The Bible Commands Genocide

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:06]Let's talk about something most people avoid, the Bible. Specifically, the parts that don't make it onto greeting cards or church bulletins. Because if you've actually read the whole thing cover to cover, you've probably noticed something uncomfortable. God in the Old Testament doesn't just allow killing. He orders it specifically in detail with instructions. Now, before we get into it, let me be clear about what genocide means. The United Nations defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Keep that definition in your pocket. We're going to need it. Let's start with the Amalachites. This is one of the clearest examples in the entire Bible. In 1st Samuel 15:3, God speaks through the prophet Samuel to King Saul and says, quote, "Now go attack the Amalachites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." Read that again slowly. men, women, children, infants, even the animals. This is not a metaphor. This is not poetry. This is a direct military command attributed to God telling an army to wipe out an entire people, including babies. By every modern legal and moral standard, that is genocide.

[00:01:38]There is no other word for it. And who were the Amalachites? They were a nomadic tribe. Their crime, according to the text, was that they had attacked the Israelites hundreds of years earlier when the Israelites were leaving Egypt.

[00:01:52]So God's solution to a conflict that happened generations ago was to erase an entire civilization. Every man, every woman, every child who had no part in that ancient conflict, punished, killed for what their ancestors did. Now, here is something important to think about.

[00:02:11]When we look at history and we see a group of people being ordered to kill every member of another group based on their ethnicity or tribal identity, we call that an atrocity. We call it a war crime. We built international courts specifically to prosecute people who do this. But somehow when it appears in a religious text, the conversation changes. People start saying things like, "You have to understand the context." Or, "God's ways are higher than our ways." But the children being killed didn't get to appeal to context.

[00:02:43]The infants didn't get a pass because of historical nuance. Let's move to Numbers 31. This one is deeply disturbing. Moses and the Israelites defeat the Midionites in battle. The soldiers come back.

[00:02:57]They've killed all the men, but they've brought back the women and children. And Moses is angry, not because they killed, but because they didn't kill enough. He says in numbers 31:17:18, "Now kill all the boys and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." This is Moses, the man considered one of the greatest prophets in the Abrahamic tradition, ordering the execution of boys in non-virgin women and ordering his soldiers to keep the virgin girls for themselves. Read that slowly and think about what that means. Young girls taken as property after their families were slaughtered. This is in the Bible. This is presented in the text is morally acceptable is something God permitted.

[00:03:47]Let's go to Deuteronomy 7. God is speaking to the Israelites about the people living in Canaan, the land they're about to enter. He names seven nations. The Hittites, Gegashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And then in verse two, he says, "When the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally." The Hebrew word used here is haram. It means complete destruction, sacred destruction. These weren't enemy combatants who had attacked Israel. These were people living in their homes, in their towns, in their land. And the command was to destroy them completely. Not because of anything they personally did, but because of the land they were living on.

[00:04:35]In Joshua 6, the Israelites arrive at Jericho. The walls fall. And then what happens? Joshua 6:21 says, "They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it. Men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys. Every living thing. This is presented as a victory, a blessing, a miracle. God brought the walls down. God delivered the city and then every person inside was killed. Believers often try to explain these passages away. One of the most common arguments is that the Canaanites were wicked, that they practiced child sacrifice and other horrible things, and that God's judgment was therefore justified. But here's the problem with that argument. If the reason for the killing was the wickedness of adults, why were children killed? Children don't practice religion. They don't make moral choices.

[00:05:35]A 2-year-old in Jericho had no responsibility for whatever religious practices the adults around them engaged in. And yet, according to the text, that child was killed by divine command. And the soldiers who did it were following God's orders. There is also a logical problem here. If God is all powerful, he could have removed the adults, scattered the population, sent a plague that only affected the guilty, converted them, inspired them to leave. The options available to an omnipotent being are unlimited. The specific choice to command mass killing, including of children, is a choice. It tells us something about the moral framework being presented in the text. Let's talk about the Midianites again from a different angle. In Numbers 25, some Israelite men had relationships with Midianite women and began worshiping Midianite gods. God's response was a plague that killed 24,000 Israelites.

[00:06:39]Then in Numbers 31, God commands a war against Midian. And as we already saw, Moses orders the killing of the boys and the non-virgin women. The reason for this entire campaign traces back to intermarriage and religious mixing.

[00:06:57]Think about that. An entire people was targeted for military destruction in part because some of their women had relationships with men from another group. The Midianite women were collectively blamed. The Midianite boys were killed because of their ethnicity.

[00:07:14]The virgin girls were taken as prizes of war. Now, let's bring in something that often gets avoided in this conversation.

