But Doesn’t the Bible Have Terrible Things in It?

Let’s Name the Problem Honestly

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?

The Three Hardest Problems

• 1
  The Canaanite conquest. In the book of Joshua, God commands Israel to destroy the Canaanite cities, including their inhabitants. This is the passage critics call "genocide."
• 2
  Slavery in the Old Testament. The books of Exodus and Leviticus contain laws regulating slavery rather than banning it outright. Why would God permit slavery at all?
• 3
  Harsh punishments. The Old Testament prescribes severe penalties, including death, for offenses that seem minor to modern readers.

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.

What Was Happening in Canaan? The Evidence

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. The Bible says so plainly: "They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods" (Deuteronomy 12:31). But this is not only a biblical claim. It is also established by archaeology, ancient historians, and physical evidence from multiple sites across the Mediterranean.

This evidence does not come from the Bible or from Jewish sources. It comes from:

• 1
  Thousands of burial urns excavated at Carthage and at least seven other Phoenician/Canaanite colonies across the Mediterranean, each containing cremated infant remains.
• 2
  Inscriptions carved into the urns by the parents themselves, recording vows fulfilled to Baal and Tanit after the sacrifice. One urn containing animal remains was inscribed as a "substitute," confirming the others were intentional offerings, not natural deaths.
• 3
  Dr. Patricia Smith and colleagues at Harvard and Hebrew University analyzed the skeletal remains and found that the ages of the infants (mostly around two months old) do not match the expected pattern of natural infant mortality. The age profile matches sacrifice, not disease.
• 4
  Greek historian Kleitarchos (3rd century BC) described the practice independently: a bronze statue with outstretched arms was heated until red-hot, and infants were placed into the arms. Kleitarchos was a pagan Greek with no connection to the Bible or Jewish tradition.
• 5
  Multiple Roman and Greek writers including Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch all independently described the same practice. These are pagan sources confirming what the Bible describes.
• 6
  Excavations at Tyre (the Phoenician homeland city) uncovered urns with human bone fragments incinerated at extremely high temperatures, matching the Carthaginian pattern.

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?"

Justice: What a Good God Must Do

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.

Mercy Without Justice Is Not Mercy

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.

God as Judge, Not as Bully

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.

The Bible gives God’s own reasons, and child sacrifice was not the only one. Leviticus 18 lists the practices of the nations in Canaan, including idolatry, sexual sin and child sacrifice, and says "the land vomited out its inhabitants" (Leviticus 18:24-25). God also warned that if those practices remained, "they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods" (Deuteronomy 20:18). And He made clear this was not a reward for Israel’s goodness: "it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you" (Deuteronomy 9:4-5). The same standard applied to Israel. If Israel did the same things, the land would "vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you" (Leviticus 18:28).

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 gave time for repentance, and the people of Canaan had heard what God had done for Israel (Joshua 2:9-11). 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; 6:22-25). 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.

The Conquest Language: Harder Than You Think

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.

Joshua says Israel "totally destroyed" the Canaanites (Joshua 10-11). Yet Joshua itself records that "very large areas of land" were still to be taken (Joshua 13:1), and the next book, Judges, describes Canaanites still living throughout the land. The Bible gives its own reason: Israel "never drove them out completely" (Judges 1:28), and God told them, "you have disobeyed me... I will not drive them out before you" (Judges 2:2-3). Some scholars also read Joshua's summary statements as the kind of sweeping victory language found in other ancient war records, which they call "hagiographic hyperbole." But the Bible's own explanation for the Canaanites who remained is Israel's disobedience.

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.

What About Slavery?

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.

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:

• 1
  Hebrew debt servants were released every seven years (Deuteronomy 15:12). This was mandatory, not optional.
• 2
  Kidnapping someone to enslave them was punishable by death (Exodus 21:16). The very foundation of the Atlantic slave trade would have been a capital offense under Old Testament law.
• 3
  Runaway slaves were not to be returned to their masters (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). This is the exact opposite of the Fugitive Slave Act in American history.
• 4
  Slaves had legal protections. If a master knocked out a slave’s tooth or injured their eye, the slave went free (Exodus 21:26-27). No other ancient law code granted anything like this.

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 Bible’s Moral Trajectory

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 plan to people living in brutal ancient cultures. God Himself never changes (Malachi 3:6), but some of the laws He gave Israel met a hard-hearted people where they were, as Jesus explained about divorce: "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning" (Matthew 19:8). So slavery is regulated, then undermined, then the seeds of abolition are planted. And God’s mercy was there from the start: the Law already commanded "love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) and kindness even to an enemy (Exodus 23:4-5), and God told Jonah He cared about the people of Israel’s enemy, Nineveh (Jonah 4:11). Jesus then showed that love in full, teaching us to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44).

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’s justice and mercy meet, and He takes the punishment for sin upon Himself.

Where Justice and Mercy Finally Meet

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.

The Objection Cuts Both Ways

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.

Key Words to Know

Common Objections