Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?

This is one of the most common reasons people give for rejecting Christianity, and it deserves an honest answer. This page is not going to soft-pedal the passages that bother people. It is not going to pretend they are not there. It is going to take them seriously — and then explain why, on careful reading, the "harsh OT God, kind NT God" framing is not actually what is in the text.

You do not have to be religious to follow this answer. The question is partly historical (what was actually happening), partly literary (what kind of writing is the Old Testament doing), and only finally theological. All three layers matter.

A short, honest answer

The God described in the Old Testament and the God described in the New Testament are the same God, and his character is consistent across both. The Old Testament itself explicitly describes him in the same terms the New Testament does — compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. The genuinely hard passages (specific conquest narratives, certain judgments) are fewer than the impression suggests, are reading-sensitive, and look more like a God carefully restraining judgment within a broken human history than a God indiscriminately wielding it.

This is not a slogan; it is something the texts will demonstrate if you read them carefully. Below is the careful version.

A few terms first

For readers without the background: the Old Testament is the longer first part of the Christian Bible, originally written in Hebrew (with some Aramaic) between roughly 1500 BC and 400 BC. It is also the Jewish scriptures, called the Tanakh. The New Testament is the second, shorter part of the Christian Bible, written in Greek in the first century AD by the earliest followers of Jesus. Christians have always claimed both as one continuous scripture, with the New Testament fulfilling and completing what the Old Testament began.

First: the OT's own summary of God's character

The Old Testament summarizes God's character in one specific verse, and then quotes itself with that verse over and over. The verse is from the book of Exodus — it is God describing himself to a Hebrew leader named Moses:

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

Read the proportions slowly. Compassionate. Gracious. Slow to anger. Abounding in love. Maintaining love to thousands. Forgiving. Then, at the end, he does not leave the guilty unpunished. The judgment is the closing note, not the opening one. The mercy is much louder.

This verse is then quoted, partially or fully, throughout the Old Testament — in books like Numbers, Nehemiah, multiple Psalms, and the prophetic books of Joel and Jonah. The book of Jonah has a particularly striking moment: the prophet Jonah complains that because he knew God was compassionate and gracious, he tried to run from his assignment to preach to the city of Nineveh, because he was afraid God would forgive the people Jonah wanted destroyed.

The Old Testament's own self-understanding is that God's defining traits are mercy, patience, and forgiveness, with judgment as a secondary, painful, reluctant note. If the popular picture of an "OT angry God" were accurate, the Old Testament itself does not seem to be in on it.

What the OT actually does on average

A scan of the Old Testament's content is also useful. It contains:

• The whole book of Psalms — 150 prayers of praise, lament, longing, repentance, and trust in a God who is described as "near to the brokenhearted."
• The wisdom literature — books like Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes — grappling with how to live well under a good God in a broken world.
• The prophets — most of which are calls to justice for the poor and mercy for the oppressed.
• Long stretches of narrative full of forgiveness, patience, and second chances (the stories of Joseph, David, Jonah, Hosea).
• Provisions in the Hebrew Law for protecting foreigners, forgiving debts, and caring for widows and orphans.

The overall texture of the Old Testament is much closer to the texture of the New Testament than the caricature admits. Where it differs is in period and purpose — the Old Testament is largely the story of God carefully forming one specific nation (ancient Israel) through which he intends to bless all nations. The New Testament is the story of that promise being fulfilled.

The genuinely hard passages

That said: there are genuinely hard passages, and we are not going to skip them. The hardest cluster is the Canaanite conquest narratives in the book of Joshua, where God instructs the Israelites to wipe out specific peoples in the land of Canaan during the period of about 1400 BC. We will not pretend these are easy. Several things, however, are worth knowing before forming a verdict.

1. The judgment is targeted, not arbitrary.

The conquest narratives are explicitly framed as judgment on specific peoples for specific, sustained practices — including child sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and a list of behaviors that one biblical passage (in the book of Leviticus) calls "detestable" enough that "the land vomited out its inhabitants." Whatever else one thinks of these passages, they are not random aggression. They are presented as judicial response to multi-generational systematic harm.

