Honesty in History (Deuteronomy 2,26-3,5)

‘And the Lord our God delivered him (Sihon) before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain’ (Deuteronomy 2,26-3,5)

 From the point of view of the Jewish people, who took possession of the promised land, via these fights, it is a glorious story. They won, they had their new country. Yet, what is striking, is the honesty of these accounts. God prompted the sacred writer to remember these brutal acts. We ‘utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, every ones, of every city, we left no one to remain.’

There is guilt (bloodshed) attached even to what we call ‘sacred history’. Passages like this is like harsh sounding trumpets blown into our face. ‘Do not think that there is pure history.’ We must remember, and all victors or gainers in history, that communities and cultures are fallen, always, and marked by blood.

There is a strange echo of this acquiring of the promised land by Jewry, and our modern attempts of an exodus into the future. I just wonder, if we ever see similar stories of blood underlying the glorious trails of our satellites and spaceships? A Tesla car (the epitome of hubris) is floating freely in space. Humankind (the victorious part of it) is planning to set up mining colonies on the Moon and on Mars.

We, Christians, and Jews, just need to be aware of these new ‘digital storytelling’, which threaten to silence the Biblical story telling of our accountability. A new hubristic colonisation of all avaible resources is on its way. Without the biblical honesty about our fallenness, a shameful, new colonisation of the cosmos is taking place.
 
01.05.2019