Hard Questions: What do we do with the violent God of the Old Testament

This is the one that keeps people up at night.

God commands the slaughter of the Canaanites — men, women, and children. God hardens Pharaoh's heart and then punishes him for the hardness God created. God kills Uzzah on the spot for touching the Ark of the Covenant to keep it from falling. God orders the execution of people for gathering wood on the Sabbath. The God of the flood drowns the world.

If you've read the Old Testament with any seriousness, you've run into this. And the answers the church usually offers don't quite cover it. This article will not cover it either. But I want to take the problem seriously, lay out the real options, and tell you where I land — while being honest that where I land is not where everyone lands, and that the question remains genuinely open among careful readers.

First, the options. There are several positions serious theologians have taken, and they're worth naming clearly.

Marcion's solution — rejected by the early church, but persistent. Marcion of Sinope, a second-century theologian, concluded that the God of the Old Testament and the God Jesus revealed were simply two different beings — the violent creator God of Israel versus the loving Father Jesus proclaimed. He threw out the Old Testament entirely. The early church rejected this as heresy, and for good reason: Jesus himself quotes the Old Testament constantly, calls its God his Father, and says he came not to abolish but to fulfill. But Marcion keeps getting reinvented, and it's worth naming why — because the problem he was responding to is real.

The hyperbole argument. Several contemporary Old Testament scholars, including John Walton and others working in ancient Near Eastern studies, argue that the extreme language of the conquest narratives — "kill every living thing," "utterly destroy" — reflects a standard genre of ancient war rhetoric, not literal commands to genocide. Other ancient Near Eastern texts from the same period use identical hyperbolic language to describe military victories that clearly did not involve total annihilation. The Hebrew word herem, translated "devote to destruction" or "utterly destroy," described the dedication of conquered territory to God — not necessarily the literal killing of every person in it. The later presence of Canaanites in the land, the commands not to intermarry with them, the stories of survivors like Rahab — all of this suggests the texts themselves don't describe what a literal reading implies. This is a serious scholarly argument that deserves more attention than it usually gets in church.

The divine prerogative argument. Augustine and others in the tradition argued that God, as the author of life, has the prerogative to take it — and that commanding Israel to drive out the Canaanites was an act of divine judgment upon a people whose wickedness had accumulated over generations. This position has serious defenders, but it also has a serious problem: it can be used to justify almost anything, and historically it has been. The church's track record of invoking divine sanction for violence — the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, apartheid — should make us deeply cautious about arguments that place violent acts beyond moral scrutiny because God commanded them.

The cruciform hermeneutic. The most sustained recent attempt at a constructive answer comes from theologian Gregory Boyd, in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (Fortress Press, 2017) and its more accessible companion Cross Vision (Fortress Press, 2017). Boyd argues that the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament should not be read at face value but through the lens of the cross — that the same divine self-emptying we see in the crucifixion was present when God, accommodating himself to the fallen, violence-prone worldview of ancient Israel, permitted his image to be distorted by that culture's understanding of divine action. Boyd is not without critics — his argument requires significant interpretive moves that not everyone finds convincing — but he takes the problem more seriously than most, and the conversation he has opened is genuinely important.

The developmental argument. A related approach reads the Old Testament as a record of Israel's developing understanding of God — an understanding that was always partial, always shaped by the culture and limitations of its time, and always moving toward something more complete. The Old Testament itself contains this tension: the same tradition that commands the slaughter of Amalekites also contains the book of Jonah, where God refuses to destroy a foreign city and explicitly rebukes Israel's desire for vengeance. The tradition is not monolithic. It is a conversation across centuries, and the later voices push back against the earlier ones.

Where does the Episcopal tradition land?

The Episcopal Church does not have an official position on the violent texts of the Old Testament specifically. But it does have a hermeneutical framework — a way of reading Scripture — that bears directly on the question. The tradition has never required a flat, literalist reading of every text. The 39 Articles affirm that not everything in the Old Testament applies directly to Christians, and that the civil and ceremonial laws of Israel are not binding on Christian communities.

More fundamentally, the Episcopal tradition reads the whole of Scripture through the lens of the incarnation and the cross. Jesus is understood as the fullest and most complete revelation of who God is. When the New Testament shows us a God who refuses to call down fire on Samaritans, who tells Peter to put away his sword, who forgives from the cross — that picture has authority over texts that show God commanding slaughter. This is not a liberal softening of Scripture. It is how the tradition has always read it.

I don't think the hyperbole argument fully resolves it — there are texts that are hard to read as anything but literal commands. I don't think the divine prerogative argument is safe to use — history has shown too clearly where it leads. I find Boyd's cruciform hermeneutic genuinely compelling, though I hold it with some tentativeness. I find the developmental reading persuasive as a partial account. And I think the honest position for anyone who reads these texts carefully is to acknowledge that they present a genuine theological problem — not a problem to be explained away, but one to be sat with, returned to, and held in tension with the fuller picture of God that the whole of Scripture, culminating in Jesus, offers.

The tradition at its most honest has sometimes said: we don't fully know what to do with this. What we do know is who God is in Christ. And we read everything else in that light.

Where are you with this today? Maybe this is the question that's been making you feel like honest reading disqualifies you from faithful belief. It doesn't. The people who wrote these texts were themselves wrestling with who God is and what God requires — and the wrestling is right there in the text. You're not doing something wrong by noticing. Stay with it. Ask it again the next time you open that book. The question itself is a form of engagement, and engagement is what the tradition has always asked for.

Sources and further reading: Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-17; Joshua 6:21; 1 Samuel 15; Jonah 4 (NRSV). Gregory A. Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (Fortress Press, 2017); Cross Vision (Fortress Press, 2017). John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (IVP Academic, 2017). Christian Hofreiter, Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2018). The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888). The 39 Articles of Religion, Articles VII and VIII. The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Catechism, p. 853.