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[Paperback Writer]

I'm a Christian and I've recently been mulling over some really difficult OT verses. A common argument I see against the Bible is that a lot of the practices of the ancient world (slavery, killing off almost entire enemy populations, etc.) are common in its pages. These things do occur, and I was wondering why God would command or allow such things. I feel like I'm being forced to say that certain actions that I'd never accept in any other context are moral simply because God commanded them. God, according to Christianity, is morally perfect, so anything He command or does is moral by definition. I don't understand why there are so brutal passages in the Old Testament.

One of these is the treatment of women. A couple of verses come to mind for this:

Deuteronomy 22: 13-21: So basically, if a man brings a charge against his new wife of not being a virgin, proof of her virginity at the time must be presented. If it isn't, she's to be stoned. Is this proof of virginity bloody bed-sheets? If it is, wouldn't this be a faulty method of determining whether or not she was a virgin? I've read that the hymen can be popped during physical activity and other non-sex activities. I've also read that not all women bleed the first time they have sex. What's the deal with this?

Deuteronomy 22:23-24: These verses say that if a woman is raped in the city and she does not cry out, both are to be stoned to death. Doesn't this ignore the fact that the rapist could have gagged her or had a weapon?

Deuteronomy 22:28-29: Basically, if a man rapes a non-betrothed woman, he is to pay her father and marry her. I know that a woman's worth was tied to her virginity back then, but why didn't God tell the Israelites that it shouldn't be?? Why make the rapist marry her? Everyone knows how traumatic rape usually is for a woman, I doubt they'd be very thrilled to marry and spend the rest of her life with the scumbag who raped her.

There are other verses about women being taken as plunder in the aftermath of a battle. Why is this okay? Why is it moral?

The second thing is warfare and the slaughters described.

Judges 21: 10-24: After defeating the Benjaminites and killing a ton of their men, the Israelites decide to take the surviving 400 virgins and gift them to the Benjaminite survivors to ensure that they wouldn't go extinct. They tell them to go hide in the vineyards of Shiloh and abduct their women to be their wives... doesn't this bother anyone else?

Why are these things moral?

Numbers 31:7-18 — The Israelites wipe out all Midianite settlements and kill all the men. They take the women and children captive. Moses comes and gets angry at them for sparing them and orders all (including young male children!) to be executed except the virgin girls. Are these actions okay just because God commanded it?

There are other passages about killing all the inhabitants of an area, too. Why would God command these things? The ancient world was obviously barbaric, but why would God choose . In other situations, there seems to be no issue with God telling the Israelites to be better than their neighbours (no child sacrifice, for example) but He allows or commands all of these horrific things.

There are other things, too. Slavery being a big one. I don't know why this was allowed. Obviously it was not out of God's capability to tell the Israelites to just stop it; he chose to allow it. Why would He do this? There are verses about not boiling a goat in its mother's milk, but not a single verse condemning slavery altogether?

This might be a little long, and sorry for that. Why are so many brutal or "barbaric" things commanded by God in the OT? Are these things moral?

In literally any other context, taking over a town and slaughtering literally everyone (including children and babies) except the virgin girls (for what reason?) would be blatantly immoral and horrific? Am I, as a Christian, supposed to say "these things were and are immoral every single time except these times?" I feel like I'm being forced to go against my conscience to be a Christian. Thanks for your help.

[jimwalton]

PART 1: VIRGINITY AND RAPE. You've asked some questions demanding long answers. I am apologizing ahead of time for the lengthy response.

Deuteronomy 22.13-21. Proof of virginity. It's not an ill-treatment of women, but protection for them. Virginity before a marriage was valued to make sure one's children (and therefore everything anyone will inherit from you) are actually one's own. The integrity of a woman and her household was based on a demonstration of her virginity. The physical evidence demanded in this case could be either the sheets from the initial consummation (bloodied by the breaking of the hymen) or possibly rags used by the woman during her last menstrual period to show that she was not pregnant prior to the marriage.

