Is God a Moral Monster?

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 . . .

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. . . a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential . . .

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. . . megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

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‘ethnic cleansing’

‘bloodthirsty massacres’

‘xenophobic relish’

‘morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland’

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What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh – and even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

[The Canaanites] were pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel.

Christopher Hitchens

God is Not Great:

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The Old Testament contains ‘a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre . . .

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. . . but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human animals.

Christopher Hitchens

God is Not Great

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OT law

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Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death. Because they have cursed their father or mother, their blood will be on their own head.

Leviticus 20:9

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Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite. The son of the Israelite woman used the Name blasphemously with a curse; so they brought him to Moses. . . .

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Then the Lord said to Moses: ‘Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him.

Leviticus 24:10–14

OT narratives

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However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you. . . .

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. . . Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshipping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

Deuteronomy 20:16–18

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They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it – men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Joshua 6:21

Some responses

It is nothing to do with ethnicity

God’s desire to bless all nations through Abraham

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I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Genesis 12:3

God’s concern for foreigners

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The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 19:34

the problem is the Canaanite’s evil behaviour

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After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.”

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No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you.

Deuteronomy 9:4

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It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil. . . .

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. . . I firmly believe that this is bedrock and right and that anyone who does not believe it cannot have probed deeply enough into the grounds of his moral beliefs.

Kai Nielsen Ethics Without God

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God’s act of engaging in battle is not for the sake of violence or even victory as such but to establish peace and justice.

Paul Copan Is God a Moral Monster?

Israel is subject to the same standards

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Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. . . .

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But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the foreigners residing among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. . . .

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. . .And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

Deuteronomy 18:24–28

The destruction is not what we think

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[We don’t have] a simple conquest model, but rather a mixed picture of success and failure, sudden victory and slow, compromised progress.

Gordon McConville ‘Joshua’ in The Oxford Bible Commentary

hyperbolic language

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When the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them.

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Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.

Deuteronomy 7:2–5

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So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

Joshua 10:40

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“Israel has utterly perished for always.”

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Joshua was not trying to deceive people; the ancient audience would have readily understood what was going on. In fact, if we read the text closely, we see this is exactly right.

Paul Copan‘How Could God Command

Killing the Canaanites?’

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“Men and women” or similar phrases appear to be stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, “without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders”.

Richard Hess

cities or garrisons?

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We know that many of these ‘cities’ were used primarily for government buildings, and the common people lived in the surrounding countryside.

Richard S. Hess

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At the sound of horsemen and archers every town takes to flight. Some go into the thickets; some climb up among the rocks. All the towns are deserted; no one lives in them.

Jeremiah 4:29 niv

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Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.

Leviticus 18:24

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There is no indication in the text of any specific noncombatants who were put to death.

Richard Hess

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[We] are not talking about genocide or ethnic cleansing, but a kind of corporate capital punishment that was deliberately limited in scope and restricted to a specific period of time.

Paul Copan‘Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites’

God is God

God can have good enough reasons

Israel’s unique situation

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In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.

Genesis 15:16 NIV

God’s promises

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I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Genesis 12:2–3

Further ReadingDavid Lamb, God Behaving Badly (IVP USA, 2011)

Chris Wright, The God I Don’t Understand (Zondervan, 2008)

Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker Books, 2011)

Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker Books, 2014)

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