Hey God, are you violent?
Do we really have to talk about that God?
The one in the Bible who is violent. The one who supposedly enacts “the Lord’s vengeance.” The one who signs off on wars and all the horrors that happen when one group exploits another. The God of judgment, revenge, and us-versus-them mentalities.
Do we really have to talk about that violent God in the Bible?
We’ve all had our own way of approaching the violent texts in Scripture. Some of us contextualize: “It was a different time then.” Some of us zoom out: “Don’t get caught in the details of that war, it’s about the bigger picture of God’s faithfulness.” Some of us explain them away: “Well, that didn’t really happen...” And rightfully so, because in some way or another, we’ve all had to wrestle with how to make sense of the horrendous (or “morally dubious,” as Eryl Davies puts it) biblical texts.
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We began our new series Are you there God? It’s me, Harbor by surveying our community on what you all would like to learn about God. Several folks named God’s violence in the Bible.
So, this past Thursday, we looked at a violent text. One so incredibly horrendous that it has brought tears to my eyes that it is in this “sacred book.” We looked at Numbers 31, an ancient war story, where the writer claims God commanded Moses to conquer and pillage the Midianites. I won’t get into the weeds of the text. If you aren’t familiar with it, in sum: it’s cruel and ruthless, and it portrays that cruelty as God’s vision for Israel. It is morally devastating.
In the weeds of biblical scholarship, we know the text comes from a pretty severe us-versus-them ideology fueled by “YHWH is faithful to Israel and Israel alone.” Anyone in the way is marked for suffering. It also comes from what scholars call the Priestly account, meaning it was written after the nation’s exile at a time when its writers were obsessed with purification—so they often emphasized Israel’s unique holiness above others.
There are a lot of ancient cues and contexts that help us understand that the text is more about what the authors were experiencing rather than what God actually did.
I know deep in my bones that God is not violent. That God does not sanction war, oppression, or exploitation of any kind. That God does not want us to have an ideology of superiority.
And yet, here in the Bible, these texts remain. Cruel acts of violence claiming to be from God.
So how do we make sense of them? And, again: why even give them air time?
Because when violence is justified “in the name of God,” it’s not just an ancient problem—it is a pattern that has repeated itself in colonization, oppression, and exploitation across centuries. To ignore these texts is to ignore the damage they’ve caused. To face them honestly is to begin to untangle the harm and stay awake to a deeper voice of God.
As strange as it sounds, I’ve found myself feeling closer to the sacred as I study texts like Numbers 31 and “talk back” to the ancient authors. I mourn that anyone ever imagined God this way, and I feel God in deep solidarity with the victims of that violence.
I come back to these words of the Psalmist:
“You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted;
You encourage them, and you listen to their cry,
Defending the fatherless and the oppressed,
So that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.”
(Psalm 10:17–18)
Maybe the most faithful thing we can do with these texts is to refuse their version of God and instead see that God is here—not violent, but mourning with the afflicted.
