Have you ever debated the question, “Is it ever okay to lie?”? If so, it usually doesn’t take very long for someone to raise the uncomfortable fact that people in the Bible—particularly people in the Old Testament—lie quite a bit. Furthermore, not only do they get away with it, they’re often commended for it—like the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1:15-21, who lie to Pharaoh about what’s going on with the Hebrew babies, and Jehu in 2 King 10, who very deceptively lures the prophets of Baal into a trap and then kills them all.
If you’ve ever wondered about those incidents, what to make of them and what the implications are for the Christian life, tune into Tony Payne’s conversation with Moore College Old Testament Lecturer Jack Day in this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast.
Runtime: 46:52 min.
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Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: I teach ethics here at Moore College, and we often debate questions in class like, is it ever okay to lie? And it doesn’t take very long during those sorts of conversations for someone to raise the uncomfortable fact that people in the Bible, and particularly people in the Old Testament, lie quite a bit.
[00:00:23] And not only do they get away with it, they’re often commended for it—like the Hebrew midwives, for example, in Exodus, who lie to Pharaoh about what’s going on with the Hebrew babies. Or like Jehu, who in 2 King 10—who very deceptively lures the prophets of Baal into a trap and then kills them all, and gets commended for it.
[00:00:44] Have you ever wondered about those incidents in the Old Testament and what to make of them, and what the implications are? Well, we’ll see if we can make sense of them and those implications on today’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast.
[Music]
Introducing Jack
[00:01:14] Tony Payne: Well, hello again. Welcome to another edition of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. I’m Tony Payne. And this week, we’re joined by Jack Day. Jack, hello.
[00:01:21] Jack Day: Hello. Good to be here.
[00:01:23] Tony Payne: Now, you’ve recently displaced me as one of the junior members of the Moore College faculty, even though you’re very much my junior. Tell us what you do at Moore College these days.
[00:01:32] Jack Day: Thank you. So I have joined the faculty just this year. So in January, I started in the Old Testament Department. So I’m a lecturer in Old Testament. At the moment, I’m teaching first year subjects: teaching Hebrew, teaching biblical theology. So I look at the tiny little jots and tittles and the whole of the Bible—the small picture and the big picture. That’s what I’m doing at the moment.
[00:01:52] Tony Payne: Well, first years need to look at all of that sort of stuff. This is good. This is excellent. Enjoying it so far?
[00:01:57] Jack Day: It is an absolute joy and a privilege to be back at Moore College. I was a student way back when, so to come back and be involved in seeing men and women equipped for Christian ministry, getting to jump into the Bible together, most days, I pinch myself that I get to be here doing that.
[00:02:11] Tony Payne: It’s a privilege, isn’t it.
[00:02:11] Jack Day: It’s great.
Topic relevance
[00:02:12] Tony Payne: Great stuff. Listen, one of the joys about just interacting with people—in fact, one of the joys of life generally—is just how the connections you make with people, the conversations you have, the synchronicity or providence, we would say, of being thrown together with people yields interesting conversations. And we’ve been chatting over the years about your PhD and what you did in your PhD, which was in the general area of deception: lying, military deception. We’ll come to that in a second—exactly what you did.
[00:02:36] But it’s fascinating, too, that as we were discussing doing this podcast, and we’ve been talking about doing it over the last month or two, and how that might be helpful for the CCL and for this kind of discussion of Christian life and the nature of Christian living, it’s been in a context where war, and the nature of war, and behaviour in war, and even the Christian justification for war, suddenly has become an issue again in our public consciousness, certainly.
[00:03:00] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:03:01] Tony Payne: It’s not that it’s never not been an issue—what do Christians think about war, and soldiering, and about behaviour in war, and participation in war, and what a just war is. But it’s been impossible, given all that’s happened—and as we record this, the US/Iran-Israeli/Iran war—
[00:03:15] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:03:16] Tony Payne: —is still in the process of being sorted out. There’s no deal. There’s a ceasefire without there being any kind of peace, settlement. What happens in war, what we should do in war, what a Christian should do in war has very much been live and as part of our public discussion.
[00:03:29] Jack Day: Yeah, it is. I mean, when I started this research—I mean, we’ll say a bit more about the process in a moment—but the warfare angle of my topic really came into my orbit around middle of 2023, and then very soon after that was the beginning of the Israel/Gaza conflict.
[00:03:46] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:03:47] Jack Day: And so, there’ve been points in my work where I’ve been looking at what international humanitarian law says about deception in war, while things are unfolding in the news that are directly relevant to the kinds of principles and the kinds of laws I’ve been reading.
[00:03:59] So it’s been quite a—I mean, fascinating, but also really horrifying, in many ways, time to be grappling with these topics. It’s helped me see that this is not just an academic ivory tower kind of exercise. This is real people, real lives right now. These things matter.
[00:04:13] Tony Payne: They do, and we’ll come back to where it matters and why it matters, and how the research you did in into these Old Testament texts help us to see what matters.
Genesis
[00:04:21] Tony Payne: But tell us the story of how it began and what your PhD research was about, because that’s really what is leading to this conversation—because your research ended up being about war and deception in war. But how did all that start?
[00:04:33] Jack Day: Yeah, so the thing that kicked it all off was really a Moore College third-year moral theology lecture on the ethics of lying. And I had grown up and been discipled in church, and just, I think, always assumed that, well, God wants us to tell the truth. Lying is always wrong. If people come and knock on your door and you’re hiding Jewish people in the basement, then you should tell the truth and face the consequences. And I had sort of assumed that was what the Bible said and that’s what, surely, all Christians believe.
[00:05:00] And it was this ethics lecture—Chase Kuhn was my lecturer, at that point—it sort of blew it wide open, and found, oh, there are really faithful Christian people who take the Bible seriously who think sometimes, lying is absolutely justified. That sort of rattled me at the time. And that sat there for quite a while.
