Below are Charles Bledsoe’s original post and significant responses at BSA to his post titled The Historical and Theological Problem of a Killer God, Oct 20, 2025.
As touched on by Dr. Baden in a recent lecture, the simple historical solution to the problem of the biblical God commanding mass slaughter is that the herems, genocides in the Bible didn’t actually happen historically. They were invented to supply an explanation for the absence in the land of various peoples at the time that accounts of these exterminations were written. Additionally, they were fictions inspired by the herems of other Near Eastern peoples. And what’s more, they functioned to discourage apostasy and taking up the worship of foreign gods. And, last but not least, the portrayal of Yahweh as the author of a policy of eradication assigns responsibility to Him and absolves the Israelites because they had no choice but to follow God’s orders.
This is all well and good as a historical explanation that exonerates the ancient Israelites of ethnic cleansing, and that should spare the biblical authors from harsh criticism for portraying God as the enjoiner of ethnic cleansing, but it still leaves us with the problem that God is depicted as Deus necans, God the killer. That is, yes, Israelite herems aren’t historical, were never really perpetrated, but in the story world of the Bible they were, and God is still a violence-initiating, lethal Yahweh there. So we’re still left with a theological problem.
It can be easily solved by a non-inerrancy-subscribing reader by stepping outside of the story world of the Bible and simply denying the historicity of herems, and rejecting the idea that the actually-existing God should be identified with genocidal Yahweh.
This is a quite easy to take option for someone with a liberal or revisionist theology, but what if one puts more stock in the historical and theological accuracy of the Bible, how then might the theological problem be resolved? How might one explain the biblical personification of the divine as destructive and deadly Yahweh? If you’re someone who subscribes to the plenary historical and theological accuracy of the Bible, including those passages that feature divine violence, how do you deal with the theological problem they present? How do you reconcile those passages with what I’ll (dare to make a value judgement about and) term a higher conception of God as love?
And to those who don’t buy the Bible’s wholesale historical and theological truthfulness and who can simply discard unsavory biblical depictions of God I propose the thought experiment of putting yourself in the position of a believer in plenary inspiration, and trying to devise a rationalization for maintaining the goodness and worshipfulness of a violent and destructive God. I would be interested to read what you come up with.
I’ll share my own own effort at theologically making the best of the biblical passages in question. A key to theologically vindicating the accounts in the Bible of God acting violently and destructively, taking life directly or commanding the Israelites to massacre other peoples, is to identify the underlying themes and trajectories that these accounts are a part of and read them through that lens. Those overarching themes and trajectories are the real point, and should be our takeaway, not the violence attributed to God. In particular, our reading should be contextualized within the fundamental theme and trajectory of God’s relationship with the Jewish people, a relationship aimed at the realization of God’s vision of human beings living in right relation with each other and with God. A vision of social shalom, and a just world ordered for human flourishing. In the Bible, God and human beings, although we sometimes go astray, are always on a journey together to realize this divine vision for humanity. Read this way, in this context, those bits in the Bible where God is portrayed as destructive are no longer, theologically speaking, really about exterminating Amalekites, decreeing the death penalty for apostasy, and whatnot, and are no longer theologically problematic.
Paul Trejo – Bart Ehrman left Christianity precisely on these doubts. How could a God of Love ever command the genocide of people in the Promised Land? ….
Paul Trejo Yes, unfortunately, Dr. Ehrman, and other folks who go atheist because we don’t have a perfectly benevolent universe that matches, that’s what one would expect from a perfectly benevolent God, are stuck on a theology that attributes omnipotence, unlimited controlling power to God. There would of course, be no satisfactory excuse for a perfectly, totally benevolent deity with unlimited controlling power to not use it to make the universe a perfectly benign and benevolent place for us to exist in. But, FYI folks who’ve been turned atheist by the teleological problem, the problem that the world isn’t perfectly ordered to prevent suffering and evil, there’s an alternative theological option, a theist can simply conceive God’s power to be limited, not absolute, and persuasive, not at all controlling. A God of limited and persuasive power who isn’t actually in control of the world can’t be held accountable for cancer, crimes against humanity, climate change, or life’s quotidian cruelties. And when God is re-envisioned as finite in might, and devoid of sovereign power the existence of those natural and moral evils ceases to refute either God’s existence or perfect benevolence. The teleological and theodical problems evaporate, and we’re left with a God whose reality and loving nature can be believed in again.
(But of course, this isn’t an easy theological option for conventional theists to take because they prefer a God who’s a projection of our own power and dominance drive; and the sense of security they get from imagining a powerful protector in the sky—even though that protector seems to allow bad things to happen to good people on a regular basis.)
Alternative View in a comment by Michael Waddell on Oct 21, 2025. See Charles’ agreement below.
To really understand ancient texts like the Hebrew Bible, I [Michael] have to remind myself how unimaginably cheap life was.
