But Isn’t the God of the Old Testament a Monster?
“But Isn’t the God of the Old Testament a Monster?” It is a question often raised when people encounter the difficult passages in which God commanded Israel to bring judgment upon the Canaanites and Amalekites. Others use it as an excuse to reject God. Rather than avoiding those passages or defending an interpretation that appears inconsistent with God’s revealed character, we are going to examine what Scripture actually says—and allow the whole counsel of God to help us understand some of the Bible’s most difficult words.
God of the Old Testament is NOT a Monster!
Perhaps you have heard the accusation before: “How can you possibly worship the God of the Old Testament? He commanded the Israelites to enter cities and kill everyone—including women, children, and even babies. Your God is a monster.” I will not pretend that the passages being referred to do not exist or that I myself have not struggled with them. They do, and I have. Deuteronomy contains severe language concerning Israel’s conquest of Canaan, and 1 Samuel 15:3 explicitly refers to “man and woman, child and infant” in God’s judgment against Amalek. We should not erase those words, soften them, or pretend they are not difficult.
But neither should we begin with a particular interpretation of those words and then accuse God on the basis of an interpretation we have never bothered to examine. Before concluding that God commanded the systematic extermination of every man, woman, child, and infant belonging to these peoples, perhaps we should determine what kind of places Israel was attacking, why judgment had come, what the Hebrew language behind these commands means, how Scripture uses the language of destruction, and—most importantly—whether our interpretation is consistent with everything else Scripture reveals about the character of God.
What Do You Picture When the Bible Says “City”?
When we hear the word “city,” we naturally interpret it through our modern experience. We imagine Toronto, New York, Chicago, or perhaps a smaller community filled with homes, families, businesses, playgrounds, mothers, fathers, and children. Then we imagine an Israelite army entering such a community and systematically moving from house to house killing everyone it finds. If that is the picture in our minds, the account naturally sounds horrifying.
But ancient Canaan was not modern North America. Important Canaanite cities could function as fortified political, military, administrative, and religious centers under a king, with agricultural populations and smaller settlements distributed throughout the surrounding territory. Jericho was a fortified stronghold. Ai likewise appears in the biblical narrative as a strategic objective whose fighting men came out against Israel.
That does not prove that women or children were never present within these places. They certainly could have been, and we should not claim more than the evidence allows. But neither should we automatically imagine Joshua’s campaigns as Israel invading modern suburban neighborhoods and systematically searching the countryside for every Canaanite man, woman, toddler, and infant. The biblical accounts repeatedly emphasize the defeat of kings, armies, strongholds, and peoples.
God Had Already Waited for Generations
There is another fact frequently missing from the accusation. Hundreds of years before Israel entered Canaan, God spoke to Abraham concerning the land his descendants would eventually inherit. Yet God did not immediately give Abraham that land. Why?
“Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the wrongdoing of the Amorite is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). Consider what that means. God knew what was developing within these societies, yet judgment did not immediately fall. Their wickedness was “not yet complete.” God waited. Generation followed generation before judgment finally came. Canaan itself was politically divided among numerous kings and city-states, but that does not mean those communities existed in cultural isolation from one another. Their languages, religious traditions, gods, temples, sacrifices, and other cultural practices were interconnected throughout the region. Political boundaries did not prevent religious ideas and practices from spreading throughout the land.
What Was Happening in Canaan?
The biblical description of Canaanite wickedness is severe. Leviticus 18 describes incestuous relationships, adultery, sexual immorality, bestiality, and the giving of children to Molech. God then says, “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am driving out from you have become defiled” (Leviticus 18:24). Deuteronomy makes the accusation concerning children even more explicit: “For every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31).
We should not sanitize those words merely because what they describe is horrifying. Sometimes understanding the horror is necessary before we can appreciate the tragedy God was judging. Ancient accounts from the wider Phoenician and Punic religious world preserve descriptions of child sacrifice involving a bronze image with outstretched hands and fire. Diodorus Siculus describes children being placed upon the extended, sloping hands of a bronze image of Kronos and falling into a fiery pit. An earlier tradition attributed to Cleitarchus similarly describes a bronze image associated with a brazier, while Plutarch preserves the gruesome tradition that music and drums were played loudly enough that the cries surrounding the sacrifice could not be heard.