[00:05:16] When I came out of College and I was looking to keep up my Hebrew, a friend and I were reading through the Book of Kings. That’s what we decided to read—to just chip away at. And while I was looking for a topic to do further study in, Kings was the world I was swimming in. And there’s a number of fascinating stories—narratives in Kings—that involve lying.
[00:05:34] So the most famous one is probably 1 Kings 22, and the prophet Micaiah confronts evil King Ahab. He sees the Lord sending a, quote unquote, “lying spirit to deceive Ahab’s prophets”. And there’s a number of texts on the similar theme. So my initial project in the doctorate, I was investigating lying and deceiving as a theme in the Book of Kings, particularly.
[00:05:55] And as is usually the case with research, there’s twists and turns and you got to find something new to say, or that’s, you know, part of the academic process. So the thing that emerged that I found interesting is lots of scholars I read would say this line that went something like, “In the Old Testament, you have a range of texts where people lie or deceive in war, and everyone knows deceiving in war is just different”. Like, lying to your best friend or your next door neighbour, that’s one thing. But lying to the enemy nation who’s trying to destroy you, that’s a very different moral scenario. So that’s why it’s fine all over the Old Testament.
[00:06:30] And I found that interesting, and particularly that, as I dug into that, lots of people rolled out that line without ever really probing it or justifying it. So it’s kind of a moral intuition that lots of people have that just gets kind of cited as a reason for why these texts are the way they are.
[00:06:46] So in the end, the topic that I dove into in detail was really considering is that true? How far does that go? As we look at the Old Testament narratives that seem to portray lying and/or deceiving in more positive ways—against the background where there’s lots of biblical texts that condemn lying, but there are these narratives that seem to set it forward more positively—is warfare, violence, military-type things—is that one possible reason why there is more positively portrayed deception in the Old Testament? That’s the question that I really dug into.
[00:07:15] Tony Payne: Yeah, that’s interesting. ‘Cause at one level, you could see—say with something like camouflage, just off the top of our heads as we think about it, you think, “Is camouflage okay in warfare?” And you say, “Well, of course: you camouflage yourself.”
[00:07:27] But camouflage is deception. Like, you’re not wearing your normal clothes; you’re wearing clothes that are deliberately meant to hide you and, in a sense, to deceive the enemy, at least in some form, at the most basic level—and most people would say, “Yeah, camouflage is fine.”
[00:07:39] Jack Day: Sure, yeah.
[00:07:39] Tony Payne: But then it’s only, well, what about putting out reports and intelligence to seek to lead the enemy to think you’re going to invade here, instead of here, which is what the Allies did in the great D-Day invasion? They tried to persuade the Germans they were actually going to land somewhere else, whereas in fact, they landed in Normandy.
[00:07:55] And so, there’s an intuitive level where many people would not feel morally compromised or in a great quandary about that kind of dissembling deception. But when it comes to God’s people deceiving others—especially when it comes to God supposedly sending a lying spirit and participating in some way in this whole—well, that raises the stakes quite a lot.
Scope
[00:08:16] Tony Payne: So how did you go about exploring it? How was the scope of the project as it unfolded?
[00:08:21] Jack Day: Sure. So the texts that I chose to look at in particular are ones drawn from what we in English tend to call the historical books. In the Hebrew tradition, they’re the former prophets. So this is the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. They’re the books that tell this interconnected story from Israel first landing in the Promised Land, fighting a war of conquest with the Canaanites all the way through Judges. You got lots of different wars against the Moabites and the Ammonites. And then you have books of Samuel: House of David versus House of Saul. And the books of Kings. Finally, the Israelites are kicked outta the land through wars as the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, invade. So that’s the story these books tell, with war running through it right the way, literally, from beginning to end. Those are the texts I looked at—for what probably come across as fairly obvious reasons. I mean, these are the books where war is probably most prominently featured in these texts. And there are a lot of deceptive acts in those wars that are narrated there as well.
[00:09:20] Partly it was an academic choice—that they’re some of the deception stories that are less well studied in the biblical Old Testament literature on deception. Lots of people have written about Genesis: you know, Jacob: classic deceiver; Abraham lying about Sarah being his wife—those sorts of things. But some of those stories—particularly Joshua/Judges/Kings—that’s the area where there was more room for me to make a case that there’s something fresh to consider here.
[00:09:42] The way I went about it was really two main sort of methods, I guess, that I was bringing to that. The first was looking at the Old Testament in conversation with philosophy—with moral philosophy—with ethics in a whole range of different traditions. And this is kind of a newer movement in biblical studies the last 10 or so years, even. There are people who are reconsidering how the history of Western philosophy particularly might be a useful intertext to consider Old Testament texts in conversation with.
[00:10:12] For a long time, people were moving the other way, saying we’ve had too much kind of people looking at the Old Testament from Greek Western philosophical eyes, and actually what’s going on in the Old Testament is quite different. It’s a different part of the world: ancient near East. But the last decade or so, there’s been a, I guess, pendulum swing the other way of people thinking, “Well, let’s not be anachronistic and just kind of read the Old Testament through those Western philosophical lenses and distort the texts. But rather, is there a way that we can look at what people are discussing in the philosophical world on a question like the morality of deception in warfare?”, because there’s lots of philosophers who’ve asked that question, and I’ve read some—many of them over the past few years.
[00:10:51] And the different lines that philosophers have drawn: pretty much everyone agrees deceiving your neighbour is bad. Some deception in warfare is justifiable. But what exactly is the difference? Why is there a difference? Where is the line between what might be acceptable or unacceptable in war? Those are the questions where philosophers have drawn different lines and made different distinctions.
