What about the violence in the Old Testament?

Some of these passages are genuinely disturbing, and the first thing to say is that Christians should stop pretending they are not.

"You shall not leave alive anything that breathes" (Deuteronomy 20:16). "Devote them to complete destruction" (Deuteronomy 7:2). Psalm 137 ends by blessing whoever seizes Babylonian infants and dashes them against the rocks.

If you read that and feel nothing, something is wrong. Feeling the difficulty is the correct starting point.

What follows is not a resolution that makes everything comfortable. It is the set of considerations that a careful reading has to include.

The conquest

The stated grounds are moral, not ethnic

The texts give reasons, repeatedly, and the reasons are about behaviour rather than ancestry.

"Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants" (Leviticus 18:24-25).

Leviticus 18 lists what "these things" are: incest, child sacrifice to Molech, bestiality, ritual prostitution. Archaeology has confirmed Canaanite child sacrifice, including the tophet burial grounds at Carthage, a Phoenician colony continuing the same religious tradition, where thousands of infant remains have been excavated.

And Moses tells Israel plainly that this is not about their merit: "not because of your righteousness... but because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God is driving them out" (Deuteronomy 9:5).

The judgement was delayed four hundred years

This detail is easy to miss and it changes the picture.

God tells Abraham that his descendants will not inherit the land for four generations, "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" (Genesis 15:16).

Four centuries of delay, explicitly so that judgement would not fall before it was warranted. That is not the profile of an impulsive act.

The rhetoric was conventional hyperbole

This is the point most modern readers do not know, and it matters.

Ancient Near Eastern military accounts routinely used total-destruction language for what were, in fact, partial victories. The Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BC) declares "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not" — a boast made about a people who evidently continued to exist.

The biblical texts do the same thing, and they do it visibly. Joshua 10:40 says he "left none remaining". Joshua 11:23 says he "took the whole land". And then Joshua 13:1 says "there remains yet very much land to possess", and Judges opens with extensive Canaanite populations still present.

The same book cannot be reporting literal total annihilation in one chapter and continuing coexistence in the next unless the language is conventional. Ancient readers knew the genre.

Individuals could and did opt out

Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute in Jericho, aligned herself with Israel and was spared with her whole household. She appears in Hebrews 11's roll of faith and in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).

The Gibeonites used a ruse to secure a treaty and were incorporated rather than destroyed.

Ruth was a Moabite and became the great-grandmother of David.

Genocide does not have an opt-out clause based on allegiance.

Israelites were subject to the same standard

This is decisive against the ethnic reading. Israel was warned that identical behaviour would bring identical judgement:

"If you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods... you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish" (Deuteronomy 8:19-20).

And it happened. The northern kingdom was destroyed by Assyria in 722 BC, and Judah exiled to Babylon in 586 BC — the prophets describing it in exactly the terms used of the Canaanites.

The principle is moral, and it applied to the chosen people first.

It is explicitly non-repeatable

The conquest is presented as a unique event at a specific moment in redemptive history, not as a template.

The New Testament's only warfare language is spiritual: "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood" (Ephesians 6:12); "the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh" (2 Corinthians 10:4). Jesus told Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52) and said to love enemies and pray for persecutors (Matthew 5:44).

Every Christian who has cited these texts to justify violence — and there have been many, from the Crusades onward — has misused them. Say so plainly.

Slavery

The Bible does not abolish slavery outright, and this troubles people rightly. Two things need saying together.

What the law actually did. Compared with every surrounding legal code, the differences are stark.

• Kidnapping for slavery carried the death penalty (Exodus 21:16). This alone makes the transatlantic trade a capital crime by biblical law.
• Escaped slaves were not to be returned (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). Every other ancient code required return, as did the American Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This provision alone made the institution unenforceable.
• Hebrew servitude was time-limited — six years, with generous mandatory provision on release (Deuteronomy 15:12-15).
• Injuring a slave meant freedom (Exodus 21:26-27).
• Killing a slave was punishable (Exodus 21:20).

Most Hebrew servitude was debt-bondage — closer to indentured labour in a society with no bankruptcy law than to chattel slavery.

Where it points. Paul tells Philemon to receive the runaway Onesimus back "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). He lists slave traders among the worst offenders (1 Timothy 1:10). Galatians 3:28 destroys the categories at their root.

The trajectory is clear enough that abolitionists — Wilberforce, Equiano, the Clapham Sect, the Quakers, the Black church — argued from these texts.

And the shameful part. Other Christians defended slavery from Scripture, at length and in print. That happened, it was evil, and no account of this subject is honest without it.

The imprecatory psalms

Psalm 137 ends with a blessing on whoever destroys Babylonian infants. Psalm 109 asks that a man's children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

Three things.

These are prayers, not commands. The psalms are the record of what people said to God, including in rage. Not everything in a psalm is endorsed — the psalms also record despair, accusation and confusion.

They are handing vengeance over rather than taking it. The alternative to praying "God, deal with them" is going and dealing with them yourself. Paul makes exactly this move: "never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God" (Romans 12:19).

They come from real atrocity. Psalm 137 was written by survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem, who had watched Babylonian soldiers do to their children what the psalm asks be done in return. Lewis, who found these psalms genuinely repellent, still noted that the cruelty in them is a response to cruelty, and that a faith which produced no anger at atrocity would be worse.

The framework that holds it together

Progressive revelation. God works with people where they are and moves them. Jesus said Moses permitted divorce "because of your hardness of heart, but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8) — explicitly identifying a law as an accommodation rather than an ideal. That principle applies more widely than divorce.

Christ is the interpretive key. "In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:2). Where the picture seems to conflict, the fullest revelation governs the earlier and partial one.

Both testaments contain both. The Old Testament's fullest description of God leads with mercy (Exodus 34:6). The New Testament's most severe judgement passages come from Jesus. Marcion tried to split the two Gods apart in the second century; the church rejected it because the texts do not divide that way.

How to handle this in conversation

Concede the difficulty first. "I find these passages hard too" is true, and it is the only credible opening.

Do not explain away. A tidy answer to a text about dead children will not be believed and should not be.

Give the considerations without claiming they settle everything. The four-hundred-year delay, the moral grounds, the hyperbolic convention, Rahab, the same standard applied to Israel.

Point to the cross. The decisive answer to whether God is willing to inflict suffering rather than bear it is that he bore it. Whatever else is unclear, that is not.

Be willing to leave it unresolved. "There are things in this book I don't understand, and I've decided to trust the God who is most clearly revealed at the cross" is an honest position. It is more honest than certainty, and considerably more persuasive.