Why so much war in the Old Testament — and why kill the children?

Let's not open gently. Here is the verse that stops people cold, often in the middle of a reading plan where they were actually enjoying the Bible:

Men. Women. Children. Infants. Even the animals. This is the command as recorded. And it is not an isolated verse. The Hebrew Bible contains dozens of similar passages. The conquest of Canaan in Joshua. The destruction of Jericho. The annihilation of the Midianites. The elimination of the Amalekites — which Saul fails to complete and pays for with his kingdom. These texts have sat in the center of the canon for three thousand years, and they demand a response that goes beyond "well, God works in mysterious ways."

Because a God who commands the slaughter of infants is not the same God that Jesus calls Abba — Father — or that Paul says "is love." Those cannot both be true in the same way. Something has to give. And the most honest and courageous theological move is not to make it give quietly, behind doctrinal curtains, while publicly insisting everything is fine. It is to look at the problem directly and ask what it is actually showing us.

What scholars have actually concluded

The law of herem — "total destruction" — was most likely a theological ideal written in retrospect, not a historical record of events God commanded in real time.

The Hebrew word herem means something devoted to destruction — set apart for God by being completely eliminated. It was the ancient Near Eastern concept of holy war taken to its most extreme expression. And here is what modern scholarship has concluded about it, stated plainly: historical-critical scholars are virtually unanimous that the herem law in Deuteronomy "was never put into practice" and "originated in a theoretical manner a few centuries after the wars of Israel in Canaan."

Old Testament scholar John Collins at Yale puts it directly: "The texts are not naïve reflections of primitive practice but programmatic ideological statements from the late seventh century BCE or later. We can no longer accept them as simply presenting what happened." In other words: these texts were written or heavily edited centuries after the events they describe, for political and theological purposes. They tell us what later writers believed God must have wanted — not what God actually commanded in the moment.

Moshe Weinfeld, one of the twentieth century's most respected Deuteronomy scholars, concludes that in practice the inhabitants of Canaanite cities were not destroyed but rather placed under labor obligations — which is consistent with other evidence in the biblical text itself, which repeatedly describes the Israelites living alongside the very peoples they were supposedly commanded to eliminate.

The picture that emerges is deeply human: a people who had survived wars, conquests, and exile, looking back at their history and interpreting it through the lens of divine mandate. Victors have always sacralized their violence. The Romans believed Jupiter endorsed their empire. The Crusaders believed God endorsed their marches into Jerusalem. The colonial powers believed God endorsed their conquest of indigenous peoples. The pattern is not evidence of God's nature. It is evidence of human nature — the oldest, most dangerous habit of our species: making God responsible for what we wanted to do anyway.

Four ways serious people have read these texts

1. Divine judgment — God used Israel as his instrument. The traditional conservative reading: the Canaanites were genuinely wicked, and God waited four hundred years (Genesis 15:16 says "until the sin of the Amorites reaches its full measure") before executing judgment through Israel. On this view, God has the right to end lives he created. The problem with this reading is that it requires accepting that infants bore the guilt of their parents' society — and that God could find no other way to achieve his purposes than the mass slaughter of babies. It also makes God the direct author of atrocities that would be universally recognized as war crimes today.

2. Hyperbole — ancient war literature exaggerated victory. Many scholars argue that "total destruction" language in the ancient Near East was a literary convention — a way of claiming complete victory, not a literal body count. Egyptian and Assyrian battle records from the same era use identical language about destroying enemies "utterly" who then appear again in the next battle. The Bible uses this convention too: Joshua says the Israelites "left no survivors" in cities whose inhabitants show up fighting again chapters later. On this reading, herem was rhetoric, not reportage. Which raises its own question: why did the tradition preserve it as divine command?

3. Progressive revelation — God worked with what he had. A more theologically generous reading: God met a brutal bronze-age tribal people where they were, working within their framework of reality while gradually redirecting it toward something better. The violence of the Old Testament is not God at his best — it is God working within the limitations of human consciousness at a particular stage of development. On this view, the arc of scripture bends toward the Sermon on the Mount — away from an eye for an eye and toward love your enemies — precisely because God was always trying to move humanity in that direction, one painful generation at a time.

4. Human projection — men claimed God's authority for their wars. The reading this blog takes most seriously: the command to commit herem was not God's voice but human beings doing what human beings have always done — invoking divine authority to justify what they already intended to do. The wars of conquest were real. The religious packaging was added, because "God told us to" has always been the most powerful silencer of moral objection. This does not require rejecting the Bible. It requires reading it with the honest recognition that it is a deeply human document, written by people who were doing their best to understand God with the tools and limitations of their time and place.