[00:11:12] And so, I’ve been reading Old Testament texts with an eye to those distinctions and seeing, “Do they help us give extra categories/have extra options for what might be going on under the surface in the biblical texts?” So that’s the kind of comparative philosophical side of what I’ve been doing.
How Old Testament narrative works ethically
[00:11:28] Jack Day: Alongside that, I’ve also been thinking about “How does an Old Testament narrative work ethically?”, if I can put it like that.
[00:11:35] Tony Payne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:36] Jack Day: Classically in evangelical tradition, often people have said the Old Testament tells stories about all sorts of bad things happening. Most of the time, that’s being related, quite descriptively. There’s lots of places where God’s people do the wrong thing. Just because the text tells you the story doesn’t mean it’s saying, “You should do this too.” And that’s a really important point to make.
[00:11:54] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:11:54] Jack Day: Just because Abraham lies about his wife to save himself from Pharaoh, that doesn’t mean the text is saying that’s a really good thing necessarily.
[00:12:01] Tony Payne: You should do that next time.
[00:12:02] Jack Day: Exactly. Yeah. So that’s often been our classic line. My question has been, “Are there more subtle ways that narratives give us ethical stances?” Is there an implicit ethic that comes out of narratives—
[00:12:16] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:12:16] Jack Day: —that may be created in a more subtle kind of way? Sometimes Old Testament narratives are very explicit. So 2 Samuel 11 is the classic case where David sleeps with Bathsheba and then sends Uriah to his death.
[00:12:28] Tony Payne: There’s all sorts of deception there.
[00:12:29] Jack Day: Exactly, yeah. And at the end of that story, the final line is—David’s almost gotten away with it; Uriah is dead; Bathsheba becomes his wife; and then the final line is, “But the thing that David did was evil in the eyes of the Lord.”
[00:12:41] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:12:41] Jack Day: So you have the narrator explicitly tells you that was wrong. That happens occasionally. It’s quite rare. One of the things that’s quite distinct about Hebrew narrative is that you don’t get a lot of that.
[00:12:50] But I’ve been reading scholars and participating in this kind of discourse where we are thinking, “Are there more subtle ways that a text can be shaped in a kind of rhetorical mode?” to help you see the narrator is telling you that this act or this stance, or whatever it is, is right or wrong, even if they don’t come out and tell it straight away, necessarily.
[00:13:10] So in the deception world, a classic example there is in Genesis: you have Jacob deceives Isaac, his father—goes and gets dressed up with the goat skins and swindles Esau out of his blessing. The narrator of Genesis never really tells you that what Jacob does is wrong. Except you have the way that the story is crafted and put together: a couple chapters later, Jacob goes off to Haran to his uncle Laban, and Laban famously deceives Jacob almost in return. So he swaps his daughters: instead of marrying Rachel, “Jacob: oh, here’s Leah!” And you have there, I think, a subtle way that the narrative is put together. I would argue that you have the narrator there casting a kind of condemnation of Jacob’s initial deception. By mirroring the story, you get a kind of “this for that”—like, what goes around, comes around-type thing going on. And I think that that—the way the story’s put together is a subtle condemnation. So what Jacob did is wrong, and the narrator communicates that in a more subtle kind of way.
[00:14:04] So those are the kinds of principles I’ve been working with, looking at these texts about deception in war in the former prophets: Joshua through Kings. Can we pick up some of those subtle signals to work out? How does the narrator regard these deceptive acts from a moral perspective? And then thinking about the philosophy to try and interrogate, well, if that’s the kind of angle that they have on deception in ancient Israel, what might be going under the hood? Why are some deceptions in war okay, while others might not be?
[00:14:30] Tony Payne: I guess there’s also an implicit assumption, as we read the Bible, that when it does narrate a story that takes place in our world—in the world, God created, the world that he made out of his goodness—insofar as it tells us things about good actions and evil actions, or right actions and wrong actions—about, perhaps, wise or foolish actions, or praiseworthy worthwhile actions, or ones that aren’t—it’s telling us something about the world we live in. It’s telling us something about our world. It’s a shared world. It’s a world God made. It’s a world in which, even though the cultural situation is obviously very different; we’re thousands of years past that—we still look at those stories, read those stories and recognise the world that they’re taking place in because it’s our world, where people deceive one another, where there’s rivalries, where there’s jealousies, where truth is told or not told.
[00:15:19] And that’s also part of the way in which the Old Testament narratives function for us morally, I think—is that they describe and figure the world that we live in. They show us a world and reveal something about God and the world to us as we read what happens. And you’re right: in the narratives, it’s not always done with a big sort of Post-It note stuck to it saying, “Here’s the lesson. Did you get it?”
[00:15:41] But the lesson’s there all the same. And the way that the narrative works—and it strikes me that we know this because the place where we see it in our contemporary culture is in movies. Like, it’s very easy in the course of a narrative in a movie, because we understand its conventions, you kind of get the sense in the story, often before very long, who is going to be the villain in this story, or who is the person whose behaviour is going to be blamed, and what is the moral lesson of the story becomes apparent without them ever saying, “This is the moral lesson of the story.”
[00:16:10] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:16:11] Tony Payne: It comes out in what happens to the characters and how they behave. I mean, in the old days, it came out because some characters wore black hats and some characters wore white hats.
[00:16:20] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:16:20] Tony Payne: Some looked swarthy and evil, and others looked blonde and good. Like, there were signals like that that would be strange for us today.
[00:16:27] But it’s the same with all narrative. It signals and indicates what it’s telling you in a different sort of mode—in a different cadence than a letter or a law code or other things, which reveal the nature of morality in a different sense.
[00:16:38] Jack Day: Yeah, and I think that’s part of the rich artistry of biblical narrative—
[00:16:42] Tony Payne: Absolutely!
