Concept

Lesson 4.3, Old Testament Difficulties

Intro

"How can you defend a God who commanded the slaughter of the Canaanites, regulated slavery, and prescribed the death penalty for working on the Sabbath?"

This is the lesson that most Christians do not feel ready for. The Old Testament holds the texts that get used most often as weapons against Christians: the conquest of Canaan, the laws about war captives, the rules for slavery, the binding of Isaac, the curse psalms, the death-penalty offenses. A skilled atheist debater will steer the conversation here on purpose, because the average believer has not done the work.

The point of this lesson is to teach three frames that handle most of these texts, and then to point you to the specific defeater pages for the hardest cases.

The three frames are:

Compare ancient Israel to its neighbors, not to modern democracy. The honest comparison is not Mosaic law against the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is Mosaic law against the Code of Hammurabi, the Hittite laws, the Middle Assyrian laws, and the practices of Egypt. On that comparison, Mosaic law stands out as restrained, not brutal. It is the only ancient code with no class differences in capital punishment, the only one with anti-kidnapping rules (Exodus 21:16) that cut against the chattel-slavery economy, the only one that gives refuge rights to runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15-16).

Tell the difference between describing and commanding. Many "the Bible endorses X" arguments mix up two things the text is doing. Some passages describe horrible events as a record of moral disaster: the Levite's concubine in Judges 19-21, David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19. These are not endorsements. They are condemnations by inclusion. Other passages prescribe, giving moral or legal instruction. The two genres have to be told apart.

Pay attention to where the story is going. The Bible is a trajectory, not a flat list of rules. The treatment of women, slaves, foreigners, and the poor moves in one direction across the canon, toward Christ. Reading Leviticus without reading the Gospels is like reading the first chapter of a novel and stopping there. The slavery rules in the OT are limits on an ancient practice, set up to bend toward freedom. Paul to Philemon and the new-creation language of Galatians 3:28 are where that trajectory lands.

The lesson assigns the master hub Old Testament Difficult Texts and seven specific defeater pages for the most-cited cases. The work is to read all of them. None can be skipped if you want to be ready when the conversation goes here.

The skill the lesson is teaching: admit what is genuinely hard, refuse what is genuinely false, and steer the conversation back to the canonical framework where these texts actually live.

In full

The Old Testament is the apologist's hardest ground. The conquest of Canaan, the herem texts, the laws about sexual violence, the binding of Isaac, the curse psalms, the slavery rules, the death-penalty offenses, these are the texts most easily ripped from context and used as a weapon against Christians. A skilled atheist debater will steer the conversation here, knowing that the average believer has not done the study to respond.

The work is to admit what is genuinely hard, refuse what is genuinely false, and steer the conversation back to the canonical framework where these texts actually live. The standard ancient-context-plus-canonical scholarly framework draws on Currid, Kitchen, Webb, Hess, and Walton.

Required reading

Old Testament Difficult Texts, the master hub. Read top to bottom.
Canaanite Conquest and Herem, the conquest texts.
Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater, the structured argument-form version.
Akedah, the binding of Isaac.
Mosaic Law, the legal framework in canonical and ancient context.
Biblical Slavery Objection, the slavery question.
OT Sexual-Violence Laws, Deut 22:28-29, Num 31, the most-cited texts.
Imprecatory Psalms Objection, the psalms that call for judgment.

The general framework

Before working through specific texts, learn the three frames every OT-difficulty response leans on. If you have these in hand, you can respond to texts you have not specifically studied, because the frames carry over.

Frame 1, Ancient Near East comparison

The OT did not appear out of nowhere. It appeared in the ancient Near East alongside the Code of Hammurabi (around 1750 BC), Hittite laws, Middle Assyrian laws, and the legal traditions of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The honest comparison is not OT law vs the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The honest comparison is OT law vs the legal traditions next door. On that comparison, Mosaic law stands out as unusual. It is the only ancient code with no class differences in capital punishment, the only one with anti-kidnapping rules (Exod 21:16) that cut against the chattel-slavery economy, the only one with refuge rights for runaway slaves (Deut 23:15-16), the only one with sabbath and jubilee rules that limit how long and how harsh servitude can be. John Currid (Against the Gods) and K. A. Kitchen (On the Reliability of the Old Testament) are the standard scholarly references. Read them.

