Old Testament Violence and the Character of God #16

Passages commanding Israel to devote entire cities to destruction, including women and children (Deuteronomy 20:16-18, 1 Samuel 15:3, and the account of Jericho’s fall in Joshua 6:21), are among the most frequently cited reasons people give for rejecting the Bible’s portrait of God as good. This is not a fringe objection; it is a serious moral challenge that deserves a serious response rather than a dismissive one.

The Argument

Several complementary responses are offered, none claiming to fully dissolve the difficulty. First, historical-critical scholars and some evangelical scholars argue the “total destruction” language (herem) in the ancient Near East was conventional hyperbole for military victory rather than literal genocide — similar language appears in other ancient conquest accounts describing battles known from other evidence to have been far less total, and Judges shows many of the supposedly annihilated Canaanite peoples still present afterward. Second, these commands are presented in Scripture as a limited, specific, time-bound judgment on particular Canaanite societies for entrenched practices including child sacrifice, not as a general Old Testament policy toward outsiders or a permanent model for warfare — Scripture elsewhere insists God “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked” but desires repentance (Ezekiel 33:11). Third, some Christians reason from Christ backward: since Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s character (as the argument for the Trinity and deity of Christ would put it), these episodes should be read in light of, and constrained by, his example — the redemptive arc, not the conquest narrative, is the interpretive key.

Common Objections

None of these responses fully removes the moral weight of the text, and honest apologists acknowledge that. Critics rightly note that “ancient hyperbole” doesn’t erase the fact that the commands were given at all, or explain why a good God would issue destructive commands even in a limited, historically bounded case. This remains one of the most difficult and actively debated topics in Christian scholarship, with serious, faithful interpreters disagreeing over how far each explanation goes in resolving the tension.