[00:16:42] Jack Day: —That in some ways, it would almost feel a little on the nose if every time the narrator wants to make that point of saying, “Oh, and by the way, what this person did, that was really great. This was not so good.” There’s kind of a subtlety that’s part of the richness of these stories and that they don’t give the answer really obviously like that.
[00:16:58] Tony Payne: And so, they work on you in a different way, don’t they?
[00:17:00] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:17:00] Tony Payne: They affect you in a different way: as you read them and internalise them and read them again, and you come to really know them, they become part of you. They help you see the nature of the world and they shape the way you think about and understand and feel in the world by the story, rather than just by the command. I mean, both are necessary, but they do it in different ways.
An example
[00:17:17] Tony Payne: Can you give us an example—one of the stories in particular that you looked at and how it revealed that?
[00:17:22] Jack Day: Yeah. So one of the texts that comes to mind is 1 Samuel 11, which is one of the more obscure passages, perhaps, in the books of Samuel. So this is the story: just after Saul has been revealed and announced as the first king of Israel, the first thing that happens is the Ammonites from the East attack one of the Israelite cities in the Transjordan in Gilead. So this is the area east of the Jordan River and the kind of disputed territory that’s never quite part of Israel, in a sense. You have the city of Jabesh-Gilead is attacked by the Ammonites. Nahash, the king of the Ammonites: his name means “snake”, which is just a great kind of perhaps less subtle indicator there—like, that’s maybe the black hat moment where this is—you know, he’s—he’s literally a snake. He’s attacking God’s people.
[00:18:07] The Israelites city: they say to the Ammonites, “Let’s go and find a rescuer, and if no one comes, we will come out to you”—is what they say. And this is part of the artistry and the subtlety—that do they mean, “We’ll come out in surrender” or “We’ll come out in attack”?
[00:18:22] And as the story goes on, the Israelites, they send off their messengers. Eventually it turns out Saul is going to come and reinforce the city. And on the eve of the arrival of Saul’s forces, the people of Jabesh, again, say to the Ammonites, “We will come out to you tomorrow.” And it seems like the implication there is they’re saying, “We’ll come out in surrender.”
[00:18:39] Tony Payne: We’ll surrender. Yeah.
[00:18:39] Jack Day: Exactly. No one’s come. We’re going to give it up. And then the next day, Saul comes, smashes the Ammonites, lays waste to them. They’re all destroyed. So you have the—the very subtle, almost wordplay-type thing. But the Jabeshites deceive the Ammonites and lull them into this false sense of security so that—
[00:18:56] Tony Payne: To wait for the reinforcements to arrive.
[00:18:57] Jack Day: Exactly, yeah. And then, some of the interesting, more subtle ways that the text kind of colours that narrative, in my mind, are, for one, you’ve got the association with Saul. So Saul as a moral figure is, I mean, you look at the book as a whole. Saul is, in one sense, by the end, fairly one-dimensional. He’s the foil to David. Saul’s the guy who is kind of a bumbling, incompetent leader; doesn’t listen to the voice of the Lord; disobeys God; the kingship’s rejected—all those sorts of things.
[00:19:27] So the fact that Saul is involved in this scene, that lends some moral weight to the narrative. And that comes in even in some very kind of subtle, but for those with eyes to see it, like, quite powerful, almost visceral techniques, you see.
[00:19:38] So one of the things that happens in that story is there’s an allusion to some background. So Judges 19 is in the background. This is the awful story at the end of Judges, where the Levite comes to the city of Gibeah, and the men of Gibeah rape his concubine. The Levite ends up cutting up her body and sending it out through Israel. Horrible, horrible stuff.
[00:19:59] The way that Saul summons the people of Israel to fight for Jabesh-Gilead is by cutting up an ox and sending it out across Israel to kind of summon them. And it’s, word for word, the exact kind of phrases are used. So you have Saul there, in a sense, doing this noble thing of summoning Israel to fight against their enemies. But the language: you instantly call to mind the figure of this horrific scene of moral debauchery from Judges. And that, I think, is the inner signal that what’s going on here—that there’s something wrong—that Saul is not cast as this paragon of virtue. Even in the way his acts are described with specific words, you have this moral colouration of the narrative going on, reflecting, I think, negatively on everything that’s happening in that story.
[00:20:40] So that’s some of the kind of—it’s not just what happened was wrong; there’s a more subtle thing going on. But the more familiar you are with the Old Testament literature, you can see these illusions that are casting moral evaluation on the acts as they unfold.
[00:20:52] Tony Payne: On the acts of Saul, in that case, more so than the acts of the occupants of the city?
[00:20:57] Jack Day: That’s right, yeah. So there you have, I think, Saul reflected on negatively. There’s lots in that story. So for the Ammonites—sorry, the Jabeshites, rather—they’re very quick to surrender when the Ammonites first come. The Jabeshites first off, say, “Yep, fine.” To paraphrase a little, “We don’t have to be with Israel. That’s fine. We’re happy to make a covenant with you.” They kind of turn their back on Israel fairly quickly even before they know that there’s going to be consequences to their actions.
[00:21:19] You have a number of things going on, and part of it is there’s this kind of almost guilt by association. The fact that you have these acts connected with a figure as negative as Saul, that’s, I think, part of how the narrators of these stories are sending their moral signals. Just the company you keep is part of the moral picture too.
[Music]
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[00:22:56] Tony Payne: And now let’s get back to our program.
Evaluation
[00:22:58] Tony Payne: So you’re doing this with a whole bunch of narrative incidents and episodes connected with deception. As you started to draw those together, did they all send similar signals? Different signals? Was the colouration and the kind of implications of the narrative similar or mixed? What did you find as you looked through?