Frame 2, Describing vs commanding

A huge chunk of the the Bible endorses X arguments depends on mashing two literary jobs together. Some OT texts describe what happened, often as condemnation by inclusion: Judges 19-21 (the Levite's concubine), 2 Samuel 11 (David and Bathsheba), Genesis 19 (Lot and his daughters). These are descriptive stories that the canonical frame presents as moral disasters, not endorsements. Other OT texts prescribe, give legal or moral instructions. The two have to be told apart. The atheist who points to David's adultery and treats it as God's endorsement of adultery has the genre exactly backwards. The text records the sin to condemn it. The same story line gives us Psalm 51, David's repentance, as the canonical response.

Frame 3, Where the Bible is heading

William Webb's Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals gave us the standard scholarly framework: OT law as a stage on a path of moral progress, not the final ceiling of biblical ethics. The OT institutions of warfare, servitude, polygamy, and divorce are limited and regulated compared to their ancient counterparts, but not abolished. The canonical movement from Deuteronomy to the prophets to the New Testament shows a consistent direction. What was allowed under hard-heartedness (Matt 19:8 on divorce) gets tighter over time, and the path peaks in Jesus' sharp moves (you have heard it said... but I say to you...) and the apostles' ethic (there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, Gal 3:28). The OT is not the ceiling. The OT is the floor.

The specific texts

The Canaanite conquest and herem

The standard atheist line: God commands the genocidal slaughter of a whole people, including children. The standard answer (see Canaanite Conquest and Herem and Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater) combines four moves:

The four-hundred-year wait. Genesis 15:16, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. God's judgment on Canaanite culture is delayed by four centuries, during which the Canaanite population has historical opportunity to change course. The conquest is not random extermination. It is the long-delayed judgment on a culture that, in the canonical frame, included child sacrifice (Lev 18:21, 20:2-5; Jer 7:31; archaeological evidence at Carthage and elsewhere).
The herem category as judgment, not ethnic cleansing. Herem is the technical term for what is set apart for destruction under divine authority, a judgment category limited to specific historical conditions, not a general license for war. It applies only to specific peoples at a specific moment in a specific land-grant covenant. The New Testament reuses the category in a fully spiritualized form (the destruction of strongholds, 2 Cor 10:4, etc.).
The Rahab and Caleb cases. The conquest story itself includes a Canaanite (Rahab) and a Kenizzite (Caleb) brought into the covenant community. The category is judicial, not racial. Individuals who turn to the covenant God are explicitly included.
Hyperbole in war-language. Ancient conquest accounts (the Mesha Stele, Egyptian campaign records) routinely use total-annihilation language that, on archaeological inspection, actually means military victory rather than literal extermination. Joshua's killed all who breathed matches this convention. The same book records substantial surviving populations (Judg 1, etc.). The conquest texts have to be read in the genre they were written in, not in the genre of a modern police report.

The Akedah (binding of Isaac, Gen 22)

The atheist version: God commands child sacrifice. The standard answer works at several levels:

The story does not end in sacrifice. The drama depends on the substitution. The ram in the thicket is the canonical point. The story is about the rejection of child sacrifice through divine intervention, not its endorsement.
The text is the canonical anti-child-sacrifice statement. The same Pentateuch that contains the Akedah contains the most explicit anti-child-sacrifice laws in the ancient Near East (Lev 18:21, 20:2-5; Deut 12:31). The Akedah is the story-level foundation. The law code is the application.
Typological reading. Christians have long read the Akedah as a picture pointing to the cross: the father offering the beloved son, the son carrying the wood, the substitute ram. The story is doing christological work, not modeling a parenting style. See Akedah for the full treatment.

