Is God a Moral Monster?

Richard Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a “moral monster.” For example, Dawkins calls God’s commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to be “disgraceful” and tantamount to “child abuse and bullying.” He calls the killing of the Canaanites an “ethnic cleansing” in which “bloodthirsty massacres” were carried out with “xenophobic relish.” He says that Joshua’s destruction of Jericho is “morally indistinguishable from Hitler’s invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein’s massacres of the Kurds.” Conclusion? “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

So, is the God of the Bible a moral monster?

When you read the Bible and find instances of seemingly harsh punishment, the call for sacrifices and even the mass slaughter of entire nations – which, I might add, you do find – do we still have a good and loving God on our hands? Or do we have a terribly evil Being to be rejected, and certainly not to be believed in?

Let’s look at just one of the concerns about the God of the Bible, arguably the one most discussed—the slaughter of the Canaanites. It is what some have called the most difficult and bloody part of the Bible, the one that on the surface is the most ethically troubling. It’s found in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. The context is critical. God led the people of Israel out of slavery and out of Egypt. He was not only forming them into a new people, a new nation, but also taking them to a new land that would become known as the Promised Land. But it wasn’t just given to them. They had to take it, possess it and, at times, conquer it. And that’s what brings us to one of the bloodiest scenes in the Bible: the slaughter of the Canaanites by the Israelites on the directive of God Himself. There are several places where this is referenced in the Bible. Here’s an overview description:

As you approach a town to attack it, you must first offer its people terms for peace.  If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the Lord your God hands the town over to you, use your swords to kill every man in the town.  But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the plunder from your enemies that the Lord your God has given you. (Deuteronomy 20:10-14, NLT)

(Before you read on, let me just add that was not a license to rape and pillage. It was later detailed that if an Israelite took one of these women, it meant that they were going to have to take them as their wife and treat them with all the respect and decorum that came with that marriage. Now let’s continue reading.)

But these instructions apply only to distant towns, not to the towns of the nations in the land you will enter. In those towns that the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing. You must completely destroy the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded you. This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 20:15-18, NLT)

So, was that an indiscriminate massacre, an ethnic cleansing along the lines of Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust, or Saddam Hussein’s slaughter of the Kurds? Something that deserves not only universal condemnation, but a complete rejection of the God of the Bible? Or is there something more here?

First, this was more than just an invasion or conquest. This was God’s planned punishment of the people of Canaan for their ways, long in the making and in the coming. Yes, God was displacing them from the land to give it to the people of Israel. But that displacement came because of their ferocious, habitual, unrepentant wickedness. And I do mean wicked. The Canaanites were marked by the worst possible aspects of slavery, religious prostitution and sexual cults. (Not that there’s anything good about slavery, but think taking slavery to the darkest place that you can possibly take it.) Scholars have called the Canaanite cult religion the most sexually depraved of any in the ancient world. They had given themselves over to every kind of sexual depravity, including incest and even bestiality. At their worst, their orgiastic worship of idols even included human sacrifice—both of children and adults. There’s imagery of their cult sexual practice of bathing themselves in blood.

The Bible says that God had been tolerating this for more than 400 years. Their wickedness kept increasing and increasing, and God kept enduring it. Four hundred years of restraint and patience. Why? Because no matter what you’ve heard, judgment is always His last resort. But the wickedness reached a point where Scripture talks about how God couldn’t stomach it anymore and He vomited them out of His mouth (see Genesis 15:16 and Leviticus 18:24-30). So what stands out in the Bible is not God’s acts of justice, but how much He is marked by mercy. By restraint. But this was a time when God determined that there was no other recourse but divine judgment.