[00:23:13] Jack Day: Yeah, so I think there’s a range of evaluations you see of deceptive acts. And part of what I was doing was trying to see is there some kind of logic to that overall picture?
[00:23:23] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:23:23] Jack Day: So there are some stories where I think you have very clear endorsement of these acts of deception in warfare, and the classic example is Joshua 8: so as the Israelites come into the land of Canaan, they first defeat Jericho, as God sends the walls crashing down. The next battle they fight is against the city of Ai. And as they go up to fight Ai, the Lord tells Joshua, “Set an ambush behind the city.” And so, you have this battle unfold where the main Israelite army attacks Ai and pretends to run away, and the forces of Ai are deceived and lured out. They think it’s a genuine retreat. So they leave the city and then this ambush group rises up and takes the city, burns it to the ground. The inhabitants of Ai are slaughtered.
[00:24:08] So you have this wholesale destruction of the city that comes about through this act of deception, which is, in some sense, the direct command from God. And it’s quite an interesting part of my work—is thinking about what exactly is God commanding? And there’s sort of two things going on. The ambush in itself is a—I would argue, an act of concealment: they hide. And this is part of the philosophical work I’ve done: there’s some important distinctions to draw between deception and concealing. So there’s related activities there that are not the same.
[00:24:37] But you have—this whole battle, in a sense, unfolds from God’s command. And I think there you have a fairly strong signal from the narrative, if this is a really bad thing to do, it’ll be weird to have God saying, “Go and do this.”
[00:24:50] Tony Payne: “Go and do this.” Yeah.
[00:24:51] Jack Day: So one of the more explicit ways that the narrators give us an ethical dimension is when God acts and when God speaks and commands. So in there, you have a story where the moral weight is fairly positive: so deception of the enemy presented in very strong terms there.
[00:25:05] So they’re in some ways the extremes, I think. There’s a few other texts I looked at where it comes across more negatively. Judges 9 is the career of Abimelech, who’s, again, maybe a slightly lesser known biblical character. But he’s the son of Gideon. He just seizes power, slaughters his half-brothers.
[00:25:22] Tony Payne: Not a good guy.
[00:25:22] Jack Day: Yeah. Pretty much everything he does is terrible, and there’s a range of ambush stories in his reign that—
[00:25:27] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:25:27] Jack Day: —seem to be presented a bit more negatively as well.
[00:25:29] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:25:30] Jack Day: Between those extremes, I think there’s a range of different evaluations that you see these acts of deception have in different conflicts—different military contexts. And part of what I was doing was trying to work out is there a framework that has a kind of moral logic emerging out of the philosophical work I was looking at that could help to hold those together? Yeah.
Moral framework
[00:25:51] Tony Payne: And what did you find? Did you find there was a framework? Did you come up with something that helped to place the different examples in relation to each other in a way that made sense?
[00:25:59] Jack Day: Sure, yeah. So at this point, it’s probably worth commenting a little on what I wasn’t doing. So I wasn’t trying to argue strongly for “This is the framework that ancient Israelites had about—
[00:26:10] Tony Payne: Yes.
[00:26:11] Jack Day: —Military deception.” So what I was doing is kind of like a step before that: is there a philosophically plausible kind of framework that factors in different types of deception and context and so on, that mirrors the pattern I discern from the narratives? Because it’s quite hard to conclude these stories were they written by the same people in the same times. Like, all that’s very disputed. So I wasn’t trying to say, like, this is like—
[00:26:34] Tony Payne: “This is definitely what was in their heads in constructing these narratives.”
[00:26:38] Jack Day: Exactly. So not—not saying that. Yes.
[00:26:39] Tony Payne: You can’t do that .
[00:26:40] Jack Day: Yeah. So that’s hard. So I’m more saying, “As you look at the final picture, is there some way of holding it coherent?” Which is important, because then often—this is maybe a slight tangent, but in Old Testament studies, it’s fairly common to say, “Well, here you have story #1, where deception is approved; story #2, where deception is condemned. They must be written by different people—”
[00:26:58] Tony Payne: yes, of course!
[00:26:58] Jack Day: “—because they have different moral stances on deception.”
[00:27:01] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:27:01] Jack Day: And I’m trying to say, “Well, is that perhaps a little simplistic?” Is there a way of thinking about military deception that says, “Actually, there’s good reason why the same person might approve it here but not here.”
[00:27:11] So there’s a number of philosophers and theologians as well. So someone like Augustine is one of the people in the philosophical tradition. He’s a theologian. But philosophers always start with Augustine on this question, ’cause he is kind of the titan that looms across ethics in many ways. Aquinas has some things to say. Immanuel Kant has some things to say. There’s a few modern military ethicists I looked at.
[00:27:33] To cut a long story short, the conclusion I reached is I think there is a framework which can account, at least for the narratives that I looked at. And that is, assuming deception in general society is wrong as the moral background, it seems like if you were to hold this position, I think it works with the narratives. Like, number #1, deceiving one’s enemy in war is generally good and right, provided that the war is, in some sense, just, and maybe I can talk a bit more about what I mean by that. So if you’re advancing a good and just cause, militarily, deception seems to be approved in that context—with the exception that there’s a particular means of deception that seems to not be endorsed, and that is abusing what you might call the means of making peace.
[00:28:16] So in the modern literature, people will talk about if you raise the white flag and surrender as a way to get your enemy to put down their rifles and have a ceasefire, and then at that point, you re-engage and attack, that is very much frowned upon, to say the least in the—
[00:28:34] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:28:34] Jack Day: —Modern ethical literature. So moral philosophers talk about perfidy. That’s a general word—an archaic word—but a technical term here for those kinds of deceptions that abuse the rules of warfare, if you like. So things like pretending to be wounded so you can then shoot the person who comes to provide you with aid, breaking the ceasefire—those kinds of actions.