The Saul story — what psychological torture looks like

"Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king." The punishment for keeping the best livestock alive.

Saul goes to war against the Amalekites. He wins. He destroys the people — mostly. He keeps King Agag alive, and keeps the best of the animals, which his soldiers intend to sacrifice to God. He thinks he has done well. Samuel arrives. And the first words out of Samuel's mouth are: "What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears?"

Saul tries to explain. Samuel does not accept the explanation. The kingdom is taken from Saul on the spot. And from this moment forward, Scripture describes Saul as a man tormented by an evil spirit — a man who swings between moments of clarity and episodes of murderous rage, who weeps in the night and throws spears at his own musicians, who eventually turns to a medium to contact the dead prophet who told him he was finished.

Now ask the question underneath the question: what is it like to be a human being told by your religious authority that God commanded you to slaughter an entire people — men, women, children, infants — and that your failure to complete that slaughter completely has made you unacceptable to God? What does that do to a person's interior life? What does that do to a person's sense of God?

Saul did not fail to love God. He failed a test he was given by a prophet speaking in God's name. The distinction matters enormously. The Saul story may be, underneath its surface narrative, the story of a man psychologically destroyed by being caught between his humanity and a command no human being should ever have received. He could not complete the massacre. He was punished for his mercy. And he spent the rest of his reign haunted — soothed temporarily only by a young musician named David playing in the corner of his chambers.

That detail — David's music quieting the torment in Saul's soul — is not incidental. It is the picture of a man whose interior life had been shattered by the collision of love and religious obligation, and who could only find peace in beauty. The music was the one thing that reached past the religious terror into something still human.

The most convenient sentence in the history of war

"God told us to."

This is the most powerful and most dangerous sentence in human religious history. It ends moral debate. It overrides conscience. It transforms murderers into soldiers of God and atrocities into obedience. And it has been used — relentlessly, across every tradition, in every era — by people who wanted to do something that their own conscience told them was wrong and needed a larger authority to silence that conscience.

The Crusaders said it as they marched into Jerusalem and slaughtered everyone inside. The Inquisition said it as it tortured suspected heretics. The colonial powers said it as they enslaved and dispossessed indigenous peoples on every inhabited continent. The institution of slavery in America was defended with scripture by pastors who filled pulpits every Sunday. The pattern is not evidence of God's instruction. It is evidence of God's name being commandeered by people with something to gain.

The Urantia papers make this point with unusual directness. They describe the Hebrew scriptures as "many distorted and greatly exaggerated stories of God" — a record that contains genuine revelation alongside profound human limitation, the two woven together in ways that require discernment rather than wholesale acceptance. The papers note that the very concept of God evolved across the Old Testament — from a tribal warrior deity who needed to be appeased with animal sacrifice, to the God of Hosea who says "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," to the God of Isaiah who speaks of comfort and redemption to a devastated people. That evolution is not evidence of God changing. It is evidence of human understanding growing — slowly, painfully, across centuries — toward a clearer picture of what God actually is.

The God-fear that became church hurt

Here is the church hurt in its purest, most distilled form: many people grew up fearing God more than they feared anything or anyone else in the universe — including the devil. Think about what that means. The devil was supposed to be the enemy of human souls. And yet it was God — not the devil — who was going to send you to eternal torment if you stepped out of line. The devil couldn't condemn you. God could. And would.

If you accept that framework, the devil becomes strangely attractive. At least the devil isn't threatening to burn you. At least the devil isn't making impossible demands. At least the devil is offering a kind of freedom — however false — that the fear-God religion was not. Maybe this is the root of what the Urantia papers call Lucifer's "declaration of liberty." Lucifer's argument was essentially: I am not the condemnation seat. God is. Follow me and be free. It is a lie. But it is a lie that lands with devastating effectiveness on anyone who has been taught that God's primary relationship with humanity is one of conditional acceptance and potential eternal punishment.

The fear-religion version of God — the one who commanded the slaughter of infants, who rejected Saul for having mercy, who will throw you into eternal fire for wrong belief — is the ghost-cult God wearing a New Testament name. It is the ancient transaction-religion, updated for the modern era. Give God what he demands, or face the consequences. That God is not the Father who runs to meet the prodigal while he is still a long way off. That God is not the one who sends rain on the just and unjust alike. That God is not the one Jesus revealed.