The bloody sheets from the broken hymen were used as evidence that she was virginal. How else was one to tell in a culture where tampons had yet to be invented? Even if a woman didn't bleed all over the wedding sheets, this is casuistic law, not hard-core guides. You're right that a person can obviously be a virgin without an intact hymen, can have sex without rupturing the hymen, or can rupture their hymen without any blood getting on any particular sheet. They dealt with it. The woman could still plead her case with her evidences. Communities were often small, and the truth could be determined. We understand what the text is for and what it's trying to tell us.

Deuteronomy 22.23-24. These cases are part of casuistic law: case studies to give examples to guide the judges. They are hypothetical. The premise behind them is that in almost case a girl has a chance to cry out if she is being raped, and the lack of a cry is evidence that she was involved in the relationship and not totally against it. It's hypothetical, not "only if she cries out can she be vindicated." If she doesn't cry out, her consent is assumed since she lived in the town and her screams would have been heard. What the court will try to determine is whether she was really raped or if it was consensual. That's really the intent of the case law.

Deuteronomy 22.28-29: This is a strong protection for the woman. It's not so much that she is being forced to marry her rapist, but that he is being forced to marry her. In each of the three cases in this chapter, the man is guilty in all three. If a woman in that culture was raped and toss to the side like a piece of trash, her life was ruined. She would never marry, never have any financial resources or security, would have no children, and would probably starve to death, be thrown out of the community, etc. The Bible says, "No way. This girl gets money as security for her future and the rapist must provide for her his whole life; you have to marry her and take care of her; he had legal obligations to her. This law is actually attempting to correct a problem in their sexist environment. It was providing security and protection for the woman—the innocent victim.

PART 2: GENOCIDE. Let me lay some groundwork first, and then I'll speak more specifically.

1. The only time(s) that the Israelites were commanded by God to fight offensive battles (to conquer cities) was during the conquest. Beyond the land of Canaan, they were never commanded to expand their boundaries, build an empire, wipe out people groups, etc.

2. The goal of the conquest was not genocide, but occupation. Repeatedly the commands of God are to drive the Canaanites from the land (Ex. 23.30 as one example of many). More to the point, the Canaanites were first to be given an opportunity to surrender and become part of Israel (Dt. 20.10), and if they would not surrender, to engage them in battle.

3. It was God's intent to bless all the nations (Gn. 12.3 and others). It’s not the Canaanites as people that the Lord hates, but their godless perversions and lying religion. Dt. 7.5-6 is very clear that the point is truth, not genocide.

4. In those days the cities were fortresses surrounding governmental and cultic structures, not dwellings for the population. When commands were given to conquer cities, it was the rulers and soldiers the army was after, not the population. In the agrarian society of the Canaanite city-states, more than 90% of the people lived in the countryside as farmers, and less than 10% of the population lived in the cities. The cities were mostly fortresses and governmental centers. Almost exclusively, when a city was attacked, it was military action against military personnel and the rulers of the region, not against the general (and innocent) population. It was impossible, without nuclear weaponry, to wipe out all the citizenry. There was never an attempt to wipe them out.

5. The Conquest is not what many people imagine. Joshua cut a swath through the center of Canaan (Jericho, Ai and Shechem, Joshua 6-9), separating north from south. Gibeah surrendered (Josh. 9), and they were not killed. At that point an alliance of cities from the south attacked Joshua (Josh. 10), and the Israelites won. Now they controlled the southern hill country. Joshua then turned and attacked Hazor in the north and burned it (Josh. 11), and an alliance of northern cities attacked him. Joshua won, and all of the hill country of Canaan was now in Israelite hands. That was the extent of it (Josh 11.16, 23, etc.). They never gained the valleys and plains until under the monarchy, as nation-states attacked David and he won. There was no genocide.

Now let's talk about ancient Near-Eastern warfare. The "kill 'em all" speeches of the ancient Near East were a case of customary warfare bravado, and people in those days didn't take it literally. What it meant was: "Secure a total victory." The language is used in Josh. 10.40-42; 11.16-23; yet they readily acknowledge that it wasn't literally true (Judges 1.21, 27-28). On the one hand, Joshua says he utterly destroyed the Anakim (Josh. 11.21-22), but then he gives Caleb permission to drive them out of the land (Josh. 14.12-15; cf. 15.13-19). What it proves it that "kill them all" was an idiom of warfare that meant "We won a decisive victory." No people groups were being wiped out. This was pretty typical of the whole region in this era.

