The Old Testament moral problems

The Old Testament contains conquest narratives in which God commands the killing of populations, legal provisions for slavery, polygamy in the patriarchal narratives, and imprecatory psalms. For modern readers this is often the first stumbling block, before the New Testament case is reached.

The strongest atheist statement is from Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. Honest engagement has to take it seriously, not soften it.

Paul Copan (Is God a Moral Monster?, 2011) argues the conquest narratives use hyperbolic war rhetoric standard in Ancient Near Eastern literature, that Jericho and Ai were primarily military fortifications, that Mosaic slavery laws were significantly more humane than ANE comparators, and that the trajectory of Scripture is toward abolition. Christopher Wright (The God I Don't Understand, 2008) is more candid: some texts are genuinely difficult and Christians have always disagreed on how to read them.

The site does not claim every OT moral problem has a clean answer. It claims that read in genre and historical context, the texts establish less than the popular skeptical reading suggests, and that the New Testament reframes the relationship to violence (Matthew 5:38 to 48; Romans 12:19 to 21).

Reading

• Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?, 2011.
• Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide?, 2014.
• Christopher Wright, The God I Don't Understand, 2008.
• John Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, 2017.