Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
How is God Loving When His Ways are Savage?
Abstract
In 1 Samuel, God ordered Saul to punish the Amelekites by destroying them with no mercy. He was to kill “men and women, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. The animals were kept by the people as booty and so God punished Saul for disobedience. In Judges, God told the Israelites to massacre the people of Jabesh-gilead by killing every male, and every female that is not a virgin, the four hundred virgins they found being donated to the tribesmen of Benjamin! Loving God?
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
God’s Savage Ways
- In Joshua 11:5, God promises victory over a massive coalition to the Israelites and instructs Joshua to hamstring all the horses, which he does.
- In Deuteronomy 20:13-14, God tells the Israelites to slaughter every male of their Canaanite enemies but to keep the women, infants, cattle and goods to enjoy themselves, for God had given it to them.
- In Judges 21:10-12, God told the Israelites to massacre the people of Jabesh-gilead by killing every male, and every female that is not a virgin, the four hundred virgins they found being donated to the tribesmen of Benjamin.
- In 2 Samuel 12, God told off David for sending Uriah the Hittite to his death in battle while taking his beautiful wife as his own. God did not punish David for this monstrous crime, but instead punished his other wives by letting someone else rape them, and punished his unborn son by death.
- In 1 Samuel 15:2-3, God ordered Saul to punish the Amelekites by destroying them with no mercy. He was to kill “men and women, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”. The animals were kept by the people as booty and so God punished Saul for disobedience.
- In Hosea 13:16, God promised that the “little ones” of Samaria should be “dashed to pieces” and “pregnant women ripped open”.
- In Ezekiel 9:4-6, God in a vision told a man to mark those to be saved so that the others could be slain, “old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women”.
- etc…
- etc…
What had the horses done to merit the gratuitous punishment of hamstringing? What had infants and babies done to merit their shocking deaths, even being ripped from their pregnant mother’s wombs? What is God inviting men to do to determine whether women are virgins or not, and was the women’s fate just, either way? How just and how loving is a God who treats human people in such savage ways? It is hardly surprising that such a God would be happy to send some people into perpetual torture in Hell, but He can hardly be described as loving as Christians do. Do these people know what their God is like even according to their own holy book?
