The Bible and Moral Injury

1. Moral Injury: An Ancient, Unseen Wound of War

The recognition that the dangers and damages of war aren’t limited to observable physical injuries appears in diverse literary, artistic, religious, and philosophical contexts throughout various historical periods.

Beyond physical wounds. Moral injury is a nonphysical wound resulting from violating one's core moral beliefs, either by oneself or others, in high-stakes situations like war. Unlike Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is a fear-victim response to life-threat trauma, moral injury focuses on the consequences of perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that transgress deeply held moral convictions. It's a "soul wound" that wrecks a person's fundamental assumptions about "what's right" and how the world should work.

Causes and symptoms. Moral injury can stem from:

• Perpetration: Killing, harming, or acting without restraint.
• Failure: Self-blame for inaction or perceived lack of control.
• Disillusionment/Betrayal: Feeling let down by authority figures, or recognizing one's own capacity for evil.
  Symptoms include despair, self-harm, social detachment, loss of faith, inability to forgive, and a profound sense of shame and guilt. These experiences can lead to a persistent existential crisis, eroding one's sense of self and humanity.

Urgency of the issue. The concept of moral injury, though recently formalized, describes an ancient human experience. Its modern recognition is critical due to the escalating rates of veteran suicides, particularly after prolonged conflicts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many service members struggle with moral and ethical issues that traditional psychological diagnoses don't fully address, highlighting the urgent need for comprehensive understanding and healing strategies.

2. The Bible as a Two-Way Mirror for Moral Injury

My thesis is that the engagement between the Bible and moral injury generates a two-way conversation: on the one hand, moral injury can be an interpretive lens that brings new meanings out of biblical texts, especially those associated with war and violence; on the other hand, the critical study of biblical texts can make substantive contributions to the ongoing attempt to understand, identify, and heal moral injury.

A reciprocal dialogue. This book proposes a unique interdisciplinary approach where moral injury research and biblical studies mutually inform each other. Moral injury serves as a heuristic lens, allowing readers to uncover new meanings in biblical narratives, rituals, and characters, particularly those related to warfare and violence. Conversely, the critical study of biblical texts offers substantive contributions to the understanding, identification, and healing of moral injury.

Unlocking new insights. By applying the moral injury framework, we can:

• Identify biblical characters who display characteristics of moral violation or betrayal.
• Explore stories that illustrate the consequences of such experiences.
• Uncover war-related rituals, poems, or prayers that connect to moral injury and attempts to cope.
  This approach reveals the human dimensions of scripture, providing a window into the pain caused by loss, death, moral violation, and betrayal in ancient communities.

Addressing a critical gap. While moral injury studies have referenced ancient texts like Homer's epics, sustained attention to biblical texts has been limited. This book aims to fill that gap, offering biblical resources for understanding moral injury, especially for the many service members and veterans who identify with Christian or Jewish faith traditions. It seeks to move beyond superficial references to a deeper, critical engagement that benefits both fields.

3. King Saul: A Biblical Portrait of a Morally Wounded Warrior

Perhaps the Saul texts, like those describing Odysseus, point not to psychological illness but to the effects of moral trauma on character, social trust, and personal survival.

Saul's tragic descent. King Saul, Israel's first king, is often portrayed as a tragic figure, but a moral injury lens offers a fresh interpretation. His story (1 Samuel 9–31) can be read as the tale of a warrior morally wounded by a series of betrayals and ambiguous commands from divine and prophetic authorities. These experiences, rather than inherent wickedness, may explain his subsequent decline into paranoia, rage, and violence.

Experiences of betrayal and violation:

• Samuel's condemnation (1 Sam 12): Saul, appointed by Yhwh, hears his very kingship declared a rebellious act, violating Israel's covenantal identity.
• Ambiguous commands (1 Sam 13, 15): Saul is placed in no-win situations by Samuel, where his well-intentioned actions are condemned as disobedience, leading to Yhwh's rejection.
• Divine ambivalence: The text solidifies the impression that Yhwh has a deep ambivalence and even hostility toward Saul, afflicting him with "evil spirits."
  These events leave Saul with a wrecked sense of what is right, continually finding his moral world unreliable.

