto a crowd of terrified men and women. Image source. |
I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles." This book is great.
One of the chapters is called "Samson's Suicide and the Death of Three Thousand Others in Children's Bible Stories through Two Centuries," by David M. Guan. This is about the bible story where Samson is captured by the Philistines, and he knocks down the pillars of their temple, causing the building to collapse and kill a huge number of people, including himself. The bible (and children's bible stories, in my experience) portray this as a good thing because the Philistines were the bad guys.
Guan's essay analyzes the illustrations in children's bibles which tell this story. I want to show you this one quote in particular from page 242:
It may not be easy for artists to make doomed Philistines look like wicked people. Illustrators work under various constraints, including the space and frame available, and such considerations may account in some cases for few Philistines and lone Samsons. But as the example of the escaping Philistines suggests, there are likely to be other factors involved in the design of these illustrations. One obvious factor is adult concern about presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person).
Wow, there it is. "Presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)."
This is huge, honestly, and I'm glad someone is calling it out. The bible has a lot of stories about mass slaughter- in particular, stories where mass slaughter is portrayed as a good thing, where the bible heroes kill "enemies" in the name of God. There are even some stories (like Joshua's conquest of the land of Canaan) where God commands his people to commit genocide- to kill all inhabitants of all the cities in the promised land. The story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho is one of the classics you always see in children's bibles- God commanded his people to walk around the city for 7 days, and then miraculously, the walls collapsed, and then God's people went in and killed everyone (except Rahab and her family because she had helped them). Yes, really, we really are teaching little kids in Sunday School that God commanded his people to kill everyone in Jericho (except Rahab's family) because they were bad guys.
"Presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)."
In the children's bibles I've seen, these stories sometimes are cleaned up a bit and they don't mention all the murder. For example, when we tell kids the story of Daniel in the lions' den, it's common to end the story right after Daniel comes out of the lions' den safely (uh spoiler warning?), and not mention the part where Daniel's enemies and their wives and children were then thrown into the lions' den and killed by the lions. But for other stories, they're not "cleaned up" to get rid of the mass murder- we tell kids that the bible heroes killed people in the name of God, and that it was right (as in the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho).
(These are the 2 approaches I discussed in my post 2 Wrong Ways to Write Bible Stories For Kids.)
I'm very interested in the essays in "Text, Image, & Otherness" which analyze this weird contradiction- that conservative Christians believe it's good for everyone (including children) to read the bible, and we can always learn some good lesson from it- BUT ALSO we don't necessarily want to explicitly show kids these scenes of over-the-top violence- BUT ALSO it was right for these bible role models to commit violence in God's name, it is right to commit genocide if God commands it- BUT ALSO wow yikes, we're not actually going to draw a picture of it and show it to kids.
If you're writing and illustrating a bible for kids, you SHOULD be confronted with the problem of "presenting mass slaughter to children (let alone any respectable person)."
Personally, I believe that the writers of the bible were wrong when they said God commanded and approved of this violence. And furthermore, if your God tells you to kill someone, you should just quit religion right then and there, okay? Don't, like, actually do it, my god.
But if you believe in biblical inerrancy, you don't have the option to say the biblical writers were wrong. So you're stuck in this weird position where you're teaching children that sometimes mass murder is good. I seem to recall that Jesus said it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around one's neck.
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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":
"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith"
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children"
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood
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