Is God Violent?
I recently read through a chronological Bible, starting with the New Testament and finishing with the Old. I was shaken by the violence described in the Old Testament. God’s repeated acts and threats of violence against His people and other nations lingered in my mind long after I was finished. I found it difficult to continue my Bible studies for several weeks.
I later recalled a book I had once stumbled across entitled Drunk with Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible. In it, the author (Steve Wells) painstakingly lists all the accounts of God killing people that are described in the Bible. Among many other things, these include God slowly killing an infant for the sins of his parents; destroying cities with fire from the sky; killing a prophet’s wife “with one blow”; swallowing entire families in the ground; and wiping out everyone but eight people on earth – which some people have described as the first genocide. It also includes accounts of God killing people through agents like snakes, bears, lions, hailstones, sickness, armies, and Satan.
I have thought a lot about the many episodes of God’s violence that are described in the Scriptures. If God is love, I wonder, how can he be so violent? Wells’ work and the freshness of the Biblical stories in my mind piqued my interest, so I decided to examine God’s killings myself and see what the analysis revealed. I used the verses listed in Drunk with Blood as my starting point and folded in information I had already collected in my studies. This article summarizes my findings, observations, and thoughts.
The Numbers
First, let’s look at the numbers. I identified 119 accounts of God using lethal violence in the Bible – 116 in the Old Testament and 3 in the New Testament. I only included accounts that were either explicitly attributed to God or where his involvement seems undoubtedly clear. These are distributed across time as follows.
Old Testament Numbers
Here are some numeric highlights from the Old Testament.
God’s deadly actions are described in 16 of the 39 books of the Old Testament. (This number would be higher if I included the additional accounts identified by Steve Wells.) Furthermore, almost all the books that don’t contain an explicit deadly action do include descriptions of divine violence, often in the form of God threatening future punishment/judgment. It appears that only the books of Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon do not include such violence. In the words of one pastor, “From start to finish in the Bible, God is seen as a warrior. There is divine violence [throughout] the Bible.”[1]
In 10 of the 116 accounts the Bible does not explicitly mention people dying but it can be deduced, like when God sent a severe three-and-a-half-year famine on the land in Elijah’s time.
62 killings involved the death of God’s chosen people or those close to a righteous person (e.g., Israelites, relatives of Abraham, and Job’s family), 52 involved “others” (e.g., non-Israelite people and nations), and 2 involved both groups.
75 cases clearly indicate, as part of the account, that people were killed because of their disobedience, rebellion, violence, complaining, foolishness and/or some other form of sin. In many of the remaining cases this can be deduced, and in some cases this reason for killing is given elsewhere in the Bible.
54 of the 64 times God’s people were killed it was because of their sin.
25 of the 54 times people from other nations were killed it was in response to them first threatening or attacking God’s people.
The people who died in a killing account included individuals, families, groups of people, entire cities, entire regions, armies, and everyone on earth except for eight people. The number of occurrences of each of these killings is tabulated below.
In 100 cases God used one or more agents to kill people. A tabulation is as follows.
In 55 accounts, the number of people is explicitly stated. Here’s the distribution.
There are many cases where the precise number of people killed is not stated and many of these involved a significant number of deaths. For example, the 14th chapter of the second book of Chronicles describes a battle where Israel routs a one-million-man Ethiopian army. Another example from the same book describes God causing a “vast army” to turn on itself, resulting in “dead bodies lying on the ground as far as [people] could see.”[2]
In four cases God hardened someone’s heart prior to killing people for their bad behavior, like when he hardened Pharoah’s heart before killing all the firstborn in Egypt.
At least eight times lots of people died because of one person’s sin, like when God killed 70,000 Israelites in three days because King David took a census.
Sixteen times a killing account explicitly notes that women and children were killed; four times an account notes that women were killed; one time an account notes that children were killed; and four times an account notes that a baby was killed. Also, there are numerous accounts where “everyone” in a city or cities was killed.
Two times people were killed to make a point: Satan killing Job’s family, and God killing Ezekiel’s wife.
New Testament Numbers
There is a dramatic drop-off in the number of killings attributed to God in the New Testament as compared to the Old Testament. A summary of them is as follows.
The death of a husband and wife who lied to the apostles in the very early days of the church.
King Herod.
The last account was when God allowed His son, Jesus, to be crucified.
An argument could be made that the Christians who seemed to die from taking the Lord’s Supper irreverently should be included in this list, but I chose not to because of the absence of an explicit link to God.
Initial Observations
At first blush, the numbers above reveal the following.
God is violent.
There is a significant disparity in the number of God’s lethal actions described in the Old and New Testaments.
The amount of killing described in the Old Testament is substantial.
Old Testament killings routinely involved the death of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of people. The three New Testament killings involved one or two people.
Old Testament killings are distributed fairly-evenly between Israelites and foreigners.
Killings involved a considerable array of numbers of people, killing agents, situations, etc.
The lethal episodes occurred at points in time stretching out over thousands of years.
On an unrelated note, it’s interesting to point out that the number of descriptions of miraculous healings in the Bible increased significantly from the Old Testament (23) to the New Testament (85)[3] while the number of God’s killings dropped dramatically.