Consequences of moral injury. Saul's later actions—his escalating suspicion, fear, and hostility toward David, his manipulation of his daughters, his violent rage against his own son Jonathan, and the slaughter of innocent priests—can be seen as consequences of moral injury. His eventual despair and suicide reflect the ultimate breakdown of social trust, personal integrity, and a reliable moral order. Saul's narrative, therefore, serves as a powerful allegory for the devastating effects of moral trauma on character and personal survival.

4. Ancient Rituals: Pathways for Post-War Healing and Reintegration

The sought-after rituals and practices have most frequently centered on the goals of providing returning soldiers with a sense of purification or communalization.

Bridging combat and civilian life. Moral injury research consistently highlights the need for rituals and symbolic practices to facilitate a healthy transition for returning soldiers from combat to civilian life. These "meaning-oriented interventions" aim to help veterans regain purpose, re-engage with relationships, and process the grief, guilt, and disillusionment of war. Ancient cultures, including Israel, offer models for such postwar transitions.

Old Testament postwar rituals:

• Purification (Numbers 31): Warriors, captives, and objects underwent ceremonial cleansing after battle. This ritual, rooted in priestly laws of corpse contamination, symbolized a clear boundary and transition from the defiling context of combat, acknowledging the grievous nature of killing.
• Appropriation of Booty (Numbers 31, 1 Samuel 30): Spoils were redistributed among combatants and noncombatants, or dedicated to sanctuaries. This communal sharing reframed warfare as a shared societal endeavor, distributing moral responsibility and connecting local conflicts to larger divine actions.
• Construction of Memorials/Monuments (Numbers 31, Joshua 6): Portions of booty were dedicated to temples or monuments erected on battlefields. These acts commemorated victory, praised deities, and imbued the conflict with broader, shared significance, addressing doubts about the war's purpose.

Symbolic functions for moral repair. These ancient practices, while pragmatic, also served crucial symbolic functions. They marked transitions, acknowledged the defiling nature of war, and fostered a sense of shared responsibility, countering the individual isolation often experienced in moral injury. By providing concrete, bodily actions, these rituals offered a means to process and integrate the moral burdens of war, resisting the sanitization of conflict and affirming the enduring impact of violence.

5. Lament: The Language of Honesty, Forgiveness, and Community in Moral Repair

Corporate ritual practices are extremely important for individuals, such as soldiers, who otherwise must bear alone in the intricacies of their brains and psyches the costs of what the body politic as a whole has asked them to shoulder.

Honest expression of suffering. Moral injury work emphasizes the need for returning soldiers to speak honestly about their experiences, giving candid expression to their grief, pain, and disillusionment. Old Testament laments, both individual and communal, provide a powerful model for this truth-telling. They offer a structured, yet unbridled, vocabulary for expressing anger, protest, and despair directly to God, countering cultural tendencies to sanitize or ignore the negative realities of war.

Lament's role in healing:

• Truth-telling: Laments acknowledge moral dissonance and ambiguity, insisting that all experiences of disorder are proper subjects for discourse with God.
• Resilience building: The act of lament, by naming suffering and acknowledging agency, can foster resilience and a hopeful posture, even in the face of unresolved grief.
• "Witness poetry": Biblical laments function as witness poetry, giving voice to extreme suffering and helping sufferers process violence, trauma, and loss, while maintaining a sense of humanity.

Forgiveness and communalization. Laments, particularly the penitential psalms (e.g., Psalms 32, 38, 51), address the need for forgiveness by providing language for confession to a divine moral authority. This theological confession, akin to the "evocative imaginal confession" in clinical models, allows sufferers to acknowledge responsibility while reclaiming goodness. Communal laments further extend this, drawing larger communities into shared responsibility for war's moral burdens, validating soldiers' pain, and fostering a sense of belonging and co-ownership of the anguish.

