The God of the Old Testament Is Brutal — And You Can't Just Ignore That
Genocide, slavery, stoning — the Old Testament contains passages that are deeply troubling. Here's how to wrestle with them honestly.
Let’s not sugarcoat this.
They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old, and ox, sheep, and donkey, with the edge of the sword.
That’s the fall of Jericho. Men, women, young, old, livestock — everything destroyed. By God’s command.
But of the cities of these peoples that Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes; but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, as Yahweh your God has commanded you;
That’s God ordering the complete extermination of entire people groups. Not as a last resort. As a first instruction.
And it gets worse. The Old Testament includes laws permitting slavery. It prescribes stoning for offenses like gathering wood on the Sabbath. It records a flood narrative in which God drowns virtually all of humanity. It describes God killing the firstborn children of Egypt — children who had no say in Pharaoh’s decisions.
Richard Dawkins put it bluntly: “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.”
That’s harsh. But if you’ve read the passages he’s referencing — honestly, without the filter of Sunday School flannel boards — you understand where he’s coming from. These texts are in the Bible. They’re not footnotes. They’re central narratives. And they describe a deity who, at first glance, looks nothing like the Jesus who said “love your enemies.”
If you’ve ever struggled with these passages, you’re not weak in faith. You’re paying attention.
The Easy Outs (That Don’t Work)
Before we get to responses that carry actual weight, let me dismiss some that don’t.
“It’s just metaphor.” Some of these passages might use hyperbolic war language (more on that later), but you can’t wave away entire books of the Bible as metaphor just because they make you uncomfortable. If it’s all metaphor, then the resurrection might be metaphor too, and the whole thing collapses.
“God can do whatever He wants.” Technically true, if God exists. But this isn’t actually an answer — it’s a conversation stopper. If “God can do anything” means God can command genocide and it’s fine because He’s God, then morality is just power, and we’ve defined God into a being who’s above criticism by definition. That’s not theology. That’s authoritarianism.
“Just focus on the New Testament.” This one is tempting but ultimately incoherent. Christians claim the entire Bible is God’s revelation. You don’t get to pick the half you like. The New Testament itself constantly references the Old. Jesus quotes it. Paul builds on it. It’s one story.
So what do we do with these passages?
Ancient Near Eastern Context — The Radical Reframe
Here’s where things get genuinely interesting, and where most people haven’t been given the full picture.
When modern readers encounter Old Testament violence and slavery, we compare it to our standards — 21st-century Western ethics shaped by two thousand years of Christian influence (ironically). But the Old Testament wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written in the ancient Near East, a world with its own moral norms, and those norms were brutal.
Let me show you what I mean.
Slavery: The ancient world ran on slavery. Every civilization practiced it. It was as assumed as gravity. The question wasn’t whether slavery would exist — it was how slaves would be treated. And here’s what’s remarkable: Israel’s slavery laws were radically more humane than anything else in the region. Hebrew slaves were freed after seven years (Deuteronomy 15:12). Escaped slaves were not to be returned (Deuteronomy 23:15-16 — unique in the ancient world). Slaves had Sabbath rest. Masters who killed slaves were punished. Compare this to the Code of Hammurabi, where escaped slaves were executed and harboring them was a capital offense.
Was it still slavery? Yes. Is slavery wrong? Absolutely. But the trajectory matters. God took a world where slavery was universal and unquestioned and began pushing it in the direction of liberation. Paul would later write “there is neither slave nor free” (Galatians 3:28) — a statement so radical it would take centuries to fully work out.
Warfare: In the ancient Near East, warfare was apocalyptic. The Assyrians skinned captives alive, impaled them on stakes, and decorated their walls with pyramids of severed heads — and bragged about it in their official records. The Moabites sacrificed children to Chemosh. Every surrounding nation practiced warfare with a cruelty that makes the Old Testament look restrained by comparison.
Does that excuse the Canaanite conquest? Not entirely. But it changes the frame. We’re not comparing Israel to modern Geneva Conventions. We’re comparing them to their actual neighbors, and in that comparison, Israel was remarkably constrained.
Women’s rights: The Old Testament’s treatment of women is often criticized — and some of it deserves criticism. But compared to the surrounding cultures, where women were property with zero legal standing, Israel’s laws were progressive. Women could own property (Numbers 27). Rape was punished (Deuteronomy 22:25-27). Divorce required a legal document, providing women with some protection (Deuteronomy 24:1).
None of this is modern feminism. But it’s a clear step forward from the world Israel inhabited.