There are authors who eloquently point out that the description of God in the Old Testament is far more loving and compassionate – and the depiction of God in the New Testament is far more judgmental – than generally recognized. I fully agree with that. Regardless, the fact that something changes moving from the Old to the New Testament is undeniable.
What God reveals about Himself and man
Before moving forward, it’s important to examine what God reveals about Himself in the Bible. At the most fundamental level, God is:
Holy – God is utterly unique, perfect, good, without equal, and beyond our comprehension.[4]
Love – God embodies love, is the source of all love, and is unfailing and lavish in His expression of love.[5]
Just – God is perfectly righteous/just and will not let any sin go unpunished. He is the embodiment of truth.[6]
The following sampling of scriptures referenced above capture the mixture of God’s love and righteousness and are worth highlighting:
Exodus 34:6-7 – The Lord passed in front of Moses calling out, “Yahweh! The Lord! The God of compassion and mercy! I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations. I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations.”
Jeremiah 9:24 – But those who wish to boast should boast in this alone: that they truly know me and understand that I am the Lord who demonstrates unfailing love and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth, and that I delight in these things. I, the Lord, have spoken!
Psalm 89:14 – Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Unfailing love and truth walk before you as attendants.
Deuteronomy 32:4 – [God] is the Rock; his deeds are perfect. Everything he does is just and fair. He is a faithful God who does no wrong; how just and upright he is!
John 1:14 (NIV) – The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us… full of grace and truth.
God also displays a wide range of emotions and character traits in the Bible. For example, He reveals that He is deeply hurt when we reject Him and/or the laws He established for our good. Speaking through the prophet Ezekiel, God told the Israelites that they would one day “recognize how hurt I am by their unfaithful hearts and lustful eyes…”[7] Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, God said, “I have long been silent; yes, I have restrained myself. But now, like a woman in labor, I will cry and groan and pant.”[8]
Our rejection of God and our sin also stir up anger in God. For example, the first book of Kings reveals that, “the people of Israel had done many evil things, arousing the Lord’s anger”;[9] and the apostle Paul wrote, “[the] anger of God will fall on all who disobey him.”[10]
Fortunately, God is also patient and slow to anger as we saw in Exodus 34, and His anger is short-lived. Speaking through the prophet Joel, God reveals that He is “eager to relent and not punish,”[11] like when He “changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction [of Nineveh] he had threatened.”[12] Regarding the fleeting nature of His anger, King David wrote, “his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime!”[13]
It’s clear that God shares many emotions and character traits with humans – like love, compassion, hurt, and anger. There is a difference, though, in how we embody and express these emotions and traits.
When God made humans, he made them in His own image giving all people the capacity to express His extraordinary love and righteousness. God also gave humans free will and the ability to choose their own path. Unfortunately, man chose to turn his back on God and pursue his own desires, which allowed sin and its consequences to enter the world. Man’s heart is deceitful, and his mind is hostile toward God.[14]
The Bible tells us that all people are born with a sinful nature, that our desires are never satisfied, and that this leads to contentions, strife, and wars.[15] Sin leads to all sorts of undesirable consequences including, ultimately, death.[16] We may not understand why, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
So, while humans share many character traits with God, the two differ dramatically. This is captured nicely in the following Bible verse.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”[17]
Focusing specifically on anger, the Bible reveals that there are two types of anger in the world. Consider the words of pastor/author Paul Tripp regarding God’s anger.
One of the necessary components of our broken world is anger. Because if this world is broken, if it's not the way it's supposed to be, then it's right at points to be motivated by anger. Anger is not just a bad thing. Anger is also a very, very good thing – and we better know the difference. God's grace is not supposed to make us un-angry. God's grace is supposed to make us good and angry at the same time
You wouldn't want God not to care. You wouldn't want him to be complacent. You wouldn't want him to be passive. You want him to be angry because that anger is literally the hope of the universe.
Imagine a mom watching her child being beaten up. Imagine that mom not caring. Imagine that mom not going out and stopping it. Imagine that mom not being filled with anger. You would say there's something horribly wrong inside that mother in the same way you don't want to ever relate to or worship a God who is incapable of anger. That God would not be a good God. That would be horrific. How could you look at the brokenness of the world and be complacent? How could you look at that brokenness and say it's OK? It's not OK.
Because [God’s] anger is driven by his love, you cannot separate God's anger from his love. The reason he's angry is because he loves. Because he cares so deeply and fully for the world that he's made. Because he cares so deeply and fully for the people he's made, He's angry.[18]
But there’s also another anger – man’s anger – and it’s quite different from God’s. The Bible reveals that, "...the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God."[19] Man’s anger is an unholy anger. Humans think our way is best and we’ll do whatever we can to get it. Consider the words of James, the brother of Jesus.
What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. (Emphasis mine)
Man’s anger is driven by his sinful/selfish desires, and they lead him to often behave in a destructive and harmful manner. God’s anger and wrath are different. They are a holy response to the intrusion of injustice and evil into our world.
Understanding the Bible
Another important thing to consider is our understanding of the Bible. Some people say that the Bible is the perfect and inerrant word of God and that it should be interpreted literally. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this statement over the years.
The books of the Bible were written between 2,000 and 3,500 years ago, in cultural settings that differ dramatically from our modern world, and in languages other than English. It would be foolish to think that we can read a modern translation – especially of the Old Testament texts – and have a perfect understanding of what its authors were trying to convey.
