Did God really command genocide in the Old Testament — and if He did, how is that not a dealbreaker for your faith?

• Y

  Yuki1mo ago

  This question honestly kept me out of the church for eight years. I grew up reading these passages and couldn't reconcile them with 'God is love.' What finally brought me back wasn't a clever argument — it was recognizing that I was holding God to a standard of justice I couldn't even define coherently. If morality has no source higher than human instinct, then calling anything 'genocide' evil is just one ape's opinion. The question turned on me.

  178Reply
• M

  Morgan1mo ago

  My grandmother survived a genocide. A real one. So forgive me if I have zero patience for theological gymnastics that make it sound like God ordering ethnic extermination is somehow nuanced. Some things should just horrify you. Full stop.

  162Reply
• A

  Alex4w ago

  It shakes me. I'm going to be real. I've been a Christian for thirty-one years and these passages still shake me every time I teach through the Old Testament. But being shaken isn't the same as losing faith. Abraham was shaken by Isaac. Job was shaken by everything. Moses was shaken enough to argue with God to His face and God counted that as righteousness. The faith doesn't demand we have clean comfortable answers. It demands we keep showing up with our honest questions.

  147Reply
• Q9

  Quinn 921mo ago

  That 'clay doesn't interrogate the potter' argument is used to shut down every single legitimate moral question anyone could ever raise about anything. It's not an answer. It's a conversation-ender dressed up as theology. God himself in Isaiah invites Israel to 'come let us reason together.' Reasoning about God's commands is apparently okay when Isaiah does it.

  143Reply
• F

  Feli1mo ago

  Hard pass on any theology that requires me to believe infanticide was righteous because God said so. That's literally the same logic every religious extremist in history has used. 'God told us to.' No thank you.

  134Reply
• R

  Ravi1mo ago

  Responding to a genocide survivor's perspective by saying 'your grief isn't a theological argument' is exactly the kind of thing that makes people think Christians are callous robots. Read the room, man.

  121Reply
• T

  Theo4w ago

  Here's what I actually believe: Scripture is given progressively. God revealed Himself gradually to people operating in specific cultural, historical, and moral contexts. The conquest narratives reflect an early and partial revelation of God's character, not the final word. Jesus IS the final word. The trajectory of Scripture moves from violence toward cruciform love. Reading Deuteronomy through the Sermon on the Mount, not the other way around, isn't abandoning Scripture — it's reading it canonically the way the church has always been meant to.

  118Reply
• F

  Feli1mo ago

  The 'Canaanite genocide' framing already concedes too much to the skeptic. Read the actual text carefully. Archaeological evidence for a total military annihilation of those populations simply doesn't exist. Many scholars — including conservative ones — think the language is hyperbolic war rhetoric, a genre convention that ancient Near Eastern audiences understood perfectly well. When Mesha of Moab says he 'utterly destroyed' Israel and left 'no survivors,' nobody thinks he means it literally. Why do we assume a different standard for the Hebrew text?

  112Reply
• MB

  Maya B.1mo ago

  can we be honest for two seconds? a lot of people defending these passages have never actually READ them. go read Numbers 31 slowly. all of it. then come back and tell me 'God's ways are higher.' i'll wait.

  109Reply
• P

  Priya1mo ago

  So killing the children of people who committed those sins is... justified? The kids were doing child sacrifice? Please walk me through that logic because I genuinely cannot follow it.

  107Reply
• J

  Jamie4w ago

  If you disagree that the conquest passages are morally troubling, I want you to explain something to me: why did the Nuremberg prosecutors quote nearly identical language from Nazi documents and the whole world agreed it was monstrous? Seriously. Same logic. Same framing. Different century. Explain why God gets a pass.

  99Reply
• C

  Casey1mo ago

  The comment above about hyperbole is textbook Greg Beale / John Goldingay territory and it's worth engaging seriously instead of dismissing. The ANE context is genuinely relevant. That said, I don't think it fully resolves the tension. There are passages — 1 Samuel 15 especially — where the text is very hard to read as rhetorical flourish when Samuel literally hacks Agag to pieces for surviving. The discomfort is real and Christians should sit with it rather than explaining it away too quickly.

  96Reply
• R

  Reese1mo ago

  The Canaanites weren't destroyed for ethnic reasons, they were judged for specific covenant violations and long-standing practices that the text describes in detail — child sacrifice, sexual exploitation, religious corruption. The Israelites themselves were later exiled and judged by the SAME God for the SAME reasons. The principle at work isn't ethnic favoritism, it's moral accountability applied consistently across all groups. This is a crucial distinction that the 'genocide' framing completely erases.

  93Reply
• O

  Omar1mo ago

  I read Numbers 31 slowly. I've read it multiple times. And yes, it is deeply disturbing by modern moral instincts. But I'd push back on the idea that modern moral instincts are the infallible standard. Within living memory the 'modern' West was running the Holocaust, two world wars, colonial famines, and chattel slavery — all with the blessing of respectable intellectual culture. Our era's moral confidence seems a bit unearned.