Trajectory Hermeneutics — The Big Idea
This is the concept that ties it together, and I think it’s one of the most important ideas in biblical interpretation.
Trajectory hermeneutics suggests that God meets people where they are and moves them forward. Not to the finish line in one leap, but progressively, over centuries, toward a fuller understanding of justice, mercy, and love.
Think of it like a parent teaching a toddler. You don’t hand a two-year-old a doctoral dissertation on ethics. You work with what they can understand. “Don’t hit your sister.” Later: “Be kind to everyone.” Later still: “Love your enemies.”
God took a Bronze Age tribal culture immersed in a violent world and began, gradually, to reshape their understanding of justice, dignity, and compassion. The slavery laws aren’t God’s ideal — they’re God’s accommodation to a world where slavery was universal, with the trajectory pointing toward abolition. The warfare commands aren’t God’s ultimate will — they’re God working within the brutal conventions of ancient warfare, with the trajectory pointing toward “love your enemies.”
The trajectory matters more than any single snapshot.
Hyperbolic War Language
Here’s something most people don’t know: the language of the Canaanite conquest — “utterly destroy,” “leave nothing alive” — was standard ancient Near Eastern war rhetoric. We’ve found it in Moabite, Assyrian, and Egyptian records. It was how you described victory. It was hyperbole, the way a football coach says “we destroyed them” when the score was 28-14.
How do we know the biblical accounts use hyperbole? Because the text contradicts itself. Joshua says the Canaanites were “completely destroyed” (Joshua 10:40). Then Judges opens with… the Canaanites still living in the land (Judges 1:1-36). The same people who were “utterly destroyed” are still there, intermarrying with Israelites, causing problems.
This doesn’t mean the conquest didn’t involve real violence. It did. But the “total annihilation” language is likely rhetorical, consistent with how all ancient Near Eastern cultures described military campaigns.
Jesus as the Full Revelation
For Christians, the ultimate lens for understanding God is not Joshua. It’s Jesus.
God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. His Son is the radiance of his glory, the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, who, when he had by himself purified us of our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high,
The writer of Hebrews makes an extraordinary claim: God spoke in various ways throughout history, but the final, definitive revelation of God’s character is Jesus. Not Moses. Not Joshua. Not Elijah. Jesus.
And what did Jesus look like?
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you,…”
Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Turn the other cheek. Forgive seventy times seven. Die for the people who are killing you.
If Jesus is the clearest picture of God’s character — and Christianity stakes everything on this claim — then the violent passages of the Old Testament must be read through that lens, not the other way around. We don’t start with Joshua and work our way to Jesus. We start with Jesus and work our way back, asking: what was God doing in these earlier, messier chapters of the story?
The answer, I think, is: working with broken people in a broken world, moving them step by step toward a kingdom where swords become plowshares and enemies become neighbors.
What Remains Troubling
I want to be honest here: even with all of this context, some passages remain deeply troubling.
The command to kill the Amalekite infants (1 Samuel 15:3) is not easily resolved by trajectory hermeneutics or ancient Near Eastern context. The story of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19) is one of the most horrific passages in any religious text. The imprecatory psalms — where David asks God to dash his enemies’ babies against rocks (Psalm 137:9) — are jarring to modern ears and should be jarring.
I don’t think intellectual honesty permits us to wave these away. They’re in the Bible. They’re troubling. And I think it’s okay — necessary, even — to sit with that discomfort rather than paper over it with easy answers.
The Bible is not a sanitized book. It records humanity’s ugliness alongside God’s glory, often in the same chapter. It doesn’t flinch from the mess. Maybe we shouldn’t either.
Where This Leaves Us
The God of the Old Testament is not the moral monster Dawkins describes — but He’s not the tame, comfortable deity of greeting cards either. He’s a God working in real history, with real people, in a world of genuine brutality, moving the arc of the story toward something beautiful — even when the individual chapters are painful to read.
The trajectory matters. The direction matters. And the destination — a man on a cross, forgiving his murderers with his dying breath — reveals a character that transforms how we understand everything that came before.
If you’re troubled by the Old Testament, good. You should be. The question isn’t whether these passages are disturbing. They are. The question is whether you can hold that discomfort alongside the fuller picture — the God who enters the mess, works within it, and ultimately transforms it from inside.
I think you can. But I won’t pretend it’s easy. And I won’t pretend I have all the answers.
Some of these passages will remain uncomfortable. That might be the point. A God who could be fully comprehended and fully comfortable wouldn’t be God — He’d be a mascot.
The God of the Bible is many things. Comfortable isn’t one of them.