In the words of two well-respected Old Testament scholars, “The Bible is written for us… but it is not written to us… The message transcends culture, but it is given in a form that is fully ensconced in the ancient cultural river of Israel.”[20]
The so-called currents of our modern cultural river are dominated by ideas and ways of thinking like human rights, freedom, democracy, capitalism, and the scientific method. The currents of ancient, Old Testament cultures included things like the reality of the spirit world, the existence and control of the gods, the role of kingship, and the importance of community identity. Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) gods and goddesses were believed to be violent and capricious, and ascribing violence to them was a primary form of worship.
Furthermore, the Bible reflects various genres and literary styles. Some of its writings contain historical and other forms of narrative, in other places it’s poetic, and elsewhere it contains legal and other forms of discourse.
Finally, the Bible authors used a broad range of symbolism, imagery, exaggeration, hyperbole, metaphor, and allegory in their writings. Both cultural context and genre will have a significant impact on how these should be interpreted.
Consider the following from GotQuestions.org:
The Bible is a work of literature. Literature comes in different genres, or categories based on style, and each is read and appreciated differently from another. For example, to confuse a work of science fiction with a medical textbook would cause many problems – they must be understood differently. And both science fiction and a medical text must be understood differently from poetry. Therefore, accurate exegesis and interpretation takes into consideration the purpose and style of a given book or passage of Scripture. In addition, some verses are meant figuratively, and proper discernment of these is enhanced by an understanding of genre. An inability to identify genre can lead to serious misunderstanding of Scripture.[21]
A relevant example is in order. Many people consider the Biblical account of Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan to be a story of genocide. While modern Bible translations use terms like “completely destroyed” and “utterly destroyed” in the Biblical narratives, the original Hebrew words (haram and herem) can also refer to the elimination of identity. Consider the following insights from the same two Biblical scholars cited above.
We suggest that the action [of the Israelites was] comparable to what we might try to accomplish by disbanding an organization. Doing so does not typically entail disposing of all the members, but it means that nobody is able to say “I am a member of X” anymore. After World War II, when the Allies destroyed the Third Reich, they did not kill every individual German soldier or citizen; they killed the leaders specifically and deliberately (compare to the litany of kings put to the sword in Joshua 10 - 13) and also burned the flags, toppled the monuments, dismantled the government and chain of command, disarmed the military, occupied the cities, banned the symbols, vilified the ideology, and persecuted any attempt to resurrect it – but most of the people were left alone... This is what it means to herem an identity.[22]
A careful review of conquest texts seems to indicate that this is what happened.[23] One interesting example is embedded in the following instructions God gave to the Israelites before they entered Canaan.
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, he will clear away many nations ahead of you: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. These seven nations are greater and more numerous than you. When the Lord your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. You must not intermarry with them. Do not let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters, for they will lead your children away from me to worship other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will burn against you, and he will quickly destroy you. This is what you must do. You must break down their pagan altars and shatter their sacred pillars. Cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols. For you are a holy people, who belong to the Lord your God. Of all the people on earth, the Lord your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure.[24] [Italics mine]
An obvious question that arises from this scripture is, how can the Israelites intermarry with people they have completely destroyed? It’s not possible.
Following the conquest, the book of Judges records that, “[The] people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, and they intermarried with them. Israelite sons married their daughters, and Israelite daughters were given in marriage to their sons. And the Israelites served their gods.”[25]
Once again, how do you intermarry with people you have completely destroyed?
Finally, consider God’s warning to the nation of Judah through the prophet Jeremiah in 605 B.C., 300-plus years after the Israelite conquest of Canaan.
I will gather together all the armies of the north under King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, whom I have appointed as my deputy. I will bring them all against this land and its people and against the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy you and make you an object of horror and contempt and a ruin forever.[26]
It’s a well-known fact of history supported by Biblical accounts that the people of Judah were not completely destroyed. In three separate assaults, many of their residents were carried off into slavery in Babylon and a remnant of the people stayed behind in their land. Some of the captives and their descendants eventually returned to Jerusalem several decades later and began rebuilding.
Now, while all of this is interesting, the fact of the matter is that the Israelites still killed a lot of Canaanites – and there were a lot of other apparently God-initiated killings described elsewhere in the Old Testament. What’s important for now is that we realize that a much more careful/thoughtful reading of the Bible is in order; that these stories are sometimes far less egregious than our modern minds think they are; and that often really bad people were being killed for just reasons.
The First Appearance of Violence
After God created Adam, He placed him in paradise and gave him one simple rule. He said, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden—except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”[27] When Adam and Eve later ate the forbidden fruit, they chose death.
Adam and Eve’s first child (Cain) killed his brother in jealousy.[28] This is the first act of violence described in the Bible – man-on-man violence. Cain chose violence and death.
As mankind multiplied, the Bible notes the following in the book of Genesis:
The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.
Now God saw that the earth had become corrupt and was filled with violence. God observed all this corruption in the world, for everyone on earth was corrupt. So God said to Noah, “I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the earth with violence. Yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth![29]
This is an incredibly sobering observation. Evil, corruption, and violence were occurring on a grand scale and God decided that a divine reset was in order. He selected the most righteous man in the world (Noah) and his family and wiped out everyone else in a great flood. One person I know likens this to “blowing up” a professional football team and rebuilding around Tom Brady or doing the same with a basketball team and rebuilding around Michael Jordan – but admittedly at a far greater cost.