  88Reply
• K

  Kofi1mo ago

  ok but even if its hyperbole the text still SAYS god commanded it. you dont get to just say 'oh the author didnt mean it' when it suits you and then insist every other passage is literal. pick a lane people

  87Reply
• D

  Diego1mo ago

  I read Copan. I found it unpersuasive. The 'it's hyperbole' and 'it's ANE idiom' arguments feel like they're being deployed selectively to defuse hard passages while other passages are taken at face value when convenient. That's special pleading. I say this as someone who spent 20 years defending the faith in academic settings before concluding the honest position is agnosticism.

  83Reply
• Y

  Yuki1mo ago

  The children question is the hardest one and I don't have a pat answer. C.S. Lewis suggested the children went to God immediately and were spared lives of corruption. Paul Copan argues the commands were targeting combatants in a military context and 'women and children' is a rhetorical idiom, not a literal targeting order. I find Copan's argument partially convincing but I hold it loosely. What I won't do is pretend the question is easy.

  76Reply
• LK

  Leo K.1mo ago

  My professor in seminary called it the 'divine command problem' and devoted an entire semester to it. What struck me most was that the Israelites themselves seemed to struggle with these commands — they frequently didn't carry them out fully, and the prophets later condemned the nation for syncretism that resulted from NOT completing the conquest. Whether or not you accept the commands as morally justified, the biblical narrative itself treats disobedience as a catastrophic failure, not a mercy. The internal coherence is more complex than either side usually admits.

  74Reply
• O

  Omar1mo ago

  lmao the audacity to tell a 20-year apologist they just 'couldn't answer the argument' like you figured out something they missed in a forum comment. the arrogance.

  71Reply
• E

  Elena1mo ago

  Okay but those atrocities are ALSO what we'd call evil now. That's... the point. Moral progress is real. Pretending we can't know anything is just a way to avoid reckoning with troubling texts.

  67Reply
• F2

  Feli 214w ago

  The Marcionite response — just cut the Old Testament and keep the loving Jesus — has always been a temptation and it's always been a heresy. Jesus himself quotes Deuteronomy THREE TIMES while being tempted. He said he came not to abolish the law. You don't get to take Jesus and reject the God he prayed to. It's a package deal whether it's comfortable or not.

  64Reply
• M

  Morgan1mo ago

  God is sovereign. Period. The clay doesn't interrogate the potter. Job tried to take God to court and God showed up out of the whirlwind and said WHERE WERE YOU? We don't get to put the Creator of the universe in the dock. That's not blind faith — that's appropriate epistemic humility before an infinite being.

  61Reply
• E

  Elena1mo ago

  Someone who spent 20 years defending the faith reaching agnosticism doesn't automatically make them right. It might mean they encountered an argument they couldn't immediately answer and treated that as a defeater when it isn't one. Unanswered questions aren't the same as unanswerable ones.

  59Reply
• Y

  Yuki4w ago

  Because God is not a nation-state acting in self-interest and human history is not identical to God's sovereign governance of creation. That's why. The fact that human actors have invoked divine command to justify atrocities doesn't mean divine command can never be legitimate — it means human actors lie about divine command constantly and we should be suspicious. The comparison assumes what it's trying to prove.

  57Reply
• D

  Diego1mo ago

  I'm not a Christian but I think this debate is more philosophically serious than either cheerleaders or critics give it credit for. The 'problem of divine command' in philosophy goes back to Plato's Euthyphro dilemma and hasn't been solved in 2500 years. Christians who just shrug and say 'trust God' aren't engaging the problem. But skeptics who say 'this proves the Bible is false' are also skipping steps. At most it proves that if the Bible is accurately describing what God commanded, there's a real moral problem. That's not nothing — but it's not a slam dunk either.

  55Reply
• RR

  Reese R.4w ago

  That progressive revelation take is exactly what people use to just quietly hollow out whatever they don't like. Where does it stop? Today it's Canaanite conquest. Tomorrow someone says Paul's teaching on whatever is 'early and partial' and therefore ignorable. Canonical hermeneutics needs guardrails or it becomes 'my preferences with footnotes.'

  54Reply
• R2

  Reese 211mo ago

  I hear you and I respect what your family endured. But your grief, as real and valid as it is, isn't a theological argument. Emotions are data but they're not the only data. The question of whether the God of Scripture commanded these things — and whether He was just in doing so — has to be answered on its own terms, not solely by how it makes us feel. I say this with genuine sympathy, not cold dismissal.

  48Reply
• T

  Theo4w ago

  The commenter calling progressive revelation a slippery slope makes a fair structural point. But the alternative — a flat reading where every biblical command is permanently normative — has its own catastrophic problems. Nobody actually lives that way. The question is whether the trajectory is arbitrary or principled, and I think Christocentric interpretation gives a principled answer even if we disagree on where the lines are.

  46Reply
• I

  Iris1mo ago

  Copan's book Is God a Moral Monster is worth reading for anyone actually interested in this rather than just dunking online. Disagree with his conclusions if you want but he's engaging the texts seriously. Most people in these conversations haven't read it.

  42Reply
• L

  Liam4w ago

  That last comment. Yes. That's it. That's the whole thing.

  38Reply
• T

  Taylor1mo ago

  dealbreaker? No. unsettling? absolutely. I think Alvin Plantinga's work on this is worth reading before people on either side claim easy victory

  29Reply

More debates people can't stop arguing about