OT sexual-violence laws

Two texts get cited most: Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (the so-called rapist marries his victim law) and Numbers 31 (the Midianite war, the virgins kept alive).

Deut 22:28-29: The Hebrew verb tāphas (seize) is not the verb used for rape elsewhere in Hebrew (the rape narratives use ḥāzaq, "force"). The contextual reading, in light of Deut 22:25-27, the law right before it that explicitly handles rape, is that this text is about consensual pre-marriage sex, not assault. It is the case where a young man and a young woman have had sex, and the question is what protection the woman has. The rule gives her permanent economic protection (the man cannot divorce her). In the ancient context this is a protection law, not an atrocity law. The popular polemic ignores the lexical and contextual distinctions Hebrew makes.

Numbers 31: The Midianite war (after the Baal-Peor seduction, Num 25) is best read with the standard genre and ancient-war framework. The keeping of young women is contextually about being absorbed into Israelite households, not sexual abuse. The legal regime governing such absorption (Deut 21:10-14) includes a thirty-day mourning period, a ban on selling them, and protection against later mistreatment. None of this excuses the violence of the conflict, but the popular line that frames it as a sex-trafficking operation ignores the canonical legal regime. See OT Sexual-Violence Laws.

Curse psalms

Psalms 137 (blessed is he who dashes your little ones against the rocks), 58, 69, 109, and others contain prayers for divine judgment on the psalmist's enemies. The standard answer (see Imprecatory Psalms Objection):

These are prayers, not commands. The psalmist is praying for divine judgment, not carrying it out. Christianity rejects vigilante violence. The curse psalms are the canonical alternative to vigilante violence, handing the anger over to God instead of acting on it.
The psalms are the prayer book of the oppressed. Psalm 137 is the cry of exiles who have just watched their own children dashed against rocks by Babylonian soldiers. The eye-for-an-eye logic ("may they suffer what they have done") is the cry of the abused, not the theology of the abuser. Treating it as the second flips the canonical meaning.
The New Testament absorbs and transforms the category. Revelation 6:10 (how long, O Lord) is the curse-psalm voice continuing. Jesus' forgive them on the cross is the curse-psalm voice finally answered. The path is not denial of the curse voice but its absorption into the pattern of the cross.

Slavery laws

Covered in detail at Biblical Slavery Objection. The apologist uses the four-pillars distinction (see Four Pillars of Chattel Slavery and Chattel Slavery vs Biblical Servitude). The OT ebed institution lacks all four structural features of chattel slavery: it is not race-based, not hereditary in the chattel sense, not permanent (jubilee release), and not dehumanizing (refuge rights, sabbath inclusion, anti-kidnapping law). The atheist line works by equivocating between two different institutions sharing an English translation word.

Death-penalty offenses

The OT list of death-penalty offenses (Sabbath-breaking, witchcraft, cursing a parent, etc.) is the most jarring to a modern reader. The standard framework:

The list is canonical, not consistently carried out. The actual historical pattern in the OT narrative shows few enforcements and many examples of mercy. The Sabbath-breaker in Num 15 is a specific narrative case; David committing capital adultery (2 Sam 11) is not executed; the woman caught in adultery (John 8) is not executed.
Theocratic framing. The harshness of the penalty reflects the theocratic-covenant frame of the Mosaic law. The New Testament's explicit shift to the church-not-state frame of moral discipline (1 Cor 5; Rom 13 on the state's sword) reframes the categories.
The path is restorative. From Mosaic capital punishment to prophetic critique to Jesus' "let him who is without sin cast the first stone," the canonical path is consistent.

Key takeaways

Ancient comparison matters. The honest comparison is OT vs Hammurabi and the Hittite laws, not OT vs the UN Declaration.
Describing vs commanding. Most polemical readings mash this distinction together. Refuse to.
Where the Bible is heading. The OT is the floor, not the ceiling, of biblical ethics.
The conquest, the laws, and the curses are the three hardest categories. Master the standard answers for each.
The Akedah is christological. Do not lose the typological reading in the rush to handle the moral objection.
Hard on the position, gentle on the person. A person who finds these texts horrifying is responding to something real. Acknowledge it. Refuse to defend what should not be defended; refuse to concede what should not be conceded.

