What do we do with stories of divinely mandated genocide in the Old Testament?
What do we do with stories of divinely mandated genocide in the Old Testament?
Tales have prompted debate since at least the early days of Christianity
If you believe that the Bible is divinely inspired or in some sense God’s instructions to humanity and find yourself troubled by the accounts of God-ordained genocide in the Old Testament, you’re in good company. What to make of the accounts of killings in light of Jesus’ commands to love your neighbor has been fiercely discussed by Christians since at least the second century.
And the tension between the nature of God as portrayed in the stories of the Israelite conquest and the nature of a divine Teacher who would give up his life while asking for forgiveness for His tormentors continues to this day. The Old Testament stories are often cited by critics of Christianity as a reason to reject the faith, and Christian theologians, academics, bloggers and even social-media creators continue to write reams of books, essays, video scripts and tweets on the issue without ever agreeing on a conclusion.
I’m not going to pretend to resolve the issue in these 1,300 words; while I will touch the surface, I’m not sure I can even scratch the surface of the debate. Instead, I will offer a brief and undoubtedly oversimplified history and summary of the disagreement.
The problem is easy to state. It rests on the premise that all of the following are true, assuming that the Bible is to be believed:
God is love,1 and believers in God are to love their enemies.2
God ordered the Israelites to kill their enemies, including innocent women and children. The deaths numbered in the thousands.3
The killing of thousands of innocent people was consistent with the loving nature of God.
Some have tried to soften the problem in at least two ways: First, some claim that the accounts aren’t really about genocide, since genocide is usually defined as an attempt to annihilate an ethnicity or similar group of people, and what happened in the Old Testament fell short of that. But this just begs that question by suggesting that mass killing is acceptable if it falls short of genocide. Others have pointed to signs that the accounts use hyperbole, a literary technique that was common in the writings of the day. This approach falls short in the same that the argument of mislabeling does; even if the tales are exaggerated, the core of the stories still involve the massive killing of innocent people.
From Marcion to Augustine
One of the first Christian theologians to tackle the problem was Marcion of Sinope, born late in the first century. Marcion was a student of both the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus and Paul; he simply could not reconcile the vengefulness of the God in the pre-Christian Scriptures with the writings (mostly the Pauline epistles) that he felt should be in the Christian canon. He concluded that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of Jesus weren’t even the same divine being.
For obvious reasons, this did not go over well with other Christian leaders of Marcion’s time, and Marcion was excommunicated from the church of Rome around the year 144.4
The beginnings of a non-heretical approach to the problem came from Christian philosopher Justin Martyr, who lived around the same time as Marcion. He viewed the arc of stories in the Old Testament as foreshadowing the coming of Christ.
One of the first theologians to answer the problem in a way that is still used today is Origen of Alexandria, who was born about a century after Marcion was. A prolific writer, Origen was a pacifist, believing that participating in a war was inconsistent with following the teachings of Jesus. Accepting the Hebrew Bible as part of the Christian tradition, Origen concluded that stories of God commanding killing were allegorical, representing divine expectations that believers would wage spiritual “war” to eradicate sin in their lives.
About two centuries later, Augustine of Hippo, later recognized as a saint, did not see the Old Testament accounts as a mere allegory. Since God is good and not capable of evil, Augustine concluded, God’s orders to kill were inherently just. As he wrote in his influential Summa Theologiae: “Consequently, by the command of God, death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice whatever.”
The centuries since
Since then, nearly all the arguments over Old Testament violence have been variations of the teachings of Origen or Augustine. Either the tales of violence are viewed as symbolic of the war against sin, or the violence happened as described and God had legitimate reasons for ordering it, reasons that may or may not be understood by us. Among the reasons some apologists have given to justify the violence is that it was necessary to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant, that the Israelites would be come a great and populous nation, or that it was necessary to remove evil influences as one part of preparing the nation of Israel for the coming of Jesus.
In more recent years, scholars using historical criticism have questioned the historicity of the Old Testament stories (and, in fact, not only those stories but nearly everything that the Bible says happened before the kingship of David). Using this approach, these scholars have suggested that two reasons such stories have become part of the Biblical writing were to promote the idea that the Israelites were a special people and to help create a national identity.
Final, personal thoughts
How Christians decide to deal with the homicidal stories coincides frequently with their general understanding of the Bible, and historically there has been a broad spectrum of beliefs. At one end are those who view the Bible the most literally, and they tend to trust in the justice of God even while disagreeing on what God’s motives may have been. Most who take this approach do not see the Old Testament as justifying this sort of violence today, finding that it was limited to a certain set of pre-Christianity circumstances. And many see the stories as historic while also finding the stories as instructive of the need to distance themselves from evil influences.
As for myself, I find value in aspects of the historical-critical approach; like Origen, I find the nature of the violence too unlike the God I know through the teachings of Jesus, and see I little support outside the Bible (such as through archaeology) to not be skeptical of such a violent conquest. But I also don’t find a wholesale adoption of the historical-critical approach as spiritually meaningful; I believe that we have the Bible we have for reasons, divine reasons, that go well beyond the value-free accidents of history. I tend to think that Christians are supposed to wrestle with stories like these, and that’s why we have them. If we see the Bible as scriptural, we can’t simply discard the parts we don’t like.
So I find some value in the teachings of Origen here. Just as the followers of God in the first books of a Bible had a desire, a mandate even, to become more than they were, all of us who are truly alive have a need for growth. And that often puts us in conflict with our surroundings and into a war of sorts. We can find inspiration in stories such as those of David and Goliath, to use the best-known example, as a model for trust in God even if we question the morality of the violence.
Such an approach doesn’t answer all the questions we might have, but it’s a beginning.
This commentary on the historical books of the Old Testament is part of our Bible for Modern-day Saints series. Views expressed are solely those of the author. Biblical quotations are adapted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.
See I John 4:8.
See Matthew 5:44.
See, as one of many examples, Deuteronomy 7:2.
His excommunication also came about because of other views that were deemed to be heretical.