In a paper published [October 2023] in Nature Human Behavior the authors presented “a bird’s-eye view of trends in violence from 14,000 to 2,400 years ago, between the end of the Ice Age (the Mesolithic) and Classical Antiquity… Cave paintings representing weapons usually depict hunting, but some prehistoric art in the Sahara Desert like the one at Sefar in Algeria [above] seem to show fierce combat between groups of archers.”

How Brutal are Humans?

This prompted Ruth Schuster to ask, “Just how innately brutal are humans?”

“From the start of the historic record about 4,500 years ago, the narratives abound in violence. But the historic record began thousands of years after a radical change in the human condition: For the first time in two million years, we had settled down. Were we potentially friendlier in prehistory?

We don’t know, as prehistoric osteological evidence is scarce. But some evidence remains. Archaeologists suspect they may have discovered the murder of a Neanderthal by a Homo sapiens who shivved him in the ribcage. A battlefield from over 13,000 years ago has been found in Sudan, featuring weapons that archaeologists suspect were designed to lacerate and maim rather than kill efficiently. The remains of a slaughter from 10,000 years ago have been found in Kenya.”

Where did all this Violence come from?

In this month to consider the place of violence in our times, we wonder as Schuster does,

Where this violence came from, and whether it goes back to deep prehistory, has never been clear.

In his book Constant Battles, Steven LeBlanc traces the human proclivity to warfare from the Palaeolithic period onwards. He cites evidence precisely to dispel the misconception that human beings are “peace by nature and… have been for millions of years.” He asserts that people in the past were in fact “in conflict and competition most of the time.” This was underlined in the 1993 symposium, “Crime in Prehistory” that challenged the notion that portrays prehistory as peopled exclusively by members of happy, peaceful communities, living in harmony with each other. (Source: Cuckoos in our Nest: Truth & Lies about Being Human, Iain Provan, 2023).

From pre-history to the beginnings of recorded history, we find somewhat later, the Bible brims with descriptions of terrible hostilities, as do so many ancient texts.

Old Testament scholar Matthew J. Lynch addresses this in his book “Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God“.

Old Testament violence proves one of the most troubling topics in the Bible. Too often, the explanations for the brutality in Scripture fail to adequately illustrate why God would sanction such horrors on humanity. These unanswered questions leave readers frustrated and confused, leading some to even walk away from their faith.

In Flood and Fury, Old Testament scholar Matthew Lynch approaches two of the most violent passages in the Old Testament – the Flood and the Canaanite conquest – and offers a way forward that doesn’t require softening or ignoring the most troubling aspects of these stories. While acknowledging the persistent challenge of violence in Scripture, Flood and Fury contends that reading with the grain of the text yields surprising insights into the goodness and the mercy of God. Through his exploration of themes related to violence including misogyny, racism, and nationalism, Lynch shows that these violent stories illuminate significant theological insights that we might miss with a surface reading.

Focus on the Middle East:

“Why focus on the Middle East?” Schuster asks, “Because this region was always a hotbed of societal evolution. Settlement seems to have begun at least 23,000 years ago, and would be followed by profound transformations. These ranged from hunting to animal domestication and from foraging to farming as of about 10,000 years ago… with the urban revolution, [came] the rise of agrarian states, and their evolution into aggressive empires.”

Here we are in 2024 continuing to be mystified by the unending violence in the Middle East as Israel persists to genocide a people who promises to genocide them. Who can tell who the terrorists are in a war of reciprocal horror? And more to the point, who can imagine peace in the Middle East?

The combatants draw us into a larger war, and there will no peace based on the calculus of who wins or looses. Everyone looses in this war.

What is the cost of Peace?

The cost of peace is outrageous. The cost of peace means considering the enemy as a person; it means absorbing unspeakable loss; it means unfathomable giving. Without a world view to do this – there can be no end.

We would be wise to compare this to the outrageous cost of violence.

On the cusp of Christmas labelled as a colonizer’s holiday in Canada, and reduced to the sickening baubles of consumerism, the world looses connection with the Prince of Peace, and the only One in whom we can find it.

This is more enigma than dogma.