We should be precise. These surviving descriptions come primarily from the later Phoenician and Carthaginian world, and therefore we cannot prove that every mechanical detail was practiced identically by every Canaanite community centuries earlier. But neither are these merely gruesome stories invented by modern Christians. They belong to ancient descriptions arising from the wider Canaanite-Phoenician religious world, while Scripture itself independently and repeatedly accuses the peoples of the land of sacrificing their sons and daughters in fire. So when God expresses His anger toward what was occurring in Canaan, His anger at the sacrifice of innocent children reveals something about His character rather than contradicting it. God was not indifferent to what human beings were doing to one another—and particularly to the helpless.
But That Creates an Obvious Question
And that brings us directly to what I believe is one of the most important questions in this entire discussion. If the deliberate killing of innocent children is such a terrible evil—and it is—then what are we to do with a passage that appears, at least when an English translation is read in isolation, to command precisely that?
We cannot condemn the Canaanites for sacrificing their children and then, a few paragraphs later, simply defend the deliberate killing of innocent children because this time we believe God commanded it. If that is really what Scripture teaches, then we have an apparent contradiction that deserves considerably more examination than simply saying, “God is God, so He can do whatever He wants.” Scripture repeatedly condemns the shedding of innocent blood. Among the things Proverbs says the LORD hates are “hands that shed innocent blood” (Proverbs 6:17). And Proverbs goes further: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death, and those who are staggering to the slaughter, Oh hold them back! If you say, ‘See, we did not know this,’ does He who weighs the hearts not consider it? And does He who watches over your soul not know it? And will He not repay a person according to his work?” (Proverbs 24:11–12).
That matters. The God revealed in Scripture does not merely condemn the shedding of innocent blood. He condemns indifference toward innocent blood being shed. So I am not prepared to solve the difficulty by arguing that deliberately killing an innocent child is evil when a Canaanite does it but somehow ceases to present a moral problem when an Israelite does it. That is not an explanation. It is precisely the apparent contradiction that needs to be examined.
This Is Where the Whole Counsel of God Matters
This is where a basic principle of biblical interpretation becomes indispensable: Scripture must be interpreted in light of Scripture. We do not build an entire doctrine from one difficult English expression while ignoring everything else God has revealed about Himself. The clearer passages help us understand the difficult passages, and every interpretation must ultimately be considered within the whole counsel of God.
That does not give us permission to make an uncomfortable verse disappear. First Samuel 15:3 says what it says: “Now go and strike Amalek and completely destroy everything that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”. I have no intention of pretending the words “child and infant” are not there.
But acknowledging the words is not the same thing as assuming that our first modern-English interpretation of the entire command must necessarily be correct. If Scripture does not contradict Scripture, and if God’s actions do not contradict the righteous character Scripture itself consistently attributes to Him, then an apparent contradiction should cause us to investigate our interpretation more carefully. Perhaps the problem is not God’s character. Perhaps the problem is our understanding of the passage.
What Does “Utterly Destroy” Actually Mean?
The Hebrew behind this discussion is important. The noun ḥerem [H2764] refers to something devoted or placed under the ban, while the related verb ḥāram [H2763] is repeatedly used in 1 Samuel 15 in connection with placing Amalek and its possessions under that ban.
P. Kyle and McCarter Jr., in discussing this passage, explain that the underlying verbal concept carries the idea of consecrating or devoting something to Yahweh. What was placed under the ḥerem was no longer available for ordinary human possession. In the context of warfare its application could certainly involve destruction, and these scholars understand its application in this passage very severely. I mention that because I do not want to make these scholars say something they do not say. But the lexical distinction remains important. The fundamental concept is not merely the English word “kill.” It concerns something being placed under God’s ban—devoted or consecrated to Him and removed from ordinary human possession. Their textual discussion is equally interesting because related textual traditions can be represented by expressions such as:
- “Put him under the ban.”
- “Utterly destroy him.”
- “Put him under a curse.”
I am not suggesting that we simply choose whichever expression makes the passage easiest for us. Nor does “put him under a curse” mean that nobody died. People unquestionably died in these wars. But neither should we select the English expression “utterly destroy,” load it with the modern concept of complete biological extermination, and then insist that this is the only possible meaning of what God commanded.
That is not cleansing the text. That is interpreting the text.
Does Scripture Itself Use Sweeping Language?