- Egypt’s Tuthmosis III (later 15th c.) boasted that "the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those (now) not existent." In fact, Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the 15th and 14th centuries BC.
- Hittite king Mursilli II (who ruled from 1322-1295 BC) recorded making "Mt. Asharpaya empty (of humanity)" and the "mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity)." Not true; just rhetoric.
- The "Bulletin" of Ramses II tells of Egypt's less-than-spectacular victories in Syria (1274 BC). Nevertheless, he announces that he slew "the entire force" of the Hittites, indeed "all the chiefs of all the countries," disregarding the "millions of foreigners," which he considered "chaff."
- In the Merneptah Stele (ca. 1230 BC), Rameses II's son Merneptah announced, "Israel is wasted, his seed is not," another premature declaration. Not true, didn't happen, no genocide.
- Moab's king Mesha (840/830 BC) bragged that the Northern Kingdom of "Israel has utterly perished for always," which was over a century premature. The Assyrians devastated Israel in 722 BC.
- The Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (701-681 BC) used similar hyperbole: "The soldiers of Hirimme, dangerous enemies, I cut down with the sword; and not one escaped."

In addition, we know that the people groups that Joshua claims were "utterly destroyed from the earth" continued on, such as the Anakim I have already mentioned. The same is true of the Amalekites of 1 Sam. 15 (the Amalekites were a people group for about 1000 years after being "totally destroyed"), and all of the Canaanite groups. The point was not to kill them all in a genocidal frenzy, but to win a decisive military victory over their armies and politicians, drive all rebels from the land, assimilate those who were willing, and to destroy the false religious practices that would corrupt the people of God.

The ultimate goal was that God would have a people, set aside for relationship with Himself, that he could covenant with to reveal Himself to and redeem them from sin. All comers, Israeli and foreign, man and woman, slave and free, were welcome. All rebellious, wicked, and deceivers were not.

As you can see, the label "genocide" misleads. The call to "kill 'em all" was language of victory, not genocide. "The moral of the story," as Dr. Paul Copan says, "is not to stop at a surface reading of these terms and assume God’s immorality."

The plan of God was a three-stepped plan, with each subsequent step only being necessary if the first two failed.

STEP 1: Incorporate the Canaanites into Israel as full members of the community, and worshippers of the true God. There was no reason to wait until the Day of the Lord to have the people worshipping the true God (Zech. 14.16-20; Rev. 22, et al.). The Lord will take any who come to him; the invitation is always open, and no sincere seeker is refused. Any Canaanite who surrendered would become part of the Israelite community.

STEP 2: Lacking surrender, the object of the army was to drive the Canaanites from the land, not slaughter them (Ex. 23.30-31; 33.2; 34.11, 24; etc.). Let them go somewhere else to live, and let Israel have the land that was theirs to possess. Anyone who would leave was free to go.

STEP 3: If they won't surrender, don't want to join you, and refuse to leave, the only option is to engage them in battle. The land belonged to Israel, not the Canaanites. But the point was still not genocide, but to kill the soldiers, supplant the rulers, and take possession of the land. The civilians were not harmed.

God communicated in the language of the culture, their typical Near-Eastern warfare rhetoric. Everyone in their era knew what it meant: secure a total victory. We need to read the text through ancient eyes, not through modern ones of a different culture, era, and language.

PART 3: SLAVERY. Dr. Craig Blomberg rightly assures us that “the most important matter is [in what the Bible] actually says, and there is not a single text anywhere in the Bible that commands slavery.”
Words change in their meaning through the eras.

Slavery in the ancient world didn’t mean what slavery means to us. With this accusation we need to distinguish between what we as moderns mean by “slavery” and what the ancients meant by slavery. Dr. Paul Wright, the president of Jerusalem University College, says, “When we think of slavery, the first thing that comes to mind is either slavery in the pre-Civil War U.S. or slavery as we hear it in places of the modern Middle East (via ISIS or such groups).