[00:28:52] So in the Old Testament context, it looks more like making a covenant or a treaty, and then acting deceptively. You’ve made the treaty as a pretence to then gain an advantage militarily. That seems to not be legitimate even in warfare—
[00:29:06] Tony Payne: And—and it’s in that tradition that we have the modern idea of war crimes, right?
[00:29:10] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:29:11] Tony Payne: In which, within the conduct of war, given that war is full of, in a sense, evil—of killing and brutality and destruction. And yet, within the practice of war, there are practices which are regarded as perfidious. It’s reprehensible because of the nature of the conflict and the nature of the conventions, in a sense, that surround the awfulness of war.
[00:29:31] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:29:31] Tony Payne: And so that even though in war, there’s all kinds of things that happen that, in normal circumstances—such as killing—in normal circumstances, are unacceptable and morally reprehensible. And yet, in war, they’re acceptable in some form, although even within that form, there are limits. And this is what you’re pointing out.
[00:29:46] Jack Day: Yeah. So in the modern tradition, the example par excellence is in the document called “The protocols additional to the Geneva Convention”. So coming out of the beginnings of the United Nations and the body of customary international humanitarian law, that’s been part of the story of kind of Western thinking, particularly over the past 80-odd years. It reaches back further than that, but getting codified in the 20th century. And you have there explicit distinction.
[00:30:11] So the protocols there will say deception in the normal course of warfare—what they call ruses of war: so this is things like ambushes and surprise attacks and camouflage, and even those acts of disinformation, like disseminating false orders. All those sorts of things are part and parcel of warfare, and that’s part of what we expect. That’s part of the norms. That’s permissible, even within legal warfare, in that modern sense. And then, acts of perfidy include the kinds of things I’ve mentioned. So paint a big red cross symbol on your trucks and your so and so, come in under the flag of neutrality and then attack—those are the sorts of things that are condemned.
[00:30:44] And part of what’s going on there, as I understand it, is you have certain things that in the modern world, we want to preserve in order to limit the evils of warfare. So things like making it possible for the Red Cross and for medical aid to be possible. Like, if everyone starts abusing Red Cross symbols, then no one’s going to trust the Red Cross when they actually come to try and provide help, and that’s going to be a huge net negative to the experience of people during warfare. So there are certain things we want to preserve, even in the midst of war, and limiting deceptions that compromise those goods.
[00:31:13] Tony Payne: And that would include peace treaties and the resolution of war.
[00:31:16] Jack Day: Exactly, yeah.
[00:31:17] Tony Payne: You want to preserve the possibility that the war might be resolved.
[00:31:19] Jack Day: Yeah. So this is a Immanuel Kant’s big thing: so he basically says, “The deceptions in warfare are those that make the resumption of peace impossible.” So for him, war is—realistically, it’s going to happen. But the goal of war is always to not be at war. Like, no one wants to be in a state of war in perpetuity. And deceptions which undermine the possibility of recreating peace are the ones that he condemns as reprehensible, because if you raise the white flag and then attack from that position, why is your enemy going to believe you next time you try to raise the white flag? And for Kant, that means we end up with the only possibility is wars of annihilation, basically. And that’s no good for anyone.
[00:31:53] So they’re the kinds of deceptions that—in the modern Western tradition, they’re the sorts of things people are trying to limit.
Abusing covenants
[00:31:58] Tony Payne: And as you brought that to these Old Testament texts, not to say, “Oh, this is their implicit logic”, but these are categories of thought that you might bring them to see what’s going on here and how do these make sense? What did you come up with?
[00:32:10] Jack Day: Yeah, so I think you see a few Old Testament stories where this kind of principle is analogous, I guess. And abusing covenants seems to be a similar thing that you can point to.
[00:32:20] So another classic example: this was outside my scope, but Genesis 34 is another text that’s relevant. So this is Jacob and his sons. Jacob comes to Shechem. This is the tragic story where Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, is violated by Shechem, son of Hamor. And Simeon and Levi make this offer to the Shechemites and say, you know, “Yeah, we’ll intermarry with you. We’ll join you. You just circumcise yourselves. That’s our price if you want to be our people.” And then famously, while the Shechemites are—
[00:32:48] Tony Payne: Recovering.
[00:32:48] Jack Day: —Writhing in pain for a few days, Simeon and Levi come in and slaughter them. So you have that, again, this kind of abuse of—
[00:32:54] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:32:54] Jack Day: —the means of making peace. And to me, it makes some kind of theological sense in the Old Testament context. If the covenant concept is something that’s sacrosanct in this sphere, that would align pretty well with the more general theological picture that the Israelites—they’re the covenant people. They’re the ones: the Lord made a covenant with them. That words bind us to one another and create real, meaningful pledges and promises that matter. It makes sense to me that that would be something that is almost an overriding thing that yes, in certain circumstances, deceiving your enemy: that’s good and right and part of warfare.
[00:33:25] But if you’ve promised that you won’t do something, we are the people of the God of promise. It makes sense that there’s something they would value and guard, I think, and want to protect in the moral vision.
Implications
[00:33:34] Tony Payne: Jack, this is really fascinating. Let’s talk about where it lands and the way we think today, and the extent to which your exploration of these particular texts—they’re not all the texts, as you said, and they’re not everything, theologically, we’d want to say about deception or about warfare in particular—deception and warfare.
[00:33:49] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:33:49] Tony Payne: Where do you think, from the particular angle that you explored, what were the landing points for you or the implications for you for how we think about these kinds of things today?
[00:33:57] Jack Day: Yeah, so I think perhaps the biggest point to make is that everything I’ve said is in the world of Old Testament theology, which is only the first part of the story, as we know. So in biblical theological perspective, I think much more needs to be said, and to directly apply these things from the Old Testament moral vision to us today, lots of issues there, of course.
