What about the violence in the Old Testament?
It's there. It's hard. It also isn't what skeptics often claim, and it isn't a model for anyone today.
Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?
Genesis 18:25 · Berean Standard Bible
From a pastor
Yes, the Old Testament has hard passages — judgment on the Canaanites, the conquest of Jericho, the imprecatory Psalms. Pretending they're not there isn't honest. But notice what kind of book the Bible is: it tells you the truth about how broken the world was and is, including the parts we'd rather skip.
Those wars are not a template for today. The New Testament is unambiguous: Christians fight with prayer and love, not swords. Whenever a religion (including ours) has tried to use the conquest narratives to justify violence in the present, it has done so in direct disobedience to Jesus.
Scholar's note
Old Testament scholars (Christopher J.H. Wright, Paul Copan, John Walton) argue three things together: (1) The conquest accounts use ancient Near-Eastern war rhetoric that exaggerates totality for effect — compare Joshua's 'utter destruction' language with Judges' record that the same peoples are still there. (2) The judgment is on a specific people at a specific moment in history for specific, named injustices (child sacrifice, etc.), not a general license. (3) The fulfilment of these texts is in Christ, not in any modern state.
Most importantly, the Old Testament's God is the same God who came in Jesus to die for his enemies. Marcion (2nd c.) tried to split them and was rejected as a heretic by the early church. The cross is where God's holiness and his love meet — and the Old Testament without it makes no sense.
Sources
- Christopher J.H. Wright, The God I Don't Understand (2008)
- Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (2011)
- John H. Walton & J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (2017)
Sit with this
Have you read the hard passages in context, or only the way they're quoted on social media?
Talk this through