“The textual evidence that we have for slavery in the ancient world (—by this I mean the ancient Near East, the context in which ancient Israel arose, not ancient Rome) shows by and large a different kind of ‘institution’ (that’s not the right word to use). For this reason, the Hebrew word, eved, is better translated ‘servant.’ The overall textual evidence from the ancient Near East shows that slaves had certain rights—they could own property, for instance, or determine inheritance. Or they could become free, as the Bible allows, given certain circumstances. They were typically not bought and sold, opposite as the case in the medieval and modern worlds. ‘Forced Labor,’ or the corvée, is a more complicated issue, essentially a tax on person by the government for a certain period of time (e.g., 1 Kings 9:15). Note that the servants that Israel is allowed to take from among the foreigners are able to receive inheritance from their “owner” (Lev. 25:46).

“The larger question is to what extent the Bible participates in the world of the ancient Near East, and to what extent it expresses a set of ethical standards which at the same time presuppose it yet works to change it. There’s a whole lot of middle ground, actually. This is what makes an understanding of the context of that day so vitally important as a place to start.”

Dr. Wright continues that “there is no evidence of chattel slavery in the ancient Near East. While slavery was known in many cultures there, the type of slavery was debt-slavery, punishment for crime, enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.”
Even about Leviticus 25.46 (“You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life”) Jacob Milgrom says: “The law merely indicates that the jubilee doesn’t apply to non-Israelite slaves. ‘It does not imply that the slave is a piece of property at the mercy of his master’ (Mendelsohn 1962:388).”

“Another indication that slaves were not simply viewed as property to be treated however the master wished can be seen in the fact that slaves sometimes shared rights of inheritance (Genesis 15.2-3), where Abraham’s servant will inherit his property if Abraham dies childless, and Genesis 30.1-13, where the sons of Leah’s slaves become equal heirs with the sons of Leah and Rachel in the family
of Jacob.”

“Slavery and indentured servitude in Scripture involved ownership of a person’s labor, not ownership of the person. Any approach to slavery that implies one person can legitimately own another is contrary to Scripture because it denies the humanity of
the slave.”

And lastly, there is absolutely no extrabiblical data on any slaves in Israel. The private and public documents of the ancient Near East from 3000 BC to the times of the New Testament are full of references to the practice of slavery in the parallel cultures, but nothing from Israel. Cole agrees and says that “slavery in Israel was rural, domestic, and small scale. There were no ‘slave pens’ of imperial Rome, or the racial subjugation of colonial America.” What seems likely is that slavery hardly existed in ancient Israel.

PART 4: SLAUGHTERING EVERYONE EXCEPT FOR THE VIRGIN GIRLS

I'm going to guess you're talking about Numbers 31.17-. Here's the rationale. The Midianites had been a disastrous moral effect on the Israelites. In Numbers 25, the women seduced the men of Israel, not just to have sex, but also to idolatry. Verse 18 also says they had been deceitful with unprovoked hostility and treachery. Numbers 31.16 says they had been successful at turning Israeli people away from God and worshipping false gods. Israel's leadership, military, and family life were all collapsing under the influence of the Midianites. The Midianites also posed a serious military threat to Israel, in addition to the moral threat.

I already talked to you about genocide, and that it wasn't genocide. Death for all males was not expected. No one did that. The males were killed who were perceived as a future threat who could rise up against Israel. (Keep in mind that the Israelite males who participated in the seduction were also put to death.) An enemy people will rise again unless they are sufficiently vanquished. Napoleon Bonaparte, after crowning himself as emperor, was banished and exiled. But three years later he rose up again to challenge the government and won. It was only Waterloo that brought him down. In 1953, Fidel Castro launched a revolution in Cuba. He was captured and imprisoned, and many of his men were killed. But he was released in 1955 as part of a general amnesty. He moved to Mexico, gathered supporters around him, and returned to Cuba and took over the country.

The women "who had slept with a man" were killed because they were the ones who had engaged in the abominable worship of Poor (Numb. 25.2), and had been active in seducing the Israelite men. The nation needed to be preserved from future defilement and to prevent the future propagation of the Midianite people.

