This is the post I almost did not want to write, because it is the one that gets closest to the bone. The other questions are things you could debate at arm’s length. This one is different. This is the passage you read in your quiet time and then sat there, unsettled, and closed the Bible a little faster than usual. The conquest of Canaan. The verses about slaves. The psalm that asks God to dash somebody’s children against the rocks. The story where the punishment lands on people who do not seem to deserve it.
You read it and something in you flinched. And then a second wave hit, worse than the first. Guilt. What kind of Christian is bothered by the Word of God?
I want to say this as plainly as I know how. The fact that you are troubled by cruelty is not a defect in your faith. It is the image of God in you, recognizing that something is wrong with cruelty. Do not repent of your conscience. Bring it with you into the text. God is not afraid of it.
First, refuse two easy exits
When these passages come up, people usually bolt for one of two doors, and both of them are traps.
The first door is to pretend it does not bother you. To go numb. To read about a city put to the sword and feel nothing, because feeling something seems disloyal. That is not faith. That is the slow death of the very conscience God gave you, and a person who trains himself to feel nothing at violence in the text will eventually feel nothing at violence in the world.
The second door is to quietly decide the troubling parts are not really Scripture. To take the scissors to your Bible and keep only the verses that comfort you. But a Bible you have edited down to your own preferences cannot tell you anything you did not already believe. It has no authority to comfort you either, because you have made yourself its judge.
Both doors let you off the hook and cost you the very thing you came for. There is a harder and better way, which is to stand in the room with the hard text and do the work.
Learn to read where you are standing in the story
Most of what troubles a modern reader in the Old Testament comes from reading it as if it were dropped out of the sky yesterday, aimed straight at you, describing the way things are supposed to be forever. It was not. Scripture is a story that moves, and where you are standing in that story changes what a passage is doing.
Take the laws that regulate servitude in Israel. Read as God’s eternal ideal, they are a scandal. But that is not what they are. They are God meeting a brutal ancient world where it actually was and beginning to bend it. Look at the actual content. A runaway slave must not be returned to his master (Deuteronomy 23:15). Let that land. In the surrounding cultures, hiding a runaway slave was a capital crime. Israel’s law protects the fugitive. That is not the finish line. It is a hand on the wheel, turning a violent world by degrees toward something better, and if you trace the line far enough it arrives at Paul telling a slaveowner to receive his runaway back “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 1:16).
The Bible is not endorsing the ancient world’s brutality by describing it and regulating it. It is a physician meeting a patient in the condition he is in and beginning the long work of healing. You do not read the middle of a story as if it were the end.
The word behind the hardest passages
The conquest is harder, and I will not pretend otherwise. The command over some Canaanite cities uses a specific and terrible Hebrew word.
| Hebrew word | Script | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| ḥerem | חֵרֶם | H2764 | a thing devoted to God, placed entirely under His claim, banned from ordinary use |
Ḥerem does not mean ordinary warfare for land and plunder. That is the strange thing about it. The soldiers were forbidden to enrich themselves. The city was not to be looted for gain, it was devoted, handed over wholly to God. This was not Israel’s conquest for Israel’s profit. Scripture frames it as a judgment, centuries in the coming, on a civilization the text describes as burning its own children alive in worship (Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 12:31). God even tells Abraham it will wait four hundred years because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). This is a God who waits four centuries before He judges.
That does not turn the passage into a comfortable one, and I do not think it is meant to be comfortable. But it moves the passage out of the category of divine cruelty and into the category of divine judgment on entrenched, child-killing evil, which is a very different thing. The discomfort you feel at the death of a city is right. Aim it also at the evil that made the city ripe for judgment, the evil these texts refuse to pretty up.
Where the trouble is finally answered
Here is the turn, and it is the whole point. If you want to know what God is ultimately like, you do not freeze the frame in the middle of the story. You run it all the way to the cross.
Because the deepest answer to the violence in the world was not more violence. It was a God who came down into the story in person and took the judgment into His own body. “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The same God some accuse of being bloodthirsty is the God who, when the blood finally had to be spilled to deal with evil, arranged for it to be His own.
That is the lens. Read the hard passages forward, toward the cross, and you find a God whose severity was always bending toward a Friday afternoon when He would absorb the worst of it Himself.
Carry your conscience back to the text
So do not close the Bible faster. Do not go numb, and do not reach for the scissors. Bring the trouble in with you. Ask where you are standing in the story. Trace the line forward to the cross. And let the passages that unsettle you do their proper work, which is to keep you from ever imagining that God is safe, tame, or indifferent to evil.
A God who never troubled you would be a God you invented. The real one is harder, and kinder, than that.
Next: Did it really happen?
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