And the results? Well, not good, which has been borne out by thousands of years of violence. Clearly, the Devine reset didn’t work.
God later chose one man (Abraham) through which he would create a nation of “chosen people” known as Israel. God chose Israel to fulfill an oath He swore to their ancestors to deliver them from slavery in Egypt; to bless the world by being the line through which Jesus the Messiah would be born; and to point others to God.[30]
God instituted laws and regulations by which His people should live – laws that offered peace and prosperity if obeyed, and all sorts of problems if not.[31] Consider God’s words to the Israelites as they stood on the verge of entering the Promised Land.
Now listen! Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and to keep his commands, decrees, and regulations by walking in his ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy.
But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live a long, good life in the land you are crossing the Jordan to occupy.
Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. This is the key to your life.[32]
Much of the remainder of the Old Testament reveals God’s people ignoring this and many other warnings, falling into hardships as a result, crying out to God, and being rescued by God. This cycle repeats over and over.
Roughly 800 years after the Israelites occupied the land of Canaan, the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “’Israel and Judah have done nothing but wrong since their earliest days. They have infuriated me with all their evil deeds,’ says the Lord.”[33] Not long after that, the prophet Ezekiel records God declaring, “The people’s wickedness and pride have blossomed to full flower… [The] land is bloodied by terrible crimes. Jerusalem is filled with violence.”[34] Ezekiel even described Jerusalem as a “city of murderers” at one point.[35]
Clearly, the chosen nation approach didn’t work.
A Violent God
There are some who say we should not want a non-violent God. Consider the oft-quoted words of UCLA Professor Miroslav Volf.
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath?
God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them.
My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry.
Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them?
Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[36]
A Washington, D.C. Metro area pastor puts it this way:
In the face of evil and suffering, [and] terrible injustice, would we really want a God who is calm and unmoved by that? Do we really want a God who is completely without violence? Is that something we want?
Now, in general… it is those of us Christians, followers of Jesus, who are living in the comfortable West [who] read about the violence in the Bible and a violent God and [are] shocked and embarrassed by that. But it is those people who are living under constant oppression, under constant threats of violence, who are suffering, who are actually praying for God to come with divine violence and to bring a divine deliverance. They're hoping for that. They're welcoming that.[37]
Certainly, many of the cases of divine violence in the Old Testament were brought about by violent injustice or the threat of violence. As we saw above, 25 of the 54 times the OT describes God taking lethal action against non-Israelites it was in response to them attacking or threatening His people. But what about the other 29 times? And what about the many times God killed people (particularly Israelites) for what we might consider a small infraction or for something that simply doesn’t make sense to us?
In his book God Behaving Badly, David Lamb writes that, “[God] used violence only to punish the wicked or to protect the weak, and He ultimately promoted peace within Israel and between Israel and her neighbors.”[38] (Emphasis mine.)
Among other things, Lamb examines an episode of lethal violence that I have struggled to understand for quite some time, i.e., the killing of a man named Uzziah for reaching out to keep the Ark of the Covenant from falling off a cart. Lamb deftly points out the criticality of properly transporting something so supernaturally powerful precisely in accordance with God’s instructions (Israel was ignoring those instructions); the disrespect for God shown in the way the Israelites were handling the ark; and the lack of concern the Israelites demonstrated for their relationship with God through their actions. Lamb writes, “[God] gets mad to protect His law, His honor, and His relationship with His people.”[39]
I felt better, in a sense, about the story after reading Lamb’s critique – but I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with it. I’m even more uncomfortable, though, with stories like the one involving David’s census and the mass loss of life that resulted from it.
The episode is briefly described in two places in the Bible and offers little insight into why 70,000 people had to die for David’s actions. The account in the first book of Samuel notes that God’s anger was “once again” burning against Israel and records God telling David to “Go and count the people of Israel and Judah.”[40] The account in the first book of Chronicles does not note God’s anger and says that Satan “rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel.”[41]
Both accounts note the unease of David’s military commander, Joab, with the effort but don’t explain why. The account in Chronicles does, though, record that Joab said the census would “cause Israel to sin” and that he was “so distressed” over David’s request that he did not complete the full census.[42] Why Joab felt this way is never explained.
Samuel notes that, after taking the census, “David’s conscience began to bother him. And he said to the Lord, ‘I have sinned greatly by taking this census. Please forgive my guilt, Lord, for doing this foolish thing.’”[43] Chronicles records that, “God was very displeased with the census, and he punished Israel for it. Then David said to God, ‘I have sinned greatly by taking this census. Please forgive my guilt for doing this foolish thing.’”[44]
Both accounts describe God giving David a choice of three punishments and how David’s choice, a plague, killed 70,000 people. Seventy thousand people! This is unfathomable (as are the totals of many of God’s other lethal actions) when read by my modern eyes. Heck, it seems unfathomable when read by anyone’s eyes.
Samuel records David saying, “I’m in a desperate situation! But let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great. Do not let me fall into human hands.”[45] God then proceeds to kill 70,000 Israelites. This does not appear merciful to me.