6. When Scripture Itself Inflicts Moral Injury on Readers

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

A perennial dilemma. For many readers, especially Christians, the Bible's depictions of divine and human violence pose a profound theological and ethical problem. Passages describing God commanding genocide (Joshua 6), inflicting plagues (Exodus 13-14), or directly destroying humanity (Genesis 6-9) conflict sharply with a moral vision of God as loving, merciful, and life-giving, and humanity as created in God's image. This tension can be deeply troubling and disorienting.

Moral injury to the reader. These biblical texts can morally injure readers by:

• Violating core moral beliefs: They challenge deeply held convictions about God's character (love, justice) and humanity's role (love neighbor, non-violence), creating moral dissonance.
• Betrayal by divine authority: For some, God's actions in these texts feel like a betrayal of trust in God as a moral exemplar, leading to questions about God's trustworthiness and goodness.
• Weaponization of scripture: The historical misuse of these texts to justify real-world violence (e.g., colonization, ethnic cleansing) can feel like a betrayal of scripture's sacred, life-giving purpose.

Confronting contemporary brokenness. Beyond historical and theological issues, these texts also morally injure by starkly revealing the ongoing violence and domination in our own society. They prevent sanitization of war, forcing readers to confront the brokenness of humanity and the world that persists today, challenging complacency and desensitization to violence. The problem is not just ancient texts, but what they reflect about our present.

7. Reconciling God's Love with Biblical Violence: A Moral Catch

The feeling of being in a moral catch between two virtuous but incompatible convictions may contribute to the difficulties readers have with the Bible’s war and violence.

The core dilemma. Many Christian readers find themselves in a "moral catch" when confronting biblical violence. On one hand, they affirm that a holy God must judge sin and overcome evil, even through destructive acts. On the other hand, they believe God's essential nature is love, consistently merciful, redemptive, and life-giving, calling believers to love even enemies. These two virtuous convictions appear irreconcilable in certain biblical narratives.

Christian moral vision. The overarching moral vision derived from Christian scripture emphasizes:

• God's nature as love: Demonstrated in creation, redemption, and forgiveness (Exodus 34:6-7, John 3:16, 1 John 4:7-8).
• Humanity's role: To love God and neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:37-39), extending to non-violence and loving enemies (Matthew 5:39, 43-48).
  This vision, often summarized by Jesus's "love God and neighbor" commandment, clashes with the violent portrayals, creating profound cognitive and moral dissonance for readers.

Strategies for engagement. Various interpretive strategies attempt to navigate this moral catch:

• Contextualization: Viewing conquest commands as limited, time-bound events, not universal paradigms.
• Historicity critique: Questioning literal historical accuracy to focus on theological messages.
• Canonical approach: Emphasizing the diversity of God's portrayals, or a "canon within a canon" (e.g., Jesus's teachings) to relativize violent texts.
• Symbolic interpretation: Reading violence allegorically as a fight against sin.
• Covenantal framework: Understanding divine violence as a response to human sin within the covenant, not inherent to God's nature.
  These approaches seek to reconcile the tension, but the "moral catch" itself highlights the profound ethical struggle inherent in engaging these texts.

8. Biblical Studies' Unique Contributions to Moral Injury Work

Academic biblical studies, however, can contribute a particularly humanities-oriented dimension to this clinical and scientific reductionism—that is, the dimension of historians, philosophers, literary critics, artists, theologians, sociologists, and textualists.

Beyond clinical reductionism. While moral injury studies have been dominated by mental health and psychology, biblical studies offers a crucial humanities perspective. It moves beyond a purely clinical or scientific reductionism to explore the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological dimensions of moral suffering. This broader lens enriches the understanding of moral injury as a complex human experience.

Providing moral frameworks and thicker descriptions:

• Theological anthropology: Biblical texts offer a holistic understanding of human persons as moral beings created in God's image, oriented towards love for God and neighbor. This framework helps define the "core moral identity" that is violated in moral injury.
• Historical and cultural breadth: Ancient biblical writings reflect human lives and experiences across diverse times and settings, demonstrating the historical and cultural universality of moral struggles in war. This can help veterans feel less alone in their experiences.
• Contexts for moral inquiry: The Bible provides contexts of rituals, penance, confession, and narratives about complex moral agency, offering a "thicker description" of moral injury that clinical psychology alone cannot.

