Old Testament Violence

Readers encountering Numbers 31, Joshua 6-11, or 1 Samuel 15 confront commands attributed to God to kill entire populations, including in some texts explicit mention of children. This is not a marginal difficulty; it sits at the center of some of the Bible's most quoted historical narratives and has driven serious thinkers, from Marcion in the second century to contemporary critics like Richard Dawkins, to reject the Old Testament's God as morally monstrous.

It is important to state the objection in its strongest form rather than deflect it quickly. The claim is not merely that ancient warfare was brutal (which is true of essentially all ancient warfare) but that a supposedly perfectly good and omnipotent being explicitly commanded specific instances of what looks like ethnic extermination. Any adequate Christian response has to engage this claim directly rather than change the subject to secular atrocities.

One major line of response, developed by scholars like Kenneth Kitchen, Lawson Younger, and Paul Copan, points out that ancient Near Eastern royal annals routinely used hyperbolic 'total destruction' formulas for military campaigns that historians know, from other evidence, were partial. The Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah boasted that Israel's 'seed is not,' yet Israel obviously continued. Reading Joshua's 'left no survivor' language against this convention, and against Judges' own admission that many Canaanites remained, suggests the text is using idiomatic victory rhetoric, not filing a literal casualty report.

This does not, by itself, remove all violence from the narrative; battles were still fought and people still died. But it does mean the most extreme reading, that Israel enacted a literal, total genocide of every Canaanite man, woman, and child nationwide, is not what the text is most plausibly claiming, even on a traditional view of its historicity.

The genre argument is least persuasive against texts like 1 Samuel 15:3, where Saul is commanded to kill 'both man and woman, infant and nursing child.' Here the specific mention of infants resists an easy hyperbole reading, and this is honestly the hardest material for any Christian account to handle. Scholars disagree sharply here: some, like Copan, still apply genre and covenant-judgment categories; others, like Eric Seibert and Peter Enns, argue that at some point maintaining a fully historical, straightforwardly divinely-commanded reading of such texts is morally and theologically untenable.

Enns and Gregory Boyd instead propose that such texts preserve Israel's own, culturally limited, and in this case mistaken belief about what God demanded, a belief that Scripture records accurately as part of Israel's real spiritual journey without endorsing it as God's actual will. This is a minority but serious and increasingly influential position within evangelical and broader Christian scholarship, not a liberal dismissal of the text.

A second major strategy reads the canon as a developing story rather than a flat, uniform moral rulebook. Jesus himself models this when he says Moses permitted divorce 'because of your hardness of heart' but 'from the beginning it was not so' (Matthew 19:8), explicitly naming an accommodation within the Torah itself. If this pattern holds elsewhere, some Old Testament material may represent God meeting a violent culture where it was, rather than expressing his final ethical will.

The prophets already push in this direction internally: Isaiah and Micah anticipate a day when swords become plowshares, and later wisdom and prophetic literature increasingly critiques violence and militarism. N. T. Wright and others argue the whole Old Testament should be read as an unfinished story whose climax and reinterpretive key is Jesus, particularly his refusal of violence at his arrest and his command to love enemies.

A third, complementary strand, associated with Christopher Wright and others, stresses that the conquest is framed within the text itself as judicial judgment for specific and severe moral corruption, notably including child sacrifice, rather than as a general endorsement of violent conquest of foreign peoples. Leviticus 18 explicitly warns Israel that it will suffer the identical judgment if it commits the same acts, and the later exile fulfills exactly that warning.

This reframes conquest as closer to a (still troubling) act of judicial sentence within a unique redemptive-historical moment than to ordinary warfare or ethnic animus, and it explains why the New Testament nowhere authorizes anything similar for the church, which is told instead to bless enemies and overcome evil with good.

Even combining these strategies, critics reasonably object that a good God could have simply commanded relocation, conversion, or containment rather than any killing at all, and that appeal to genre or judgment does not remove the moral weight of the specific, named killings that do appear to be narrated in earnest. These are not weak objections, and honest apologetics should present them as live difficulties rather than fully solved problems.

It is also fair to note that different resolutions carry different costs for the doctrine of Scripture: hyperbole and judgment readings preserve a strong view of scriptural inerrancy but require more historical-critical argument; accommodation readings (Boyd, Enns) ease the moral difficulty but require accepting that some Scripture contains theologically mistaken material about God's will, which many Christians consider too high a price.

This is a topic where thoughtful, well-credentialed evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox scholars genuinely disagree, and readers should be suspicious of any single tidy answer presented as settled. Works like 'Show Them No Mercy' (edited by Stanley Gundry) deliberately present four competing evangelical views side by side precisely because no consensus exists.

What unites the more careful treatments is a refusal either to explain the difficulty away entirely or to treat it as a simple disproof of Christianity; instead they locate it within the larger question of how a good God could work redemptively within, and gradually transform, a violent ancient world, culminating in a Messiah who is executed rather than executing.

None of these approaches turns the conquest narratives into comfortable reading, nor should they. What they do is show that Christian belief in a good God is not simply refuted by the presence of these texts, since multiple internally consistent, textually and historically grounded frameworks exist for understanding them, even though those frameworks disagree with one another on important details.

A reader honestly wrestling with this material should expect ongoing tension rather than a final resolution, and should recognize that this tension has been felt, and argued about, by careful believing scholars for centuries, not only by modern critics.