The slaughter did not seem to sit right with David, either, when he’s recorded saying, “I am the one who called for the census! I am the one who has sinned and done wrong! But these people are as innocent as sheep—what have they done? O Lord my God, let your anger fall against me and my family, but do not destroy your people.”[46]
Frankly, given the staggering loss of life that resulted from David’s actions, it’s disconcerting that God would inspire such a sparse description of the event.
Some people in the God-is-violent camp say God made us so He can do as He pleases with us, whether we understand/like it or not. The fact is, we’re all going to die someday anyway and the end for most people won’t be pretty as it is. Others say that the punishments described in the Old Testament are the just actions of a holy and righteous God and we are simply getting what we deserve. And some say the punishments described in the Old Testament are not really as bad as they look.
While I see the reasoning in these and other viewpoints, I have come to appreciate an alternative explanation for the violent depictions of God in the Bible that is far more harmonious with God’s character as revealed throughout the Bible and in the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
A Non-Violent God
Some people believe that God is, in fact, non-violent and that the violent depictions of Him in the Bible can be explained when properly framed. One person who has done a tremendous amount of work developing this view is a pastor/theologian named Greg Boyd.
In 2017, Boyd published a two-volume, 1,492-page tome on the subject.[47] Not long after, he published a shorter version (250 pages) summarizing his position. At the risk of being overly simplistic, I’ll outline the main points of his reasoning.
First, Jesus is the ultimate, perfect reflection of God. This was captured by the Apostle Paul when he wrote, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…”[48] (Emphasis mine.) Therefore, everything in the Bible should be viewed through the lens of Jesus.
Boyd writes, “…the Bible itself instructs us to base our mental representation of God solely on Jesus Christ” and that “Jesus [is] the key that unlocks the revelatory content of every passage of scripture.”[49] Boyd asks, “…how do [the] sometimes horrifically ugly portraits [of God in the Old Testament] testify to Christ when interpreted through the looking-glass of Jesus’ life, and especially of his sacrificial death?”[50]
Second, there is overwhelming evidence in both the Old and New Testaments of the loving, non-violent, self-sacrificial way of God and Jesus. God repeatedly describes himself as gracious, merciful, compassionate, forgiving, and rich in unfailing love.[51] The Apostle John writes simply, “God is love,”[52] and he summarizes God’s radically, self-sacrificial love by writing, “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us.”[53] Since God gave up His life on a cross, Boyd says God displays “cross-like” or “cruciform” character.
Jesus told His disciples, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father!”[54] He said love your enemies and people you despise, blessed are the peacemakers, and turn the other cheek.[55] He fellowshipped with prostitutes and tax collectors, lovingly and respectfully interacted with women, and spoke admiringly of despised Samaritans and Roman soldiers. He spoke of God’s common, indiscriminate grace that gives rain and sunshine to the good and bad alike. He washed the feet of the people who would abandon Him the night before His crucifixion, tamped down the resistance to His arrest (even healing the violently severed ear of one of his detainers), and allowed Himself to be unjustly beaten and crucified.
This last point is huge. The expression of God’s love reaches its peak in the crucifixion. The same God who could have called down twelve legions of angels (78,000 of them!) to save Himself instead cried out on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”[56] Jesus had all the power to do whatever he wanted, and yet he chose to submit to our violence; and John 13:15 records Jesus saying, “do as I have done for you.”
Third, the arrival, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus along with his importance over all other Biblical revelation helps us to see the Old Testament from a different/better perspective, much like the ending of movies like the The Sixth Sense help us to better understand everything that happened up to that point.
Boyd writes, “If we believe that Jesus fully reveals what God is really like, we have no choice but to suspect that something else must be going on when God appears to act violently in the Old Testament… This is what I'm doing to the Old Testament’s violent portraits of God: I'm asking, how do these sometimes horrifically ugly portraits testify to Christ when interpreted through the looking glass of Jesus’ life, and especially of his sacrificial death?”[57]
Fourth, according to Boyd, “we know that God's people in Old Testament times were generally stubborn, had no real knowledge of God, and tended to make God in their own twisted image.”[58] This led them distort God’s revelations, including inaccurate depictions of God in the Bible.
