Violence in the Old Testament

Many readers come to the battle stories of the Old Testament and feel their stomach turn, and some begin to wonder whether they can trust the God of the Bible at all. That distress shows that you take both Scripture and human life seriously, and the church has long felt it too. Christians have not explained these texts away or thrown them out. The church reads them as part of Scripture and reads all of Scripture in the light of Jesus Christ, who is “the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3) and who taught his followers to love their enemies.

What kinds of violence are in the Old Testament?

The Old Testament contains three kinds of violence, and it helps to tell them apart.

Much of the violence is told as sin. The first murder comes in the fourth chapter of the Bible, and God says to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). When King David arranges the death of Uriah to cover his adultery, the prophet Nathan confronts him (2 Samuel 12:1–14). The last chapters of Judges tell of rape and civil war to show a nation coming apart.

Other violence belongs to Israel’s laws, which prescribed the death penalty for many crimes, as most ancient law codes did. The hardest texts of all are the commands to wipe out the peoples of Canaan.

What does “utterly destroy” mean in the Bible?

The command appears in Deuteronomy. When the LORD gives the peoples of Canaan over to Israel, the text says, “then you shall utterly destroy them,” and it forbids Israel to make any covenant with them or show them mercy (Deuteronomy 7:2).

The Hebrew word behind “utterly destroy” is herem, which means something “devoted” to God and taken out of human use, often by destruction. At Jericho, the book of Joshua says, the Israelites “utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, both young and old” (Joshua 6:21). In 1 Samuel 15:3 Samuel tells Saul to kill the Amalekites, “infant and nursing baby.”

Israel’s neighbors spoke the same way about their own gods. The Mesha Stele, a Moabite inscription from about 840 BCE now in the Louvre, records King Mesha’s boast that he took the Israelite town of Nebo, killed seven thousand people, and “devoted them to Ashtar-Chemosh,” his god. The Bible’s writers used the war language of their world.

Did Israel really destroy the Canaanites?

The Bible itself tells the story in more than one way. The book of Joshua summarizes the conquest in sweeping terms: Joshua “left no one remaining, but he utterly destroyed all that breathed” (Joshua 10:40). The next book tells a different story:

Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shean and its villages, or Taanach and its villages … but the Canaanites continued to live in that land. When Israel grew strong, they put the Canaanites to forced labor but did not in fact drive them out.

Judges 1:27–28, NRSVUE

Judges also says that the Jebusites went on living in Jerusalem “to this day” (Judges 1:21). Many scholars conclude that the sweeping claims in Joshua are the kind of exaggeration found in ancient victory reports, like Mesha’s.

Archaeology points the same way. The British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated Jericho from 1952 to 1958, concluded that the walled city there fell long before the time of Joshua. Some archaeologists dispute her dating. Many scholars also hold that Deuteronomy took its present form in the seventh century BCE, centuries after the Canaanite nations had disappeared, so its commands about them served as a demand for undivided loyalty to God more than as orders anyone could carry out. Other Christians read the conquest as history and trust that God’s purposes in it were just, and they hold that view out of reverence for Scripture. On how to read biblical history, see Should we read the Bible as literal fact?

Does the Bible argue with its own violence?

It does. In 2 Kings, God praises King Jehu for wiping out the family of King Ahab (2 Kings 10:30). About a century later the prophet Hosea named his son after the place of that massacre, and he heard God say, “I will avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu” (Hosea 1:4). Scripture records more than one judgment on the same bloodshed.

The book of Jonah ends with God defending mercy toward Nineveh, the great city of Assyria, the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel: “Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city” (Jonah 4:11). Isaiah looks for the day when nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4). God’s own self-description to Moses is “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). Within the Old Testament itself, the voice of mercy speaks again and again.

How did the early church read the violent passages?

In the second century a teacher named Marcion proposed a sharp solution: the God of the Old Testament was a lesser, harsher god, and Christians should discard the Hebrew Scriptures. The church in Rome expelled Marcion around 144 CE, and writers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian answered him at length. The church kept the whole Old Testament as the word of the one God whom Jesus called Father.

The church also refused to read the conquest stories as a pattern for Christian behavior. Origen of Alexandria, preaching on Joshua in the third century, read Israel’s wars as pictures of the Christian’s battle against sin. In his Homilies on Joshua, the enemies to be driven out are the sins within the soul. Origen argued that the apostles would not have handed these books to Christians to read in church unless the physical wars pointed to spiritual ones.

How should Christians read the violent passages today?

Christians read the whole Bible through Jesus. When James and John wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village that would not receive him, as the prophet Elijah once did, Jesus “turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:54–55). In the Sermon on the Mount he set his teaching against an older saying:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

Matthew 5:43–45, NRSVUE

Augustine taught in On Christian Teaching (1.36.40) that anyone whose reading of Scripture does not build up love of God and neighbor has not yet understood it. By that rule, a reading of Joshua that makes Christians more willing to kill has not yet understood the book.

The church has not always read this way. For centuries Christian rulers and explorers claimed the right to take lands held by non-Christian peoples, a claim known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Mainline churches have since renounced it: the Episcopal Church repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2009, the United Methodist Church in 2012, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 2016, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has done the same.

Reading the violent passages faithfully means letting them disturb you, praying the angry psalms as the cries of real people, and never using them as permission to harm anyone. For related questions, see Does the Bible support slavery?, Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?, and War, peace, and self-defense

These old stories of war can turn you toward prayer for peace in your own time. The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 gives this collect for every evening:

O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

The Second Collect at Evening Prayer, Book of Common Prayer (1662)