Fostering spiritual self-understanding. For service members with Christian backgrounds, biblical texts can be a vital resource for spiritual and religious self-understanding. They help explore how faith experiences moral violation, the personal and communal effects, the morality of war, and the place of prayer, honesty, grief, and confession in healing. This engagement can contribute to a new, wholesome religious anthropology that embraces redemption and purpose after moral injury.

9. Beyond Combat: Expanding Moral Injury to Broader Contexts

Taking a cue from the discourses that say moral injury can result from a wide variety of interpersonal, cultural, and institutional contexts (e.g., social acts of dehumanization and institutions that forcibly strip away personhood and subjectivity), contemporary publications have begun to apply the notion of moral injury to nonmilitary settings.

Broadening the scope of injury. The concept of moral injury is increasingly being applied beyond military combat to a wider array of contexts. This expansion recognizes that moral injury can result from various forms of interpersonal, cultural, and structural violence that undermine confidence in moral goodness, dehumanize individuals, or suppress authentic personhood. This broader understanding opens new avenues for biblical interpretation.

Non-military applications of moral injury:

• Dehumanizing violence: Experiences like rape, torture, or hate crimes can inflict moral injury by degrading self-respect and violating rights.
• Structural violence: Social and cultural institutions (e.g., mass incarceration, gender norms) can cause moral injury by harming a person's moral subjectivity and limiting their capacity for authentic relationships.
• Professional contexts: Child protective services, medical students, and journalists covering crises can experience moral injury due to their exposure to profound suffering and ethical dilemmas.

New Testament and non-war biblical texts. This expanded understanding allows biblical scholars to explore a broader range of texts for moral injury themes. For example:

• Old Testament: Famine, child loss due to political maneuvering (2 Kings 6), dehumanization of women (Judges 19-21), or social diminishment by hostile forces (2 Samuel 10).
• New Testament: The betrayals of Peter and Judas (Matthew, John) can be re-examined through the lens of moral injury and repair, even outside a combat setting.
  This broadening allows for a more comprehensive engagement with scripture's portrayal of human suffering and moral struggle.

10. The Bible's Prophetic Voice: Critiquing War Culture and Fostering Moral Reflection

The forthright and sometimes graphic portrayals of war and violence in the Bible may accomplish this same end. We may think of the stark realities and grim descriptions in these biblical texts as functioning analogously to the unfiltered public airing of images of dead soldiers and their coffins arriving home—a practice that was banned by the Bush administration during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Challenging cultural narratives. The Bible, when read through the lens of moral injury, can serve a prophetic function, offering a powerful critique of contemporary war culture. Its uncensored depictions of divine and human violence prevent readers from sanitizing or distancing themselves from the grim realities of conflict, contrasting sharply with modern societal tendencies to mask war's true costs. This forces a confrontation with the "collective amnesia about war."

Exposing moral costs:

• Countering sanitization: The Bible's stark realities, like unfiltered images of war, expose the savage costs of conflict, making it harder for societies to ignore the suffering and moral burdens.
• Critiquing "just war" theory: The Bible's portrayals of moral harm in combat challenge the notion that "just war" can be fought without injurious effects on soldiers' morals and ethics.
• Promoting shared responsibility: By depicting the moral wreckage of war, biblical texts urge a sense of shared moral responsibility among soldiers, leaders, and civilians, fostering frank conversations about society's ethical identity.

A call to honest reflection. The Bible's war and violence texts, though troubling, should not be ignored. They function as a "controlled substance"—potentially harmful if mishandled, yet therapeutic if administered carefully. Their presence encourages ongoing critical sensitivity and scrutiny, prompting readers to engage in moral reasoning and lament. This engagement can lead to a more fully informed understanding of war's moral burdens, ultimately fostering a commitment to peace and moral repair.

Last updated: September 15, 2025