The virgins could be spared because they couldn't have possible been guilty of cultic fornication. They will also not perpetuate the Midianite line because the children would bear the names of their fathers and be part of their households and become part of the Israelite nation. This was an act of mercy: when the Israelites came across innocent people—those were to be spared.

[TrakeM]

To op: if the definition of moral is anything god does, then the statement god is good is meaningless. If there is a definition separate of god by which god is judged to be moral then god isn't the author of morality and therefore isn't god. Saying god is good is very problematic.

To Jim Walton: Are you saying that murdering people because they argued that your god doesn't exist was ok? It seems that your god considers leading people away from your religion to be a capital offense. This doesn't sound like perfect morality. When I make arguments that your god doesn't exist, am I not by this logic leading people away from your religion? Does your god hold that it has ever been moral to execute someone for saying that the bible and yahweh are false? If so, then I would say it's clear that you worship a moral abomination.

Are you REALLY arguing that capital punishment for adultery has ever been a part of perfect morality?

[jimwalton]

> Are you saying that murdering people because they argued that your god doesn't exist was ok?

Thanks for asking. Nope, I'm not saying that at all. There is no command in the Bible to kill all atheists and agnostics, all idolaters and everyone from another religion. There's nothing in the Bible even close to saying or implying that.

> It seems that your god considers leading people away from your religion to be a capital offense.

Leading people away from the truth that has eternal consequences is the issue that matters. For instance, the Israelites were not commanded to slaughter all the Egyptians, who didn't recognize YHWH, before they left Egypt. Abraham was not commanded to slaughter all the Canaanites in the land when he was there. Even Joshua was not commanded to slaughter all the Canaanites. The first part of the plan was to ask the city to surrender and to be incorporated into Israel. The second part of the plan was to drive them from the land, not kill them. So there is no teaching that murdering people who argue YHWH doesn't exist is OK. In the OT, in Israel, and I presume you're talking about Deuteronomy 13 again, leading people away from the truth to the point where they will suffer the judgment of God and experience his wrath is a profound offense, even more egregious than murder, rape, or slavery. Leading people away from the truth about God (assuming He exists, really is God, and there are eternal consequences to following or rejecting Him) is probably the infraction most worthy of capital punishment because this is the horror of the universe.

[TrakeM]

Ok, so are you saying that the death penalty was right to be used against people who try to lead others away from your religion/god?

What exactly would constitute leading someone away from your religion/god?

[jimwalton]

As I mentioned to you in my response to your question about Deuteronomy 13: "We don't execute infidels or any person who would lead us away from the true God because these laws (Deuteronomy) are given in the context of theocracy. Civil law (the capital crimes) was intended for Israel as a theocratic state. When Israel/Judah fell (586 BC), the civil law became defunct with it. The civil law was not intended to be carried out by every government in history. It is no longer something secular governments are responsible to carry out. It is no longer something the Church is supposed to carry out. It is not a law or rule for us as Christians."

[TrakeM]

As I mentioned to you in my response to your question about Deuteronomy 13: "We don't execute infidels or any person who would lead us away from the true God because these laws (Deuteronomy) are given in the context of theocracy. Civil law (the capital crimes) was intended for Israel as a theocratic state. When Israel/Judah fell (586 BC), the civil law became defunct with it. The civil law was not intended to be carried out by every government in history. It is no longer something secular governments are responsible to carry out. It is no longer something the Church is supposed to carry out. It is not a law or rule for us as Christians."

Theocracies are wrong because they don't respect people's right to freedom of religion. As mentioned in that thread, killing someone for suggesting switching religions is wrong. It has always been wrong. It's wrong now and it has always been wrong. Having a theocracy doesn't make what madmen in Iran do to people who suggest switching from islam to some other religion OK. There is nothing OK with killing someone for suggesting switching religions theocracy or no. Your god is clearly a moral monster. My belief that killing someone for advocating switching religions or advocating being an atheist has ALWAYS been wrong at all times in all places doesn't just make my sense of morality different from the bible. It makes it better.