Worked example, the conquest objection

Objection (steel-manned):

Deuteronomy 20:16-18 commands the Israelites to leave nothing alive that breathes in the Canaanite cities. Joshua 6 records the destruction of Jericho, every man, woman, child, ox, sheep, donkey put to the sword. If a human commander gave this order today, the Hague would prosecute him. The fact that the text attributes the order to God does not change the moral content. It makes it worse, because now the objection is to a God who commands what would be a war crime in any other context. How do you not just call this what it is?

Response, in the apologist's voice:

Let me grant a lot of this. The conquest texts are hard. The genre is alien. The moral revulsion you feel is not, in my view, evidence that you are reading wrong. It is evidence that you have been formed by a moral tradition the Bible itself has heavily shaped. So let me give the response in pieces.

The first piece is historical. The conquest texts use the language of ancient warfare. The Mesha Stele, the Egyptian campaign records, and the Hittite annals routinely describe military victories in total-annihilation language. The same Bible that says Joshua left no one alive says in the next book (Judges 1) that substantial Canaanite populations remained. The literal-extermination reading is not the only reading the text supports. The genre is not the genre of a UN war-crimes report.

The second piece is judicial. Genesis 15:16, God tells Abraham four centuries before the conquest that the judgment is delayed because the Amorite iniquity is not yet complete. The Canaanite religion of the conquest era included child sacrifice. The archaeological record at Carthage and the canonical-textual record both attest this. The conquest is not the random extermination of innocents. It is the long-delayed judgment on a culture that included the ritual murder of children. You and I would both call that worth judging. The question is whether the judge is allowed to be God.

The third piece is canonical. The same conquest narrative includes Rahab (a Canaanite who joins the covenant community), Caleb (a Kenizzite likewise), and a list of other inclusions. The category is judicial and covenantal, not racial and genocidal.

The fourth piece is the one I cannot skip. Christianity does not say the conquest is the ethical ceiling. The New Testament's use of the herem category (2 Corinthians 10) is explicitly spiritualized. What is to be destroyed is every lofty thing raised against the knowledge of God, not human beings. The path runs from the conquest to the cross to the call to love enemies. If you wanted to convict me of believing the conquest is the model, I would refuse the conviction. The conquest is the floor; the cross is the ceiling; and the moral revulsion you feel about the floor is partly a product of a tradition that has been climbing the path for two thousand years.

What I am not going to do is pretend the conquest is easy. It is not. I am also not going to pretend it is what it has been popularly framed as. The text rewards careful reading, and the careful reading is more honest than the polemic on either side.

Reflection questions

Which OT text bothers you the most? Be specific. Then go to the codex page that handles it, work through the response, and write your own answer in your own words.
Can you state the ancient comparative framework? Can you name three structural features of Mosaic law that are unusually humane in their ancient context?
What is the difference between a defense of the OT and an excuse for evil? When does the apologist concede ground that should not be conceded, and when does he refuse ground that should be ceded?
How does the describing-vs-commanding distinction handle David's adultery, the Levite's concubine, and Lot's daughters? Drill the distinction until you can use it on any text.
What is the typological reading of the Akedah? Why is the substitution the canonical point of the story?

Practice exercise

Read Deuteronomy 20 in full, then read Joshua 6 in full, then read Judges 1 in full. Notice the tension between the Deut 20 command, the Joshua "left no one alive" descriptions, and the Judges 1 "and the Canaanites continued to dwell among them" record. Write a short paragraph on what the three texts together imply about the genre of the conquest narrative. Then write your three-paragraph response to the conquest objection from scratch, without the codex in front of you, and compare to the response above.

Next lesson

→ Lesson 4.4, Christian Conduct Critiques, the Crusades, the slave trade, the Inquisition, and the standard responses.