If you have read parts of the Old Testament and felt disturbed, good. You should. These passages are difficult, and anyone who tells you they are not has not read them carefully. The question is not whether these passages are hard. They are. The question is whether they make God a monster, or whether there is more to the story than a surface reading reveals.
Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most famous atheists, wrote this in The God Delusion:
"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..."
That quote gets shared millions of times online. And if you have never read the Old Testament, it sounds devastating. But is it fair? Or is Dawkins reading an ancient library of texts the way you would read a bumper sticker, ripping sentences out of context and ignoring everything else?
Let’s look at the specific passages people find most troubling, face them honestly, and then ask: what is actually going on here?
We are going to address each one. But first, we need to talk about something most people skip over entirely: what was actually happening in Canaan.
When people read the conquest of Canaan, they often picture innocent farmers living peacefully until Israel showed up and destroyed them for no reason. That picture is completely wrong, and the evidence does not come from the Bible alone.
The Canaanites practiced systematic child sacrifice for centuries. This is not a biblical claim. This is established by archaeology, ancient historians, and physical evidence from multiple sites across the Mediterranean.
At Carthage, a city founded by Phoenicians (direct descendants of the Canaanites), archaeologists have excavated over 20,000 burial urns containing the charred bones of infants. The sacrifices continued for roughly 600 years. Inscriptions on the urns record dedications from parents to the gods Baal Hammon and Tanit, with phrases like "he heard my voice and blessed me," thanking the gods for answering prayers after the children were burned.
This evidence does not come from the Bible or from Jewish sources. It comes from:
This was not an isolated incident. This was a civilization that burned babies alive as a regular religious practice for hundreds of years. The question we need to sit with is not just "Why did God judge Canaan?" but also: "What kind of God would watch children burned alive for six centuries and do nothing?"
This is where most people get the argument backwards. They ask, "How could a loving God command violence?" But the deeper question is: "How could a loving God ignore evil?"
Think about this carefully.
Here is the principle most people miss: mercy and justice are not opposites. They are partners. Mercy without justice is weakness. Justice without mercy is tyranny. A perfectly good God must be both.
Think about it with a harder example.
When we accept that human judges have the authority to sentence criminals, even to impose the death penalty for the worst crimes, we are accepting a principle: justice sometimes requires severe punishment.
If God is real, if God is the author of life, and if God is perfectly just, then divine judgment is not murder. It is justice rendered by the only being in the universe qualified to render it perfectly. A human judge can make mistakes. A human judge can be biased. God cannot.
And the Bible shows that God was extraordinarily patient before acting. In Genesis 15:16, God tells Abraham that judgment on Canaan will not come yet because "the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." God waited 400 years before judging the Canaanites. He sent warnings. He gave time for repentance. The door was open.
In fact, when judgment finally came, a Canaanite woman named Rahab turned to God and was spared, along with her entire family (Joshua 2). She was not only saved; she became part of the lineage of Jesus himself (Matthew 1:5). The door was open to anyone willing to walk through it.
A surgeon cutting into your body and a stranger cutting into your body look the same from a distance. But one has authority and purpose; the other is assault. A sovereign, perfectly just God who gives life also has the authority to end it in judgment, just as a legitimate court has the authority to impose the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crimes. The authority matters. The purpose matters. The context matters.
There is another layer many people miss entirely. Old Testament scholars like Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan have pointed out something important about the conquest accounts: the language of "total destruction" was a common literary convention in the ancient Near East.
Ancient war records routinely described victories using extreme, exaggerated language. Egyptian pharaohs wrote that they "completely destroyed" enemies who clearly survived. Assyrian kings claimed to have "wiped out" nations that continued to exist for centuries afterward. This was how war victories were recorded in the ancient world.
The Bible itself shows this pattern. Joshua says Israel "totally destroyed" the Canaanites (Joshua 10-11). But the very next book, Judges, describes Canaanites still living throughout the land (Judges 1-3). Both books are in the same Bible. This strongly suggests the conquest language is ancient war rhetoric, not a literal body count. Scholars call this "hagiographic hyperbole," and it was standard in every culture of that era.
This does not make the conquest easy or comfortable. But it means the passages may not be describing what a modern reader assumes they describe when reading them at face value.
The Bible’s relationship to slavery is one of the most misunderstood topics in all of Christianity. Here is what most people get wrong: they read "slavery" and picture the American South, where millions of Africans were kidnapped, bought, sold as property based on race, and treated as less than human for generations. That was chattel slavery, and it was monstrous.
Old Testament "slavery" (the Hebrew word ebed) covered a very different range of situations. The evidence for this comes not just from the Bible but from the broader ancient Near East.
Researchers at Tufts University note that "forms of enslavement and involuntary labor in the ancient Near East were not always chattel slavery. Rather, some people were temporarily enslaved to pay off their debts." Scholars at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures found that in ancient Mesopotamia, "there were no slave markets and no households with hundreds of laborers. The nature of the work slaves did was not discernably different from that of other individuals." Some people even entered servitude voluntarily as a rational economic choice over starvation.