[jimwalton]

> Theocracies are wrong because they don't respect people's right to freedom of religion.

You're operating under the assumption that religion is just an opinion formed on belief that has nothing to do with reality. A theocracy based on truth because there is such a being as God, He does want to rule the country with justice, peace, and righteousness, and the people are better off with such a sovereign—this isn't a matter of freedom of religion but following the truth. As I've explained fairly thoroughly, there's a vast difference between what ISIS is doing, what Iran is trying to do, and what ancient Israel was all about.

What we are dealing with here is truth vs. perspective/opinion. You are under the false assumption that all this religious mumbo-jumbo is just the mental wanderings of deluded people, and we should learn to live and let live. Well, I agree with the live and let live part, but what if, just what if, we are dealing with truth vs. false religion? As I've said, there are eternal consequences to mistakes here, so it matters utterly that people have repeated opportunities to hear the truth (tell as many as we can about Christianity), have repeated opportunities to respond to the truth, and that malicious efforts to suppress the truth be combatted for the sake of truth and people's eternal fate.

I know you don't agree with me; that's more than obvious. I'm explaining to you the rational behind what we as Christians believe. It's not the nonsense and violence of other religions. There are logical, scientific, and experiential reasons to believe in God. The case is far stronger than anything I've ever seen or heard postulated by an atheist. Faith, according to its biblical definition, is based in evidence and knowledge. The Bible is a reliable record and that's what gives it its authority.

In the real scenario, God is the one working towards people's salvation. He wants to save people, and therefore wants them to know the truth. It's the false prophet who is the murderer, telling people lies and then watching them walk off the cliff. The false prophet is the one who is the immoral monster; the false prophet is the perpetrator of evil.

[TrakeM]

You have yet to present any evidence that what you insist is truth is actually truth.

What if you are wrong about Shiva? This is a matter of eternal truth. You're going to hell if you don't believe in Shiva. We need to establish a theocracy based on Shiva that all will hear of Shiva and all must worship Shiva by law. This is truth. Or at least it's just as supported by scientific evidence as what you are claiming to be truth.

The only way to this isn't a matter of baseless belief is if you can provide real evidence that your religion is true that can't just as easily be used to support any number of other religions. You can't.

The bible by your own admission isn't a reliable record. It contains inaccuracies. You admitted that it contains inaccuracies in another thread.

If you have real valid scientific evidence then present it.

In a different thread you admitted that your bible contains inaccuracies. That means it's not written by an all knowing god because if it was that god would know about those inaccuracies and wouldn't have written them in the first place.

[jimwalton]

> If you have real valid scientific evidence then present it.

This is a major problem. It's not a scientific matter, though you seem to think it is. There's nothing scientific about it. It's a grave mistake to think that science is the proof of everything, or that science is the repository of all true knowledge. While the natural sciences are fantastic disciplines, it's just impossible that all knowledge is scientific. We know it's not. There's philosophy, economics, politics, literature, music, the arts, theology, jurisprudence, and even psychology, sociology, and anthropology that are not science. It may even be true that more knowledge is found outside of the sciences than inside them. We are not just limited to inductive reasoning. There is also deductive, abductive, abstract reasoning, and logic.

That's not to say that Christianity doesn't have evidences, because it does. First of all, there are about 10 logical grounds for believing in theism (cosmological, teleological, analogical, linguistic, from consciousness, etc.) that are far stronger than anything proposed by an atheist. There are several arguments from science (design, fine-tuning, the existence of reason, that science has more concord with theism than with atheism). And there are several arguments from experience. All of these give tremendous probability that theism is more likely to be correct than atheism.

As far as the credibility of the Christian God over Shiva, for instance, there are the evidences behind the resurrection of Jesus.

> The bible by your own admission isn't a reliable record.

By the way, I never said the Bible was not a reliable record. What I said was that it communicated the scientific worldview appropriate to the people addressed. It addressed them in the context of their understanding, accommodating their perspective. That doesn't make it unreliable, but within a particular cultural context.

You're so eager to label God as an immoral monster and the Bible as unreliable, but you have yet to posit any evidence yourself. What substantiation do you have that God doesn't exist?