Texts of terror are the passages where Scripture tells stories of rape, abduction and violence without softening them, most often violence against women. Examples include the concubine of Judges 19, Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 and Dinah in Genesis 34. They are in the Bible because the Bible is honest about what people do once they push God aside. Many churches avoid them out of fear and unpreparedness. Old Testament professor Quonekuia Day argues that the avoidance is itself a sermon, and a false one, because it tells survivors their wound is beyond God’s reach.
If these stories touch your own life, you can talk with someone today. The National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN) is free and confidential at 1-800-656-4673. If someone in your home or a partner is harming you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
A category with blurry edges
The phrase comes from the scholar Phyllis Trible, whose book Texts of Terror Day names as one of her two go-to resources. Day teaches Hebrew and Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She is candid that the language is not standard equipment in her own wing of the church: “you won’t even hardly hear this in a conservative seminary.” In her description, these are texts that deal with violence, rape and trauma against women in ways that make them feel subhuman and strip away their lives and rights.
Even feminist scholars disagree about which passages belong on the list, and Day says so. Some question whether David and Bathsheba qualifies. Day would add a scene involving a man, though she expects little agreement. The label is a tool scholars use, not a biblical category, and nothing in the argument below depends on settling the exact list.
What does a silent pulpit actually say?
The common assumption is that skipping a passage is neutral. A pastor simply preaches something else, and nothing is lost. Day rejects that assumption. She starts from what the church already claims about its own Bible: Scripture exists to instruct God’s people and to tell them who God is. “When we skip whole passages, whole books of the Bible, we have a problem.”
The church’s claim about the Bible goes well past preference. Paul writes that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” (Romans 15:4). He also says that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). A church that says this and then never opens Judges 19 is teaching something about the scope of God’s concern. It does not have to say it out loud.
Day spells that lesson out. When pastors decline to teach these texts and do not equip people to deal with trauma, she says, “we erroneously communicate that that issue is too big for God.” She voices the pastor’s unspoken reasoning: “Because see, I can’t teach it. I can’t preach it. I can’t handle it. It is just too big.” And she names where that leaves the survivor: “So you are off on your own.” In her telling, that person goes home and cries silently.
Day frames the scale with figures she attributes, tentatively, to a national rape and incest network: someone in the United States raped every 68 seconds, and one in four Americans raped or knowing someone who has been. Those numbers are hers and are worth checking. Her point survives any correction to them. In a congregation of real size, survivors are listening, and a pulpit that addresses finances, politics and justice but never sexual violence has told them which troubles God speaks to.
Why the hesitation shows up only here
Day makes a sharp observation about pastoral self-doubt. Pastors rarely stop to ask whether they are qualified to talk about social justice, politics or the world’s finances. They simply talk. The question am I capable of this? arises almost only with these texts, and then the answer comes back no, because the subject is a landmine. If the hesitation were humility about expertise, it would appear everywhere. Because it appears in one place, it looks more like discomfort that has been called humility.
She traces that discomfort to several roots. One is a broader inability to talk about sex at all. Congregations struggle with the Song of Solomon, where a woman speaks openly of her desire for the man she loves. “They can’t handle the graphic nature of the language, yet we go home and watch graphic shows.” A church that cannot speak about healthy sexuality from Scripture will have no words ready when sexuality is violated.
The second root is historical, and Day speaks about it from inside the African American church. She says that “we know how our ancestors were traumatized by rape,” subjugated and oppressed, and she points to what that did to the family unit. Then she adds: “Our history tells us to shy away from these topics because they’ve already impacted us in such a negative way.” She offers this as an explanation, not an excuse. She is not surprised the church has historically kept quiet, and in the same breath she says it is time to change. Inherited trauma can explain a silence without making the silence wise.
Her account should not be stretched into a claim that all Black churches are silent, and Day does not make it. Her own experience includes a counterexample. Her pastor at Deliverance Temple Worship Center in Boston asked her to lead a special Bible study on these very texts. Some congregations are already doing this work. Day’s critique concerns a widespread pattern, and it speaks most directly to the churches that still follow it.
She also notes who pays for the pattern. Churches, she says, would rather preach about getting your money and your car, while “we don’t wanna teach people how to walk through being assaulted by their father who’s a deacon in the church.” The sentence puts the abuse inside the institution. When harm comes from respected insiders, silence about these texts does more than leave survivors without words. It leaves the institution’s image unquestioned.
Protecting the heroes
The same protective instinct shows up in how the church handles its biblical heroes, and Day names it as a main reason preachers steer away. The men who throw the concubine out to be raped all night in Judges 19 belong to the covenant people. Judah’s daughter-in-law Tamar has to deceive him to obtain the child he owed her. And David’s story with Bathsheba is routinely told as a romance.