[00:07:22]The New Testament God is frequently held up as a contrast. God of love versus God of wrath. Jesus versus the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament. But the same Jesus who said, "Love your enemies," also said in Matthew 10:34, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." And in Luke 19:27 in the parable of the 10 miners, a king character says, "But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and kill them in front of me." Now, yes, this is a parable. But the fact that this kind of imagery appears in the words of Jesus, who is supposed to represent the gentler version of God, tells us something about how deeply embedded this framework of divine violence is in the text. And then there is Revelation, the final book of the Bible, where Jesus returns and leads an army, where massive portions of humanity are killed, where a lake of fire awaits non-believers. This is not the god of love overriding the god of genocide. This is the same theme extended to a cosmic scale. Anyone who doesn't believe gets eternal punishment.

[00:08:43]Billions of people across history who were born into different cultures, different religions, different parts of the world face eternal torment not because of what they did but because of what they believed or failed to believe.

[00:08:59]One of the arguments believers make is that these were different times. Ancient standards were different. We can't judge ancient humans by modern morality. And that's a fair point when we're talking about humans. Human morality has genuinely evolved. We used to think slavery was acceptable. We changed. We used to think women were property. We changed. Moral progress is real. And judging ancient humans by modern standards can be unfair. But that argument doesn't work when applied to God. If God is eternal, unchanging, perfectly moral, and all knowing, then his moral standards should not be products of their time. A being who exists outside of time and who possesses perfect moral knowledge should not have needed to evolve past genocide. The argument from cultural context accidentally admits that God's morality was limited by the culture of the people writing about him, which is exactly what critics of religion have been saying all along. There is also the question of what these texts have been used to justify throughout history. This is not an abstract philosophical exercise. In 1493, Pope Alexander V 6th issued a papal document known as the interaterra. It used biblical frameworks of divine mandate to justify the conquest and enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The conquest of Canaan was literally cited as a model for what European Christians were doing to native populations. The doctrine of discovery, which has legal descendants in international law that weren't formally rejected by the US Supreme Court until fairly recently, is built on biblical foundations of one group having divine permission to take land from another.

[00:10:53]The Purisan settlers in early America saw themselves explicitly as a new Israel entering a new Canaan. The indigenous people of North America were cast in the role of Canaanites. And we know what happened. Millions of people were killed, displaced, and erased from their lands. The people doing this believe they were following a biblical model that God had already approved because he had approved it in the text in detail. In South Africa, Dutch reformed theologians used Old Testament passages about the separation of peoples to theologically justify apartheid. In Rwanda in 1994, radio broadcasts that incited genocide used religious language. The connection between religious frameworks that dehumanize out groups in realworld mass violence is not theoretical. It is historical. It is documented. The common response to all of this is that people misused religion, that the Bible doesn't actually endorse these things. But the Bible does endorse them. That's what makes this conversation necessary. It's not that violent people twisted a peaceful text.

[00:12:07]It's that a text containing explicit commands for genocide was available to be used by violent people and it fit their purposes perfectly because those commands are in there. Some theologians argue that these passages should be read allegorically, that the Canaanite conquest is a metaphor for spiritual warfare, not a literal military instruction. But this creates its own problems. If the genocide passages are metaphor, how do we decide which other passages are literal? And why did Christians for over a thousand years read these as actual historical events and actual divine commands? The allegorical interpretation is a modern retreat made necessary by modern moral discomfort. It wasn't the dominant reading of these texts for most of Christian history. Others argue that God is the creator of life has the right to take life. That because he gave life, he can order its removal. This argument essentially says that absolute ownership justifies anything. But we don't accept that logic anywhere else. A parent who created a child does not have the moral right to kill that child. A government that grants citizenship does not have the right to massacre its citizens. The creator ownership argument applied consistently would justify almost any atrocity committed by whoever holds power over whoever doesn't. What we're left with when we look at this honestly is a text that contains detailed instructions for mass killing attributed to a god. A text that was used to justify real historical atrocities. A text that billions of people consider morally authoritative today and a conversation that most people are too uncomfortable to have directly. These weren't mistakes buried in fine print.

[00:13:59]The Amalachite command is clear. The Jericho massacre is celebrated. The Midianite slaughter is presented as righteous. These are not peripheral passages. They are central to the narrative of the Old Testament. A story about a people guided by their god to take a land already occupied by other people. And the method for that taking included commanded genocide. You don't have to be an atheist to find this troubling. Many thoughtful religious people do. But if you're going to take the moral teachings of this text seriously, you also have to reckon with what else is in it. You can't build an entire ethical worldview on a book and then quietly skip the parts where that book's God commands the slaughter of children. That's not honest engagement with the text. That's selective reading dressed up as faith. The question isn't whether these things are uncomfortable.

[00:14:52]They are. The question is whether discomfort is a reason to look away or a reason to look more carefully.