What Do We Do With Violence in the Bible?
This blog post heavily draws on Confronting Old Testament Controversies (Tremper Longman III, 2019). I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in digging deeper into the topic of divine violence and genocide in the Bible. Further reading suggestions are listed at the bottom of the post.
“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them - the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite - as the LORD your God has commanded you.”
The Bible is not a children’s book. Several profoundly disturbing R-rated stories in the Old Testament describe the violent destruction of entire cities, including every man, woman, child, and animal living within them. This topic is enough to drive many faith-seekers away from Christianity. It seems like there is an intrinsic contradiction in the Bible’s portrayal of the character of God: the Old Testament God of wrath and justice versus the New Testament God of love and gentleness.
Does the Bible approve of genocide? Surely not, for “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
And yet, many of the Old Testament passages like the one quoted above detail God’s instructions to Israel to utterly wipe out the pagan nations living within Canaan. Christians have wrestled with these passages for millennia.
In response, some have said that God didn’t really order Israel to kill all people. Instead, God really means that Israel is to kill most of the people in these nations. Of course, this still doesn’t eliminate the fact that many people were killed under God’s command.
Others have spiritualized the violence in the Bible, saying that it is merely an allegory for how Christians today ought to treat the sin in their lives. While there is some truth to this approach, the original hearers of these stories would have understood it as real physical violence; to spiritualize biblical violence is to leach it of its legitimacy as real actions taken by real people. It makes us feel better, but it does nothing for the offensive reality of violence in the Old Testament.
What are we to do with this apparent contradiction of God’s character? How are we to understand biblical violence?
Here is my argument:
In the unified narrative of Scripture, God is portrayed as a Divine Warrior who fights and ultimately defeats evil in the world.
We can’t separate the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New. He is not two different Gods. Neither is he in conflict within himself, pitting a vengeful Father against a loving Son. The story of the Bible tells one unified story from creation to the Fall to the restoration of creation in which God fights and defeats the evil and brokenness in the world.
What does it mean that God is a Divine Warrior?
First, Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) civilizations worshipped warrior-gods who continually fought one another. The biblical narrative elevates the God of Israel as the One True God above all the nations’ gods. The biblical creation story describes how this God is the creator of all things as he creates life with a word; the pagan nations’ creation stories involved bloody wars between gods, and the death of a god was typically required to create human life. The God of Israel also demonstrates that he is greater than Pharaoh, who was understood to be the embodiment of Ra, the Egyptian sun god.
Furthermore, war was always a “fight of the gods,” not just people fighting people; therefore, when one nation was victorious over the other, it was understood that the victors’ god was the “greater” god. When people fought wars, the gods were understood to fight, too. The Bible uses the imagery from the nations around Israel to describe God in a way that the people of Israel understood: their God is a Divine Warrior who is greater than all the other gods.
Many of the clearest depictions of God as a Divine Warrior are found in the Psalms. For example:
Psalm 7:6 “Arise, LORD, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God; decree justice.”
Psalm 7:13 “[God] has prepared his deadly weapons; he makes ready his flaming arrows.”
Psalm 89:23 “I will crush his foes before him and strike down his adversaries.”
The motif of God as a Divine Warrior is developed in a progression throughout the Old and New Testaments.
God fights the flesh and blood enemies of Israel.
We must understand that the ANE worldview revolved around warfare and military conquest. Nations fought nations to assert dominance.
We also must understand that the practices of these nations included immeasurable evil: the genocide of nations, military-sanctioned rape and kidnapping of women and children, slavery, torture, and child sacrifice. The strongest man became king and the strongest nation became an empire, which meant wealth and comfort for the powerful and incredible oppression for the weak. The vulnerable were entirely at the mercy of those in power and were often discarded once used.
God isn’t waging war against ethnicities but against sin.
When God chose Israel to be his nation, he declared that they were to be separate and distinct from the nations around them, a “holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). Like the gods of the nations, he also goes to war but he does so to eradicate the evil that is being practiced by the nations:
“You must completely destroy them… as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that they won’t teach you to do all the detestable acts they do for their gods, and you sin against the LORD your God.” (Deut. 20:17-18)
The Creator God, in all his eternal lovingkindness, is disgusted by the violent ways of Israel’s pagan neighbours and after providing these nations with four hundred years to turn from their ways, he decides that enough is enough (see Gen. 15:13-16). Justice must be served.
So, God invites Israel to participate in his war on evil.
But the funny thing is, Israel doesn’t really have to do any fighting most of the time (recall the Red Sea or the fall of Jericho). Instead, all they have to do is obey God’s commands, which often sound quite ridiculous, like walking around a city seven times and blowing their trumpets. The point of the ridiculousness is that God wins the victory; there can be no doubt about that.
And in true ANE fashion, God’s decisive victory over the nations declares his victory over their gods, too. Therefore, God’s absolute sovereignty as the Most Powerful God is well-established - not only as a testimony to Israel but also to all the other nations.
This testimony was powerful enough to convince examples such as Rahab, Ruth, Caleb the Kenizzite, the Gibeonites, and Uriah the Hittite to join the people of God. Again, God doesn’t fight against all non-Israelites; he fights evil, and he invites all people and all nations, particularly his people Israel, to join in the fight.
God fights Israel.
If you are familiar with the Bible at all, you’ll know that Israel messed up royally in their prerogative as God’s witness to the nations. Instead, they directly disobeyed God’s commands and began worshipping the gods of the nations. Israel, who had witnessed God’s victory over the nations’ gods, decided that following visible idols was more desirable than following an invisible, unpredictable God.
What a slap in God’s face.
Furthermore, Israel partook in the same evil rites as the nations, including war crimes, rape, murder, and child sacrifice.