Half of children died before their first birthday. Personally, I’ve known very few people who have experienced the unimaginable tragedy of losing a child; in the Iron Age, it was expected. So if you had a baby you couldn’t afford, or there was something wrong with it, the normal thing to do was to leave it to die of exposure… I mean, it would probably die anyway, and it would be irresponsible to reduce the resources available to the rest of the family because of sentimentality.
If your family kicked you out, you were almost certainly going to die without familial protection. If starvation didn’t get you, a neighboring tribe would. So it was far better to stay in an abusive relationship than to leave. There was absolutely nothing stopping the head of a household or tribe from abusing those under his charge. It was far better to have a powerful clan leader who threatened to kill you if you stepped out of line, but who made his expectations clear and could protect you, than a clan leader who was powerless, no matter how kind.
When conflict arose between tribes, if it was another group in your own community (a group you had kin relations with and shared values with), then perhaps something could be worked out. There were rules, limits, and non-violent means of resolving conflict. But if you had a conflict with outsiders, then unless you could adequately defend yourself, you were completely at their mercy. No one thought it was wrong to wipe out massacre or enslave foreigners.
When you really get into this mindset, it makes sense that you would want a powerful god, a god with the power over life and death. If he sometimes killed innocent people, well, innocent people died all the time. No moral code was going to change that fact. At least you would know that life and death were in his hands. And if he sometimes wiped out neighboring peoples, everybody knew that neighboring peoples got wiped out from time to time. No one had a problem with that general reality, and if you did, it wouldn’t matter anyway. The god of the Ammonites would sometimes order them to wipe out a Moabite town, or an Israelite town. If your god disapproved, who would care? What mattered was whether the Israelite god could protect the Israelite people. The fate of the Moabites? That was a problem for the god of the Moabites to deal with. If your god said to wipe them out, and he protected you, I don’t think anyone had a problem with that.
What I’m saying is, this was a moral system that made sense in the Iron Age. I am so glad we don’t live in the Iron Age! The modern world is incomparably better, and in the modern world, people don’t really adhere to Iron Age values, thank God. But we still honor the God of the Israelites, not because he acted morally by our standards, but because there is a continuity worth recognizing and honoring.
The ancient Israelites were products of their time, but they brought us monotheism. They would certainly have committed war crimes against the Babylonians if they could (as Psalm 137 graphically shows), but in their defeat they created the idea of a universal God and a universal morality, and this (eventually) had a transformative effect on the whole world. I don’t think there would be a Universal Declaration of Human Rights without that precedent. You can trace a direct line from the god of Israel saying you must love your fellow Israelite as yourself, to early Christians saying that this applied to everyone who accepted Christ regardless of culture or ethnicity, to Enlightenment thinkers saying this applies to all humanity. I think of it as a bubble of ethics and love that existed then, as nearly every culture has a bubble of ethics and love that applies only to the in-group. But that bubble expanded bit by bit from that tiny origin, until today, when it’s normal for people of every culture to say that all people have human dignity and a right to be free from murder and abuse. The Israelite bubble was no better, morally, than any of the others. But it’s the one that happened to grow into what we have today.
So what do we do about those who want to think God never changes, that the God of the Bible was moral by our standards, despite all appearances? We reinterpret and renegotiate, like everyone. There are many examples throughout history, but my favorite is the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient poem whose purpose was to explain that it’s your duty to kill in warfare. It’s now generally seen as an exhortation to defeat evil in oneself in order to act selflessly. If they can do it, so can we.
Michael Waddell — Thanks for a reply full of good reflections. Not much to argue with in it. I agree that conceiving one’s deity as a higher power, as in dominative power; i.e., that an emphasis on the power rather than the moral and love dimension of divinity is largely inspired by male dominators in patriarchal cultures. I would also posit that it’s a projection of the brain’s dominance behavioral system (DBS). DBS, dominance orientation and motivation, is found even in the gentlest souls and it doesn’t take a great leap of speculation to see human beings anthropomorphizingly projecting human dominance orientation and motivation onto their gods.
I also agree that imagining a powerful protective deity gives people a sense of security, despite the frequent occurrence of natural and moral evils in the world. Those who believe in a mighty deity capable of giving pious and commandment-keeping human beings protection simply rationalize the undeserved misfortune that befalls the faithful and obedient along the lines of the Deuteronomistic morality of the ancient Israelites, according to which misfortune is never really undeserved, is always our just comeuppance at the hands of God for sinning against “Him”. Or they resort to various other equally lame rationalizing explanations, that there are evil supernatural powers afoot in the world that are responsible for our suffering (the apocalyptic explanation), or that God has a grand scheme in light of which our suffering is just and good (the God’s plan explanation), etc.
I’m also on board with reinterpreting Scripture where it portrays God in ways that are inconsistent with the divine love nature, and where it endorses social evils such as male dominance. However, I would also argue that sometimes it’s perhaps better to simply condemn and discard those bits of the Bible, recognizing them as preserving and telling us something about an Iron-Age morality and worldview, about Yahweh and his worship, and nothing at all about an actually-existing God whose fundamental nature is love.