This does not mean Old Testament servitude was pleasant. It was still a loss of freedom, and it should still make us uncomfortable. But there are important differences the Bible itself establishes:
No ancient society abolished slavery. Not Greece. Not Rome. Not Egypt. Not Mesopotamia. The question is not "Why didn’t the Bible instantly abolish a universal ancient practice?" The question is: "Did the Bible move the needle toward human dignity?" And the answer is yes, dramatically.
The New Testament went even further. Paul’s letter to Philemon asks a slave owner to receive his runaway slave back "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother" (Philemon 1:16). Galatians 3:28 declares "there is neither slave nor free... for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
These texts planted the seeds that eventually destroyed slavery. The British abolition movement was led by William Wilberforce, a devout Christian who spent his entire career fighting slavery because of his faith. The American abolition movement was driven by Christians reading the Bible. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Quakers were all motivated by explicitly Christian convictions.
The Bible did not drop a finished moral code from the sky. It tells the story of God gradually revealing more of his character to people living in brutal ancient cultures. The trajectory moves consistently in one direction: toward greater dignity, greater mercy, greater justice. Slavery is regulated, then undermined, then the seeds of abolition are planted. Violence is common in early texts, then the prophets start saying God desires mercy and not sacrifice, then Jesus arrives and says to love your enemies.
The question is not "Does the Old Testament contain difficult passages?" It obviously does. The question is: "Where is the story going?" And the answer is: toward the cross, where God absorbs violence rather than inflicting it.
The entire Bible builds toward a single moment where God’s justice and God’s mercy collide: the cross.
God does not simply forgive sin by waving his hand. That would make him unjust, because the crime goes unpunished. He does not simply destroy sinners. That would leave no room for mercy. Instead, he takes the punishment himself. Jesus on the cross is God’s answer to the tension between justice and mercy. The penalty is paid. Justice is satisfied. And mercy is extended to anyone who accepts it.
This means the cross only makes sense if God’s justice is real and serious. If God would never punish anyone for anything, there would be no need for the cross. The severity of Old Testament judgment actually makes the cross more meaningful, not less. It shows what sin deserves and what God was willing to absorb so that we would not have to.
Here is something most people miss. When Dawkins says God is a "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," he is making a moral judgment. He is saying what God did was wrong.
But remember what we learned in Lesson 2: if there is no God and no objective morality, then nothing is truly wrong. There are only preferences. Dawkins needs to borrow from a theistic moral framework to make his objection work. The very fact that we feel moral outrage at Old Testament violence is evidence that objective moral standards exist, which (as the Moral Argument shows) points back toward God.
In other words: you need God to exist in order to call God immoral. The objection defeats itself.
"Nothing can justify killing children. If God ordered that, he’s not good."
This is the most emotionally powerful form of the objection, and it deserves respect. A Christian should never minimize it. Two things are worth considering. First, many Old Testament scholars believe the conquest language is hyperbolic war rhetoric, not a literal account of what happened (see the section on hagiographic hyperbole above). Second, even taken at face value, the judgment was directed at a culture that had practiced child sacrifice for centuries. The question is hard either way, but "God judged a civilization that systematically burned babies alive" is a very different statement than "God randomly destroyed innocent people." Honest Christians wrestle with these texts. Wrestling honestly is the opposite of making excuses.
"The Bible supports slavery. That alone disqualifies it."
The Bible regulates an institution that was universal in the ancient world, and it introduced protections that no other ancient culture offered: mandatory release of debt servants, the death penalty for kidnapping, protection for runaway slaves, and legal rights for the enslaved. More importantly, the New Testament planted the theological seeds ("neither slave nor free, all one in Christ") that directly fueled the abolition movements. The people who actually ended slavery in the West, including Wilberforce, the Quakers, Douglass, and Tubman, were motivated by the Bible. If the Bible "supports" slavery, it is strange that it was the Bible’s own readers who fought hardest to destroy it.
"I could never worship a God who did those things."
That is an honest feeling and it deserves respect. But ask yourself: are you evaluating the full picture, or only the passages that disturb you? The same Bible contains the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the prodigal son, and "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." The same God who judged Canaan also spared Rahab, sent prophets calling for mercy, and ultimately went to the cross himself. If you only read the hardest passages and ignore everything else, you are not reading the Bible. You are reading Dawkins’s version of the Bible.
What is the strongest evidence that the Canaanites practiced child sacrifice?
Why does the lesson argue that a good God must sometimes punish evil severely?
The Old Testament contains genuinely difficult passages. Honest Christians do not pretend otherwise. But context changes everything. The Canaanite conquest was God’s judgment on a culture that burned children alive for centuries, confirmed by pagan historians and modern archaeology. Old Testament slavery was not American chattel slavery, and the Bible’s trajectory moved steadily toward abolition. And the entire story points toward the cross, where God’s justice and mercy finally meet: the penalty is paid, and grace is offered. A God who never punished evil would not be good. He would be indifferent. The Bible describes a God who is neither indifferent nor cruel, but just, patient, and ultimately willing to bear the cost of justice himself.