And perhaps the most important question any person raised in fear-religion eventually has to ask is: which God have I actually been worshipping? The one the Old Testament warriors claimed commanded them to take a city and leave nothing alive? Or the one who, according to the New Testament, looked at humanity in all its messiness and violence and chose to come and live inside it rather than condemn it?

What the Urantia papers add — evolutionary religion and its ceiling

The Urantia papers describe two streams of religious development running simultaneously through human history: evolutionary religion — humanity reaching upward with the tools available — and revelatory religion — the divine reaching down to clarify what human reaching alone cannot find. The Hebrew scriptures contain both streams. The violence of the conquest narratives belongs to the evolutionary stream — a tribal people interpreting their survival and expansion as evidence of divine favor, and their enemies' defeat as divine judgment. This is not revelation. It is the maximum reach of a consciousness that had not yet received what the prophets would eventually bring.

The papers note that even the greatest prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos — were themselves operating within cultural limitations. Their concept of God was genuinely more advanced than what came before them. And still it was incomplete. Every generation has seen a little further than the last — not because God changed, but because human capacity to receive and understand was gradually expanding.

The Urantia papers also describe what they call the "long, dark shadow of Yahweh's supposed jealousy, wrath, and revenge" — the primitive concept of God that the ghost cults produced and that the Hebrew tradition gradually, painfully moved away from. The God who commands infanticide is the ghost-cult God at the top of his game: a deity who demands complete loyalty, punishes disobedience with annihilation, and rewards faithfulness with victory over enemies. This God is not a revelation of the Father Jesus called Abba. He is the outer limit of what evolutionary religion — unaided by genuine revelation — could imagine.

The gap between that God and the one Jesus revealed is not a theological puzzle to be solved by creative interpretation. It is evidence of exactly what the papers describe: a long, painful arc of human religious development, moving from fear toward love, from tribal deity toward universal Father, from a God who commands slaughter to a God who says love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The arc is real. It matters. And we are still, twenty centuries after Jesus, in the middle of it.

No innocent baby could be commanded by a God of love to be killed. One God is the ceiling of what a frightened bronze-age tribal people could imagine. The other is the truth that exceeded everything they had imagined.

What this means for reading the Bible honestly

It means holding two things at once without collapsing either. The Bible is a sacred text that contains genuine encounters with the divine — moments of real revelation that have transformed human consciousness and that carry a weight of truth no purely human document could generate. And the Bible is a deeply human text, written by people who were shaped by their cultures, their politics, their fears, and their incomplete understanding of the God they were trying to describe.

Both things are true. Holding both does not diminish the Bible. It honors what the Bible actually is, rather than the impossible object conservative Christianity sometimes demands — a book that fell from the sky without cultural context, without human limitation, without the fingerprints of the people who wrote it.

Just because a man said it was true, and others wrote it down, does not mean God truly ordained it. The history of humanity claiming divine authority for human atrocity is long enough, and dark enough, that this should be one of the most obvious conclusions available to an honest reader. And the most reliable test is the one Jesus himself provided: does it look like the Father he revealed? Does it look like mercy? Does it look like the one who runs toward the prodigal, who defends the woman about to be stoned, who touches the leper, who eats with the wrong people, who tells his followers to love their enemies?

If it doesn't look like that — if it looks like a command to leave no infant alive — then the most faithful response may not be to find a creative theological interpretation that makes it fit. It may be to say: this was a human being's story about God, told in a human being's language, limited by a human being's understanding. God is bigger than this story. God was always bigger than this story. And the deepest evidence of that is that the story itself kept growing — kept moving, across the centuries, from wrath toward mercy, from the sword toward the basin and the towel — until it arrived at a man washing his disciples' feet the night before the authorities came for him.

The God who commands the slaughter of infants and the God who washes feet are not the same God.

One is the ceiling of fear-religion. The other is the revelation that exceeded everything fear-religion could imagine. The Old Testament is the record of humanity's long, painful, partial approach to the second God — written by people who were closer to the ghost cults than to the Sermon on the Mount, and who were doing their best with what they had.

We honor that effort by taking it seriously — which means asking the hard questions, not suppressing them. The questions are not the enemy of faith. They are the evidence that the conscience God built into every human being is still working. The fact that you cannot read "kill the infants" and simply say "God commanded it, so it must be good" — that resistance is not faithlessness. That resistance is the Holy Spirit, the inner voice of the living God, telling you that the image of God you have been given does not yet match the reality of God who made you.

Keep asking. The arc is still bending. We are still in the middle of it.