There is another reason I hesitate to interpret this language as a command to hunt down every human being possessing Amalekite ancestry until the population reached zero: the Bible itself tells us that Amalekites remained alive. Saul tells Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the LORD and gone on the mission on which the LORD sent me, and have brought back Agag the king of Amalek, and have completely destroyed the Amalekites” (1 Samuel 15:20). If “completely destroyed the Amalekites” necessarily means that every Amalekite man, woman, child, and infant had literally ceased to exist, we should expect the Amalekites to disappear from the biblical narrative.
They do not. David later fights Amalekites. Still later, an Amalekite force attacks Ziklag. When David catches them, Scripture says that four hundred young Amalekite men escaped from that battle alone. That evidence is not being imposed upon Scripture by someone trying to escape an uncomfortable passage. It comes from the biblical narrative itself. Whatever the sweeping language of destruction means, Scripture itself prevents us from simply equating it with a modern census statement declaring that every Amalekite individual was dead.
Ancient warfare accounts could employ sweeping language to describe overwhelming or comprehensive victory. That possibility becomes especially significant here because the subsequent biblical narrative itself demonstrates that the people supposedly “completely destroyed” continued to exist.
So What About “Child and Infant”?
Someone can quite reasonably respond: “But 1 Samuel 15:3 still says ‘child and infant.’ What do you do with that?” I do not erase it. I do not pretend it isn’t there. And I do not claim that I can prove no Amalekite infant died during Saul’s campaign. What I question is the much larger conclusion frequently attached to those words: that they prove God’s objective was the deliberate biological extermination of every Amalekite person and that Israel was therefore commanded to search out every Amalekite infant wherever one might be found and kill that child.
The text deserves more careful interpretation than that. We have a Hebrew concept involving something being placed under God’s ban. We have textual expressions involving ban, destruction, and curse. We have sweeping warfare language. We have a biblical narrative in which the people supposedly completely destroyed continue to exist afterward. And we have the rest of Scripture explicitly telling us that God hates the shedding of innocent blood.
Can I prove that no infant died? No. I will not pretend that I can. But neither can someone simply quote the English words “child and infant” and claim that he has thereby proven that God commanded Israel to search out and deliberately exterminate every Amalekite baby. When an interpretation appears to place one passage in direct tension with what Scripture repeatedly reveals about God’s character, the responsible response is not to ignore either passage. It is to keep studying until we have accounted for both.
Before Calling God a Monster
None of this makes these passages pleasant. They aren’t supposed to be. Judgment is terrible. Child sacrifice is terrible. War is terrible. The shedding of innocent blood is terrible. Sin and what human beings are capable of doing to one another are terrible. But there is an enormous difference between saying, “This passage disturbs me and I am struggling to understand it,” and saying, “I have already determined what this passage means, and therefore God is a monster.”
I have come to know God through His Word. I have spent years reading what He has revealed about Himself—His holiness and justice, certainly, but also His patience, mercy, compassion, faithfulness, and extraordinary grace. I can say without hesitation that the God I have come to know through Scripture is not a monster, nor do I worship a monster.
And I do not say that because I have created a God who conforms to what I want Him to be. My knowledge of God, my understanding of God, and my relationship with God are not something I manufactured for myself. They are themselves expressions of His grace. God has revealed Himself through His Word, and He has promised that those who genuinely seek Him will find Him.
“And you will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).
So I would encourage anyone who believes the God of Scripture is a monster not merely to judge Him from a handful of difficult verses isolated from everything else Scripture reveals about Him. Seek Him. Read His Word. Examine the difficult passages—absolutely—but examine all of it. See His patience before judgment. See His repeated warnings. See His hatred of injustice and innocent blood. See how readily He receives those who turn to Him. See His compassion toward the weak, the rejected, the suffering, and the sinner. And above all, look at Jesus Christ, because there we see God entering His own creation to seek and save those who were lost.
It does not surprise me that those who do not know God, who do not seek Him or His Word, and who have no understanding of His character will accuse God of being a monster. I have no expectation that those who simply do not want to know God will give serious consideration to anything I have offered here.
But I can say that, by God’s grace and according to His promises, we can come to know Him. And when we do, we may discover that it is not God who is the monster. It is mankind, in our rejection of God and in what we are capable of doing to one another, who has demonstrated the truly monstrous capacity for evil.
I do not worship a monster. I worship a holy and righteous God who hates the spilling of innocent blood, judges evil, patiently calls mankind to repentance, and by His grace has allowed me to come to know Him. You can too!