I have been discussing the wrath of God in the Old Testament and have mentioned a point that here that I want to reemphasize, a point rarely observed by Bible readers (in fact I think I didn’t take much notice of it until recently).  In the Bible God sometimes punishes people because they misbehave toward others – kill, exploit, oppress, and so on; other times he punishes them because they do not worship him properly or at all. This is a difference worth considering because it goes to the heart of a fundamental matter: is God more worried about how people treat one another or about what they believe and do in relationship to him?   Is it all about him, or is it all about our fellow humans? Most Christians, I suppose, would say “both”!  But it’s interesting that different parts of the Bible tend to focus on one or the other, sometimes exclusively. I have talked, e.g., about the prophet Amos, who predicted the coming destruction of Israel because the elite among them had [...]

In this discussion of God’s wrath, I want to emphasize that it is not an isolated view of this or that biblical author in the Hebrew Bible.  It is a highly pervasive view.  God punishes those who disobey him, and he destroys anyone who might lead his people astray into disobedience. Here is how I talk about God’s active role in suffering in my book’s God’s Problem (Harper One, 2008)   ******************************   The thematic idea that God punishes disobedience drives the narrative of all five books of the Pentateuch.  In some ways it comes to a climax in the final book, Deuteronomy.  The title of this book literally means “Second Law”; in fact it is not a second law that is given in the book – instead, the book describes the second time the Law was given to the children of Israel by the prophet Moses.  The way the narrative sequence works is this.  In the book of Exodus God saved Israel from its slavery in Egypt and miraculously allowed it to escape the [...]

I have been discussing the book of Joshua and its descriptions of violence inflicted on others on orders of the God of Israel -- massive military campaigns and massacres (is there any reason NOT to call it a genocide of the inhabitants of Canaan?).  I have wanted to cover this material as background to the New Testament book of Revelation, where the slaughter is even more full scale.  One of my points is that the contrast between the “God of wrath” in the OT and the “God of love” in the NT does not really hold up, especially in view of the New Testament’s final book; another will be that the devastation of Revelation is indeed consistent with a common motif of Scripture.  I will be getting to that later, and emphasizing it, since at the same time it is inconsistent  with another motif of Scripture. But first I want to address a question lots of people typically have about these stories of the Conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua.   Did any of [...]

In my previous post on the narratives of the Old Testament, I talked about God’s complete intolerance with the “other” – the non-Israelite who might influence his people to worship other gods and not obey his laws.  The other had to be destroyed in order to preserve the purity of his people.  It did not matter if some, many, or most of these others were decent, loving human beings who cared for their children and did acts of kindness, doing the best to help others and be good people.  They were to be destroyed.  Every one of them in the city of Jericho: man, woman, child, and, well, the animals for good measure. The taking of Jericho is the first major battle of the book, and others follow suit.  To illustrate, here is the one that comes next, less known to Bible readers today but equally instructive (and gruesome) (and with an interesting military tactic). Again, this come from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press).   ******************************   The [...]

  In this thread I have been discussing the wrath of God as manifest in the writings of the Old Testament, in preparation for a later discussion of the divine judgments meted out in the New Testament book of Revelation. In a number of Old Testament narratives God asserts his raw divine power not because he is angry at the disobedience of his people but because he does not want them to be corrupted by outsiders, the “Others” who will lead them astray.  In one sense I suppose God could be said to be angry with these outsiders, but it is a little difficult to see why, since he has not revealed himself to them and they are simply worshiping the gods they and their ancestors have worshiped from time immemorial. But in any event, the outsiders need to be destroyed to prevent them from badly affecting the Israelites.  Nowhere is this theme played out more consistently and graphically than in the book of Joshua, the sixth book of the Hebrew Bible (right after the [...]