“God's actions as a warrior are strictly intertwined with his judgment on sin, no matter who the sinner is.” (Longman, 187)
So it is no surprise that God, the Divine Warrior, fights the evil within Israel, too. We see this in individual stories such as Achan’s disobedience in Joshua 7-8 and the capture of the ark by the Philistines in 1 Samuel 4. We can read all about it in the book of Judges, where Israel repeatedly turned away from God in favour of worshipping the gods of the nations and God allows the nations to oppress Israel in return. Eventually, Israel was carried into captivity by Assyria and Babylon because they refused to turn from their evil ways.
How awful that the Divine Warrior must act even against his own special people because they refused to give up their evil, violent practices and their worship of other gods!
“So I will choose their punishment, and I will bring on them what they dread because I called and no one answered; I spoke and they did not listen; they did what was evil in my sight and chose what I did not delight in.” (Is. 66:4)
God will come and fight Israel’s oppressors.
Even while God’s judgment rained down on Israel for their flagrant departure from his good plan for them, he proclaimed his plan for restoring Israel through his prophets (most notably in the books of Daniel, Isaiah, Zechariah, and Malachi). There was an expectation of divine deliverance in the midst of their oppression by the world powers of Assyria and Babylon. This is the hope of the prophets!
This deliverance happened physically when many of the Jews returned to Judah and Jerusalem and when the world powers were defeated one at a time. But more prophetically, there was a promised hope of a Messiah who would definitively conquer all evil and truly restore the land of God’s people…
Jesus fights spiritual authorities and powers.
Enter Jesus! He is the embodiment of the Divine Warrior, the King who was eagerly awaited by the Jews. And yet… Jesus made it very clear that he did not come to rule earthly kingdoms. Instead, he came to serve others, banish sickness and darkness from the lives of the common folk, and then give his life on their behalf (Mark 10:35-45).
His enemies have shifted from those who are of physical power and authority to those who are of spiritual power and authority. He spent more time berating the Jewish religious elite than confronting Roman military oppression.
Contrary to how many people portray Jesus, he did not shy away from violence. He willingly endured a most violent death in order to decisively disarm the powers and authorities, including death itself (Col. 2:13-15). Jesus dealt with violence by assuming violence onto himself.
He who was God made flesh endured the violence of humanity in order to defeat the power of evil.
Jesus is the warring king, the Divine Warrior. His battleground is hearts and souls rather than physical land and nations as it was earlier in the Old Testament. The story of violence in the Bible is a progression and it never wavers from God’s heart of compassion and justice; it only takes on different forms as time marches on.
This is the chapter in the story in which we live now - Jesus has defeated evil but the final victory is not yet complete. In the same way that God called Israel to participate in the fight against evil, so too Christians are called to fight against the evil in our world. Participation in the divine battle today does not look like fighting nations; it looks like fighting the way Jesus did with love in action - speaking up against injustice, treating one another kindly, and bringing hope to the world through medical care, provision of food, and any other way God enables us to fight. The vulnerable are overpowered by the strong in our world too and we are called to care for the weak as Jesus did.
Jesus wins the final battle.
The book of Revelation describes a victorious king over all evil. Jesus Christ is the rider who “is called Faithful and True, and with justice he judges and makes war.” (Rev. 19:11) He is the one who, at the end of all time, will destroy all evil for all time. His victory is not peaceful; Revelation is full of bloody battle scenes in which the King battles evil, but in the end, “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will worship him.” (Rev. 22:3)
This is it. The end of all evil. The end for which all of creation longs. This is the end to which Christians participate in the fight, eagerly awaiting the restoration of creation. In the kingdom of God to come, there is no more violence, no sorrow, no death, and no pain (Rev. 21:4).
I hope this brief overview demonstrates the motif of the Divine Warrior through Scripture. God is not for genocide - ever! God is for justice, which means that evil must be dealt with, even when evil is present among his own people, Israel.
There is much more that I could say about each of these points. Suffice it to say that God is wrathful toward sin because God is love. This is good news! We would be immensely dissatisfied with a God who lets evil slide by without repercussions. Human evil is always violent; God responds with violence, but he ultimately does so through Jesus’s victory on the cross.
God is just because he is love.
I don’t wish to oversimplify the conundrum of violence and genocide in the Bible. This is a difficult topic for 21st-century minds. My aim is simply to demonstrate that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are not separate, but are united in one coherent picture of God’s warfare on evil (Longman, 176).
When God’s divine warfare is seen as a progressing story culminating in the ultimate victory of Jesus Christ, one also begins to see that God’s mercy is always present in his judgment. His call to repentance is always present, even to pagan nations and even to his own people who have drifted far away from him.
Lastly, we live in a far different world than the ANE militaristic world, however, the Christian call today is still the same as it was to Israel: follow God’s way instead of the ways of the world and be his light wherever you go. Fight evil. Push back the darkness. Live in the wholeness of knowing God as the God who is victorious above all else.
For further reading:
Boyd, Gregory A. God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, “Locking Up the Raging Sea.” IVP Academic, 1997.
Copan, Paul. Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God, “Indiscriminate Massacre and Ethnic Cleansing? The Killing of the Canaanites.” Baker Books, 2011.
Enns, Peter. The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It, “God Did What?” HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
Longman, Tremper III. Confronting Old Testament Controversies: Pressing Questions about Evolution, Sexuality, History, and Violence, “Divine Violence: Does God Kill?”. Baker Books, 2019.
Rauser, Randal. God or Godless, “The Biblical God Commanded Genocide.” Baker Publishing Group, 2013.
Note that these authors hold varying theological perspectives and these views are not necessarily my own. However, for the sake of approaching the topic hospitably, these readings are supplied for the curious learner.