Day reads 2 Samuel 11 as an assault. She notes that Bathsheba never says she loves David, and that when Nathan confronts him, David himself pronounces the offender worthy of death, which tells the reader how grievous the act was. Interpreters differ over how to describe what happened, and faithful Christians weigh the evidence differently. Day’s sharper point concerns the telling: the story “is always told from David’s point of view, never from Bathsheba’s point of view.” A church that cleans up its heroes teaches that reputation matters more than truth. Day draws the opposite lesson. If good people who loved the Lord did horrific things and God still lifted them up and used them, then redemption is real, and a congregation can face its own leaders’ failures without losing its faith.
Why the stories are there at all
When students ask Day why anyone should read Judges 19, her first answer is simple: because it is in the text. “So obviously the Lord wants us to see how evil people get when they don’t have God, or when they just dismiss God altogether.” She has her students read the chapter alongside an essay arguing that it depicts sex trafficking. They are always surprised the passage is in the Bible, and she counts that surprise as a poor reflection on church leaders.
A story that describes something is not commanding it. The book of Judges is arranged as a descent, moving in Day’s words from one level of evil to the next until the reader closes it thinking these people need God. The book names the condition plainly: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Chapter 19 is the bottom of that descent, not a model for anyone.
The narrative even records how its own characters reacted. After the concubine’s death, the Israelites who see what was done say, “consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds” (Judges 19:30). That line describes them and commands no one today. Still, the people inside the story could not stay quiet about it, while many pulpits now do. Day also hears the women’s silence in the chapter as deliberate, a literary device in which “the women not speaking in the text is for us to hear them speaking.”
Isn’t it kinder to leave these texts alone?
The strongest objection is pastoral. Naming rape from the pulpit could reopen wounds, frighten children and overwhelm people who never asked to hear it. Day takes this seriously. She admits the task is overwhelming the first time, and that a preacher will feel nervous imagining the children in the room. She grants that not everyone is ready, and that some people want to forget and never remember.
Her answer is that the objection proves the need for care, not the case for silence. “We do more damage by not even trying,” she says. The people the pastor fears upsetting are already carrying the question. Day voices it from a survivor’s side: Where was God? I was a little girl. I was a little boy. I couldn’t fight back. Preachers often avoid the subject because they dread that question. But “because we are afraid to talk about where was God, we don’t talk about it at all, but they’re thinking about it.”
When the question comes, Day separates three ideas that hurting people often merge: permission, approval and absence. “That because things are allowed does not mean that God approves and that God is absent. It just means that the world is evil.” She adds that “God gets a lot of blame for the evil of humanity.” Her distinction does not answer every question about suffering, and no faithful reading should promise that it will. What it does is let a survivor hold God and the harm apart, instead of treating God as the harm’s author or its bystander.
Answering the silence with preparation
Day’s practical counsel is modest, but each piece of it contradicts something the silence has been saying. The silence says the church cannot handle this, so she tells pastors to line up help first: a trained person in the congregation, or a rape crisis program that already knows referrals may come. A pastor who has done that can tell the room that help is waiting and that no one will be left alone after one Sunday sermon.
The silence also treats survivors as people things happen to. Day’s remedy is to give them choices. She recommends announcing a Bible study on these texts weeks in advance, so people can prepare emotionally and decide whether to attend, and warning them that memories, discouragement or depression may surface, along with whom to call if they do.
Against the habit of telling every story from the powerful man’s side, she asks preachers to read from the vantage point of everyone in the passage. She also urges them to consult commentaries outside their comfort zone; Day calls herself orthodox and grants that other scholars notice what her tradition has missed. None of this requires a sermon series. A preacher can name the wrong as a subpoint in a larger message, and Day insists that alone matters: “There’s nothing like someone saying that what happened to you is wrong, it should not have been, it was evil.” Her warning about the alternative is that the church ends up “leaving it up to culture to do what we can do as Christians.”
The silence inside the silence
When churches do break the silence, Day notices they usually speak only about women. The man she would add to the list is Lot. Genesis 19 says twice that “he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose” (Genesis 19:33), and Day points out that the Hebrew verb for giving him wine is causative: his daughters make him drink. Sermons tend to treat the episode as the origin of Moab and Ammon and move on. Day reads it as an assault on a man who did not know what was happening, and she expects scholars to argue with her.
Whatever one concludes about Lot, the pastoral observation behind her reading stands on its own. She speaks of boys molested by uncles who still cannot talk about it, and she rejects the idea that a body’s involuntary response means a victim wanted what was done to him. If people get to know these men, she says, they will hear the stories. Most churches have not yet made room to hear them. “We don’t talk about men who are raped. We don’t talk about boys who are raped.”