[00:34:17] So in some ways, the kind of picture I’m arguing for is kind of an explanation of why there is so little positively portrayed deception in the New Testament, because I don’t think there is much, if any. And I think part of the difference is if the Old Testament world is one where enmity and warfare is part of the justification for it, that political reality is just very different in the New Testament—that under the Old Testament theocracy, where God’s purposes are proceeding through these people who are fighting wars to gain a foothold in the land of promise, that’s very different to where we find ourselves as a church, where Jesus has said, “My kingdom is not of this world” and now Paul says, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood.” So the church as the church, I think, no longer fights wars or should not, anyway, in the sense that Old Testament people did in the past. So in some sense, there’s a lot of limitation I’d want to say to how we would apply this.
[00:35:08] Tony Payne: Especially in light of the fact that, in the New Testament, when it does talk about Christians fighting wars or fighting battles, or being engaged in warfare, it’s a spiritual warfare. It’s a warfare of the truth. And it’s very explicit: that there’ll be no deceitful methods—no cunning, underhanded methods in our gospel warfare. We fight not with the world’s weapons, but with spiritual weapons. We fight with the truth. 2 Corinthians 4 and all that sort of stuff. So the sense in which the spiritual battle of the people of God against the forces that oppose us, there is a transposition in the New Testament where that battle now takes place in a different mode, a different register. It takes place with different weapons and with a different—I’m sort of starting to metaphorically go for it here, so I won’t keep going. But with a different king at the front of our army, and so on and so forth.
[00:35:55] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:35:55] Tony Payne: So there are these differences. But what were you about to go on and say?
[00:35:58] Jack Day: I was about to say, I think that’s the headline, I’d want to say. Secondly, in the context of the larger sort of just warfare tradition—
[00:36:05] Tony Payne: Yeah.
[00:36:06] Jack Day: —lots of Christian thinkers have held the Old Testament texts about war to have this kind of ethical vision for human armies who are engaged in conflicts as we do. And it’s different there. So for a nation today to be engaged in war, I think is different from the church to be engaged in war.
[00:36:19] Tony Payne: Yep.
[00:36:19] Jack Day: So there’s this distinct difference there. But thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas have looked at some of these Old Testament texts and seen the kind of warfare that is permissible is, in some cases, good and right, when you are defending those who’ve been suffering injustice—when you’ve been defending yourself—those sorts of things. So to the extent that the Old Testament does have an implication for Christians today in nations fighting wars, thinking about the justice of those wars, I think perhaps there, there is scope for thinking about what I’ve been looking at—at deception in that context. So I think there would be a way to trace that logic through in the same sort of theological moves the just war theorists are making for those who are thinking about warfare in the modern period from a Christian point of view: I’d be wanting to say, yeah, I think that some of these thoughts about deception probably have good and right applications for military today.
[00:37:08] So I remember reading this journal article: someone asking, basically, can Christians be spies? Like, for someone who’s engaged in espionage, where lying in deception for the greater national good is just the bread and butter of the operation, is there scope for people who are people of the truth—who follow the one who called himself the way and the truth and the life? Is there scope for Christian involvement in that kind of thing? And I think perhaps the kinds of arguments I’d be making do provide that kind of scope—that justification that—not the church fighting wars, but for nations fighting wars, seeking to bring as much good as we can in a world of conflict and evil. I think there is scope for people to be involved in the kinds of deceptive activity that we see in some of those Old Testament texts as a good and just thing, as part of prosecuting the good.
Complexity
[00:37:51] Tony Payne: It seems so to me as well, Jack, in the sense that the Old Testament functions, it’s got a theological witness of its own: it points to Christ. It’s a story that looks forward in all the ways that we know. You teach biblical theology, and we all know biblical theology: it focuses in on Christ and leads to Christ.
[00:38:05] And yet, it’s a text, a sacred Scripture, that comes to us from God from the same word that is incarnated in Christ. In a sense, the Old Testament is full of Christ and full of the reality of Christ and of the reality of the world. It’s a text that teaches us how the world is and shapes our response to the world. And in that sense, without wanting to simplistically or illegitimately just try to recreate Old Testament Israel in modern nations in a theocratic kind of way—
[00:38:33] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:38:34] Tony Payne: —That ignores the big story and where it’s fulfilled in Christ. And yet at the same time, we read the Old Testament all the time for its exemplary value and for what it teaches us about the nature of God and of people and of the world. The nature of kingship. It teaches about the nature of war. And those sorts of intuitions and lessons in the narratives that you sort of are picking out by carefully reading the narratives tell us something about the world and the nature of the world that we do encounter in all sorts of ways today.
[00:38:59] And two things particularly strike me. One is the complexity of the world: that an attempt to come up with a single rule that binds every circumstance is an unwise way to approach things and doesn’t respect just the sheer complexity of the created order that we live in—in all its complexity, but in all its fallenness.
[00:39:15] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:39:16] Tony Payne: And so, to come up with “You must not deceive in war” or to come up with a formulation that neatly describes exactly what you must do in every situation, it’s kind of like the Pharisaical era, in a way—
[00:39:24] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:39:25] Tony Payne: —The idea that there’s going to be a set of rules that cover every circumstance, instead of realising that in our moral experience of the world, we’re constantly faced with configurations of circumstances that challenge us and ask us to think, “Well, what’s required?” This is a combination of all the things that I read about in the Bible, but in a particular combination in my circumstance, in this time, with these actors, in this particular context.
[00:39:48] And that’s the nature of moral thinking generally. We come to the newness of the complex situation we face and we draw on all that we’ve read and understood about the world and God and us. But we’re still required to make this judgement.
Surgery
[00:40:00] Tony Payne: And the example that springs to mind that for me, helps frame these kinds of things in my head is surgery.