Quoting the 3rd century theologian Novatian, Boyd writes, “God is not mediocre, but the people's understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people's mind is limited.”[59] Boyd also cites 4th century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus who “argued that God needed to allow aspects of his people’s fallen culture to get mixed in with his self-revelation, for otherwise they would not have been capable of receiving it.”[60]
So, God allowed inaccurate depictions of Himself to be included in the Old Testament as a form of accommodation. This is the first of four key aspects of God that are revealed on the cross of Jesus Christ. Boyd writes:
I hold that God has always revealed his true character and will as much as possible while stooping to accommodate the fallen and culturally conditioned state of his people as much as necessary. In his love, God was willing to allow his people to think of him along the lines of an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) warrior deity, to the degree this was necessary, in order to progressively influence them to the point where they eventually would be capable of receiving the truth that he is actually radically unlike these violent ANE deities. In this sense, I could agree with Gregory and say that, by making gradual changes, God beguiled his people into the gospel, wherein it was revealed that God would rather be killed by his enemies than kill them.[61]
To support his position, Boyd tells the story of a missionary couple working among an African tribe that performed female genital mutilation. While the missionaries were horrified and emotionally devastated by the practice, they found it necessary to withhold their objections for three wrenching years while they built relationships with tribe members and ministered to them. Only then were they able reveal the barbaric nature of the ritual that had been embedded in that culture for hundreds of years. Boyd notes:
[They] did whatever they could to make the best of a terrible situation. Among other things, they acquired anesthesia and pain medication for the girls and better surgical knives for those who performed the cutting... [The] missionaries had to be willing to appear guilty of condoning, and even assisting in, a sinful practice they actually despised if they hoped to eventually free these people from this practice... [This] couple had been heroically accommodating [the tribe’s] sinful practice out of love, and only then could [tribe members] appreciate the depth of grief the missionaries had quietly endured for these three years. We can [also] think of God as a heavenly missionary to our fallen and all-too-barbaric planet.”[62]
Boyd calls it a “Divine accommodation” when God stoops to allow his people to view him in an inaccurate, harsh light. He writes, “[These] sub-Christlike portraits bear witness to the glorious truth that God has always been stooping to bear the sin of his people and to thereby take on ugly appearances that reflect the ugliness of this sin… [Accommodating] sin was a foundational aspect of the Heavenly Missionary’s strategy in the Old Testament... [This] is what God was up to when he allowed himself to be depicted as a violent ANE warrior deity in the written witness to his missionary activity.”[63] Boyd defines this as the “first and most fundamental aspect of the revelation of God on the cross.”[64]
A second key aspect involves how God actually judges sin and overcomes evil. Boyd writes, “[It] is possible to affirm that God justly judges sin while denying that God ever acts violently in the process… [When] it comes to understanding how God judges sin and evil, Christians have almost always assumed that God must do it the way humans have always done it and the way we've believed other gods do it: God must resort to violence… This is a classic example of people unwittingly making God in their own image.”[65]
Boyd goes on to describe God’s “Aikido-style of judgement” where He uses evil to punish evil. Boyd writes, “contrary to what many people think, the Bible generally construes God's punishment of sin as organic in nature. God doesn't impose punishments on people. The destructive consequences of sin are built into the sin itself. And this is why God only needs to withdraw and let sin run its self-destructive course when he judges people.”[66]
God doesn’t need to resort to violence to judge and express His wrath, and Boyd highlights various examples – chief of them being the crucifixion of Jesus. Boyd writes:
The truth is that, according to the NT, God the father didn't need to engage in any violence to have Jesus suffer in our place...
The only thing God the father did when Jesus suffered the judgment that we deserved was withdraw his protection to allow other agents who were “bent on destruction” (Isaiah 51:13) to do what they wanted to do with Jesus. So, for example, Paul says that God did not “spare his own son” but “gave him up for us all” (Romans 8:32, emphasis added), and God “delivered him over to death for our sins” (Romans 4:25, emphasis added).[67]
This divine abandonment was the cup of God's wrath from which Jesus freely chose to drink... Jesus suffered the death-consequences of sin, which included the curse of being separated from God. This is the wrath that Jesus experienced, and it involved no anger or violence on God's part.[68]
The third aspect of Boyd’s “looking-glass cross” involves how the decisive battle in the age-long conflict between God and Satan helps us explain passages where God is depicted as directly engaging in violence. The fourth aspect involves addressing how a number of people whom God entrusted with great power wound up abusing it. For the purpose of brevity, I won’t cover these two aspects in detail here.
Boyd admirably supports these assertions with numerous examples in Scripture. Let’s examine one we have already considered – Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan.
Two months after the Israelites left Egypt – and rough forty years before they entered the Promised Land – God told Moses the following:
[My] angel will go before you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites, so you may live there… I will send my terror ahead of you and create panic among all the people whose lands you invade. I will make all your enemies turn and run. I will send terror[69] ahead of you to drive out the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites. But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals would multiply and threaten you. I will drive them out a little at a time until your population has increased enough to take possession of the land.[70]
This is the first time God communicates with Moses how the people living in the Promised Land will be removed, and it does not involve a command for the Israelites to massacre them. Instead, God repeatedly says He will drive the people out ahead of the Israelites. Also, consider God’s words a short time later.
The Lord said to Moses, “Get going, you and the people you brought up from the land of Egypt. Go up to the land I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I told them, ‘I will give this land to your descendants.’ And I will send an angel before you to drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.
But listen carefully to everything I command you today. Then I will go ahead of you and drive out the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites… I will drive out the other nations ahead of you and expand your territory, so no one will covet and conquer your land while you appear before the Lord your God three times each year.[71]
Once again, God talks about driving the people out ahead of the Israelites rather than commanding genocide. There are additional verses that far precede commands to destroy the Canaanites, like Leviticus 18:25 where God says He will cause the land to “vomit out” its residents, and Leviticus 20:23 where God again says He will drive out the land’s residents before the Israelites arrive.
Boyd writes the following about these scriptures:
All these passages suggest that the original intent of the conquest implied the dissipation of the Canaanite population, who had the possibility of emigrating outside the promised land.