[00:40:06] Jack Day: Oh right. How do you mean?
[00:40:07] Tony Payne: Surgery’s really interesting. So we would normally say chopping someone’s arm off would be wrong, right? What a terrible thing to do.
[00:40:12] Jack Day: Yeah.
[00:40:13] Tony Payne: Unless it’s gangrenous and you’re saving my life. And so, we’d see that the action of deception or, in this case, of surgery, at one level in many contexts, we would say is clearly evil, and yet, another context, because of the fallenness, difficulty and nature of the world, you’d say, in some senses, it’s necessary for the saving of life and for doing good to do something that, in itself, seems evil.
[00:40:37] But the way that a surgeon uses a knife, when a surgeon uses a knife, how a surgeon uses a knife—that’s a complex thing that surgeons have to learn how to do very carefully.
[00:40:47] It doesn’t mean just ’cause they’re a surgeon, they can now use a knife to do anything they want with a body. Yeah. Just ’cause they’re a surgeon and you’re in a hospital. There’s still a set of understandings about the good and the nature of the world that directs when and how they make that incision.
[00:41:01] They do that harmful thing, which is actually for the good. On that sort of analogy, in my head, I feel war is quite similar. It’s a doing of something harmful. A doing is something that we would say in many other contexts is evil, but it’s doing it for good. It’s doing it to serve a good that is necessary, even though.
[00:41:19] It’s painful, literally painful. In the case of a surgeon or painful in all sorts of other ways, I like the way you’ve been discussing it that the different kinds of way the narratives frame it give a different perspectives on different kinds of situations that help us understand that there are different kinds of situations in which different acts are required and are actually good acts in those circumstances, and naming them as good acts.
[00:41:41] So naming it as surgery or amputation rather than. Torture or violence. It helps us to name those different contexts, those different kinds of actions that are actually happening. What do you think? Does that make sense to you?
[00:41:53] Jack Day: Yeah. It’s interesting. I mean, as you just said there, thinking about the surgeon who goes off now, just chopping arms all over the place, that’s obviously not right.
[00:41:59] I think there’d be a way to think about some of the ideas I’ve been arguing for and say, well, okay, so deceiving my enemies is good and right. Well, I’ve got all kinds of enemies. Mm. The guy over the fence who just won’t get rid of his tree that’s raining the leaves on the pool or whatever, you know, surely that’s a
[00:42:14] Tony Payne: form of warfare and surely I’m now legitimised to lure him into a trap.
[00:42:19] Jack Day: Yeah. But I think you have to again see that in a New Testament ethical context where the way the New Testament reframes, the whole idea of enmity is yeah, radical that wier love our enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And as far as it depends on you be a piece with everyone, all those sorts of things.
[00:42:33] So I think that you have the unrestrained application of this everywhere. Doesn’t seem to me to be the overall picture of these sex are pushing us. The things you’re thinking about there about is this a thing that’s normally evil, but in this particular situation, it’s necessary. Part of what I’ve been wondering is.
[00:42:49] Another way to think about this kind of moral command about lying in deception is that it’s not that lying is always wrong, but sometimes it’s less wrong on others. You could pass
[00:42:58] Tony Payne: sometimes.
[00:42:59] Jack Day: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been wondering is the injunction against deception even in the Old Testament? I mean you as well, particularly directed to life within the community.
[00:43:09] Mm. So famously, 10 Commandments, you shall not bear false witness. To one another. Mm. Is what it says. Mm. And I think that to one another is quite significant. That you have here a rule for God’s people as they live together. Yeah. If we want to have a society built on love, we need trust. And the injunction to honesty, I think is part of facilitating that.
[00:43:28] But that command in itself, I would argue, isn’t necessarily saying anything about how you should treat your enemy or how they treat you. And so, especially given the role that I think God plays in deception, points in the Old Testament narrative, and interestingly in the new. Two Thessalonians two 11 is fascinating text that God talks about how he sends a diluting influence to those who have turned away from God and embraced Satan in his way.
[00:43:51] That kind of thing, even the Lord it seems to me at some level is engaged in the deception of his enemies, which cautions me from saying that. In of itself. It’s always bad, obviously. Mm. ’cause God is good.
[00:44:05] Tony Payne: That’s helpful. I think you’re exploring the implications of the complexity of moral reality, basically. I think part of our hubris as humans is we want to control things and we want to know what to do and we want to always be on the right and we want to construct for ourselves and morality. We can feel comfortable with and et cetera, et cetera, so that we end up trying to sort of narrow down and limit the scope of our moral vision of the world so that we can feel comfortable within it.
[00:44:30] Mm-hmm. But it doesn’t deal with the reality of the world, and it doesn’t deal with the complexity and with our finitude and our inability to comprehend the whole and just come up with a simple set of rules. And so. While the commands of God are pure and good and wonderful, like the Psalmist, we kind of chew on them and try to understand them and internalise them, and we do that so that we can come to all the varied situations of life that they will address in different ways and have the resources that God gives us to know how to act in those different circumstances.
Conclusion
[00:44:59] Tony Payne: And our conversation today and the fascinating stuff you’ve been looking at in those Old Testament texts about war is another part of that equipment for us to understand ourselves and our world understand the reality of war and of deception. And so, thanks, Jack—not only for spending all that time, squirrelled away in a garret, doing your PhD, but in—
[00:45:17] Jack Day: Lots of time.
[00:45:17] Tony Payne: Lots of time, yes. But in bringing its fruit to us today. It’s been fascinating and helpful. Thanks so much for joining us.
[00:45:23] Jack Day: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
[00:45:39] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre. And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax-deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:46:14] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions: please get in touch. You can email us at ccl AT moore edu au.
[00:46:34] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast, to James West for the music, and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:46:49] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