So, what happened to these nonviolent relocation strategies? And how are we to explain the mind-boggling leap from these gradual and entirely nonviolent plans to the plan to massacre every living thing as an act of worship? Did God suddenly experience a psychotic mood change?[72]
[Since] we know that God's people in Old Testament times were generally stubborn, had no real knowledge of God, and tended to make God in their own twisted image, should we be surprised to find God sometimes being depicted in twisted ways in the God-breathed record of his missionary activity?[73]
Boyd points out that no one other than Moses heard God’s directions for occupying the Promised Land and that Joshua received his commands from Moses.[74] Boyd posits that when Yahweh said, “I want my people to dwell in the land of Canaan,” what Moses’ fallen and culturally conditioned ears heard was, “I want you to slaughter the Canaanites so my people can dwell in the land of Canaan.”[75]
It's also worth noting that the apostle Paul is quoted in the book of Acts as saying that it was God who took down seven nations in Canaan over a 450-year period (see Acts 13:19-20); and the author of the book of Judges quotes God saying, “I drove out your enemies and gave you their land” (see Judges 6:9). A psalmist also wrote of God, “You drove out the pagan nations by your power and gave all the land to our ancestors... They did not conquer the land with their swords; it was not their own strong arm that gave them victory” (see Psalm 44:2-3).
This example is just one of many that Boyd thoughtfully addresses in Cross Vision. (Unfortunately, he doesn’t include the Bible’s account of the deaths that resulted from David’s census – which we discussed above.) For the sake of brevity, I’ll conclude my review of Boyd’s work for now and will be sure to double back if, and when, I review Crucifixion of the Warrior God.
Questions and Conclusions
I recently listened to a sermon by Tim Keller, a New York City-based pastor/theologian, where he discusses a rather curious Bible verse. In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses to tell the Israelites, “You are a stubborn and rebellious people. If I were to travel with you for even a moment, I would destroy you.”[76] Consider Keller’s words:
There's an incompatibility of nature between God and us. If you [put] alternating current and direct current together, if you [put] acid and base together, if you [put] fire and water together, there's an incompatibility of nature so that they can't live together. One has to consume the other, and the bigger one consumes the [smaller one]. So, for example, if you have a little bit of fire [come] into contact with a deluge of water, poof, there goes the fire. Or, on the other hand, if you have a huge fire and you throw a little bit of water onto it, poof, it's vaporized. And if you bring infinite, majestic holiness – the holiness of God – into contact with finite, sinful creatures… poof. God [is saying], you can't live with me. I can't bring you near me, it might destroy you.[77]
Shortly after God revealed the dangers of traveling with the Israelites, Moses asked God to show him His “glorious presence,” and God obliges – but in a limited/protective way.
Many years later, God came to earth and lived among us as Jesus Christ. But even this did not eliminate all confusion and questions. In the words of the Apostle Paul, “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but [when Christ returns] we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.”[78] The bottom line is, until Jesus returns there will be many questions we can only answer partially, and some we cannot answer at all – like why is violence even a thing?
One extremely simple way of asserting that God is violent is to conclude that, since we are made in God’s image, and we are violent, God must also be violent. On the flip side, Jesus is the exact representation of God, and the example He set was almost utterly nonviolent. I say almost because He had His moments, like when He cleared the Temple – and when He told parables about disrespected kings having rebellious people slaughtered before them.
The last point is huge. Jesus, and the Bible in general, use very violent language to describe the fate of people who reject God on judgement day. Boyd does not address this in Cross Vision and I still have not resolved it in my mind.
While I walked away from Cross Vision largely accepting Boyd’s assertions, I still have my doubts. This leads me to wonder if there is some paradoxical way that God can be both violent and nonviolent at the same time. There are certainly examples of other paradoxes in the Bible, like when Paul drifts back and forth between declaring he is and is not a slave to sin in the book of Romans. My favorite example is something Paul wrote to the church at Corinth where he states, “Our hearts ache, but we always have joy. We are poor, but we give spiritual riches to others. We own nothing, and yet we have everything.”[79]
I even wondered at one point if God’s violence in the Old Testament was God responding to man’s violence with like violence in an effort to show how ugly and futile such actions are. He was, in a sense, speaking man’s language and demonstrating that it is ineffective in bringing about meaningful, lasting change in our hearts and behavior.
After a period where God was silent for hundreds of years in the Biblical record, Jesus Christ came on the scene and showed us a far better way than violence; a way where the most powerful being there is chose to subject Himself to the violence of the people He created to demonstrate a dramatically countercultural – and far more satisfying – way of living characterized by radical self-sacrifice.
In the postscript of Cross Vision, Boyd recounts the story of a woman who approached him following one of his sermons about the conclusions he reached while studying the Old Testament’s violent depictions of God. Boyd quotes this woman as follows:
All of my life I've tried to believe God was as beautiful as Jesus reveals him to be, but I could never fully give my heart to him. It was like I was courting a man who gave me every reason to believe he would make the greatest husband in the world but whom I knew had once slaughtered a classroom full of children… [Today], you helped me see that I don't need to believe God ever ordered babies to be massacred! I can finally let myself believe God really is as beautiful as the cross reveals him to be! I can finally trust God with my entire heart![80]
I had a similar reaction to Boyd’s work and, regardless of how my thinking evolves, I will work to view everything in the Bible from now on through the looking glass of Jesus’ radical sacrifice on the cross.
FOOTNOTES
[1] I Want to Believe, But... The Bible is Full of Violence | Grace Community Church (trygrace.org), 6:50 mark.
[2] 2 Chronicles 20.
[3] See Healing Plunge: An In-Depth Analysis of Healing in the Bible: Melick, Ed: 9781733128254: Amazon.com: Books
[4] See 1 Samuel 2:2, Isaiah 43:10-11, Jeremiah 10:10, Psalm 18:30, Psalm 119:68, Isaiah 55:8-9, Revelation 4:8, Isaiah 6:3, Ecclesiastes 11:5, Deuteronomy 32:4.
[5] See 1 John 4:7-10, Exodus 34:6-7, Psalm 89:14, Jeremiah 9:24.
[6] See Psalm 71:15-17, Psalm 89:14, John 14:6, Isaiah 5:16, Jeremiah 9:24, Daniel 4:37.
[7] Ezekiel 6:9.
[8] Isaiah 42:14. Also, see Jeremiah 48:31 and Micah 1:8.
[9] 2 kings 17:11.
[10] Ephesians 5:6.
[11] Joel 2:13.
[12] Jonah 3:10.
[13] Psalm 30:5.
[14] Jeremiah 17:9, Romans 8:7.
[15] Romans 3:9-12&23, Ephesians 2:3; Psalm 51:5; Genesis 8:21, Proverbs 27:20, James 4:1-3, Genesis 6:5,11; 2 Chronicles 7:30,36; Psalm 53:3; Ecclesiastes 3:18; Isaiah 64:6; Matthew 15:19; Mark 7:20-23; John 2:24-25; Romans 8:7; Colossians 3:5; 2 Timothy 3:2-6.
[16] Genesis 2:16-17 & 3:6-7.
[17] Isaiah 55:8-9.
[18] How to be Good and Angry conference CD, Paul Tripp, Paul Tripp Ministries.
[19] James 1:20.
[20] John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2017.
[21] How should the different genres of the Bible impact how we interpret the Bible? | GotQuestions.org
[22] John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2017.
[23] See Deuteronomy 7:3; Joshua 15:63, 16:10, 17:11-13; and Judges 1:19-36, 3:1-6.
[24] Deuteronomy 7:1-6.
[25] Judges 3:5-6.
[26] Jeremiah 25:9.
[27] Genesis 2:16-17.
[28] Genesis 4:1-8.
[29] Genesis 6:5-6,11-12.
[30] Deuteronomy 7:6-9; John 3:16 and 4:22; Genesis 12:1-3 and 22:18; Amos 3:1-2; Isaiah 11:12, 43:1&10, 49:6 and 60:2-3; 2 Samuel 7:23; Deuteronomy 4:6; Romans 3:2-3. (See What is God's Purpose for Israel | Why does Israel exist? (factsaboutisrael.uk))
[31] Psalm 147:19-20.
[32] Deuteronomy 20:15-20.
[33] Jeremiah 32:30.
[34] Ezekiel 7:10-11,23.
[35] Ezekiel 24:6,7,9.
[36] Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2006.
[37] See I Want to Believe, But... The Bible is Full of Violence | Grace Community Church (trygrace.org).
[38] David Lamb, God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist, and Racist?
[39] Ibid.
[40] 2 Samuel 24:1.
[41] 1 Chronicles 21:1.
[42] 1 Chronicles 21:3,6.
[43] 2 Samuel 24:9-10.
[44] 1 Chronicles 21:7-8.
[45] 2 Samuel 24:14.
[46] 1 Chronicles 21:17.
[47] Greg Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light if the Cross, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017.
[48] Hebrews 1:3 (NIV).
[49] Greg Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017.
[50] Ibid.
[51] See Exodus 34:6-7, Jonah 4:2-3, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8-11, Psalm 145:8-9, Nehemiah 9:17, and Joel 2:13-14 for OT examples.
[52] 1 John 4:8.
[53] 1 John 3:16.
[54] John 14:9.
[55] Luke 6:27, Luke 10:25-37, Matthew 5:9, Matthew 5:38-39.
[56] Matthew 26:53, Luke 23:34 (NIV).
[57] Greg Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017, Pages xii and 23.
[58] Ibid, Page 107. For scripture regarding the Israelite’s lack of knowledge about God’s true character and will, see Isaiah 1:3; Jeremiah 4:22, 5:4-5, and 9:3; and Hosea 4:1,6.
[59] Ibid, Page 72.
[60] Ibid, Page 72.
[61] Ibid, Pages 73-74.
[62] Ibid, Page 84.
[63] Ibid, Page 96-97.
[64] Ibid, Page 135.
[65] Ibid, Page 132 and 137.
[66] Ibid, Page 148-149.
[67] Ibid, Page 139.
[68] Ibid, Page 140.
[69] The King James version of this verse says, “And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee.”
[70] Exodus 23:23,27-30.
[71] Exodus 33:1-2 and 34:11,24.
[72] Greg Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017, Page 115.
[73] Ibid, Page 107. For scripture regarding the Israelite’s lack of knowledge about God’s true character and will, see Isaiah 1:3; Jeremiah 4:22, 5:4-5, and 9:3; and Hosea 4:1,6.
[74] Joshua 11:12,15,20 and 22:2.
[75] Greg Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017, Page 117.
[76] Exodus 33:5.
[77] Moses’ Prayer for God (gospelinlife.com), October 14, 2007, 24:30 mark.
[78] 1 Corinthians 13:12.
[79] 2 Corinthians 6:10.
[80] Greg Boyd, Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017, Page 247.