This is also why God told Abraham, four hundred years before the conquest, that he would wait before bringing judgment, because "the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." The judgment is delayed by centuries to give time for change. That is not the action of a God who is itching to use violence; it is the action of a God who is restraining it.

2. The language is partly hyperbolic by ancient-Near-Eastern convention.

Ancient battle reports across the region used universal, sweeping language ("destroyed them all," "left no survivors") as a literary convention, not always as a literal claim. Later passages in the same biblical books often show the same supposedly "destroyed" peoples still living in the land. The text is using a known ancient genre. Reading "left no survivors" as a flat numerical claim, when the surrounding text shows survivors, is reading the genre wrong.

This is not a dodge; it is standard ancient-Near-Eastern studies, accepted by scholars across the worldview spectrum. It significantly reduces the scale of what the conquest actually involved, though it does not eliminate the discomfort.

3. The pattern is salvation through judgment, not judgment for its own sake.

The deeper pattern across the Old Testament is that judgment, where it occurs, is in service of the bigger story — preserving a people through whom the rescue of the world will eventually come. This is uncomfortable from inside the narratives in which judgment falls. It is also the only way the rescue story works out.

A modern parallel that has some uses (though no analogy is perfect): the Allied response to Nazi genocide in WWII required violence. Innocent people died inside that violence — collateral, mistakes, bombing campaigns that killed civilians. Most thoughtful people consider the Allies right to have fought anyway, because not fighting would have meant the continuation of something worse. The conquest narratives operate in a similar moral space, on the Bible's own account — judgment now to prevent the further entrenchment of practices that were destroying the people doing them.

4. The judgment is two-sided.

This is important and missed. God's judgments in the Old Testament are not preferential to Israel. When the Israelites commit the same atrocities the Canaanites did, the judgment falls on Israel — and the Old Testament writers say so plainly. The northern kingdom of Israel is exiled by the Assyrians in 722 BC. The southern kingdom of Judah is exiled by the Babylonians in 587 BC. The prophets, before and after, accuse Israel of the same idolatries and abuses they accused the Canaanites of, and announce that God will judge them the same way. The conquest narratives are not "us good, them bad." They are "God will not tolerate this from anyone, including you."

The deeper Christian move: read backwards from Jesus

This is the most important point. The Christian tradition has always claimed that Jesus is the clearest revelation of God's character, and that the Old Testament is to be read through him, not in isolation.

The New Testament letter of Hebrews opens this way: "In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son… The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being."

The Christian doctrine is not that the Old Testament is unreliable or that its picture of God is somehow superseded. It is that the Old Testament is partial, and Jesus is the fullness. The way to read the Old Testament correctly is to read it as building toward Jesus, with Jesus as the key to interpreting the difficult passages.

Jesus himself revised certain Old Testament applications. He moved violence off the table for his followers (the most famous example is his teaching to "love your enemies" in his Sermon on the Mount, in the gospel of Matthew). He reframed laws that had been used to oppress. He took the violence that was meant for sinful humanity into himself rather than letting it fall on us.

The arc from Old Testament to New Testament is not "harsh God learning to be kinder." It is "God carefully working through a broken world toward the moment when he himself absorbs the violence to undo it from the inside."

What this is not

It is worth being clear about what we are not saying:

• We are not saying the hard passages are not hard. They are. People who read them carefully come away troubled, and that is the right response.
• We are not saying the Old and New Testaments have no differences. They have many — different covenants, different periods, different applications.
• We are not saying every Christian throughout history has handled this question well. Many have used these passages as cover for actual violence, and that was always a misuse.
• We are not asking you to accept the conquest narratives before investigating Jesus. The order is the other way: start with who Jesus actually is, and then come back to the Old Testament with the right key.

What about right now

If this question has been a major reason you have stayed away from Christianity, you are in good company — it has been a major question for thoughtful people for two thousand years. The careful answer is more interesting than the caricature, and probably more interesting than the answer any specific Christian community has given you. If you want to talk it through, our chat is free, private, and in your language.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• Exodus 34:6–7 — God's own self-description
• Jonah 4:2 — even reluctant prophets knew God was gracious and compassionate
• 2 Peter 3:9 — judgment delayed is patience, not absence
• Hebrews 1:1–3 — Jesus as the full and final revelation
• John 14:9 — "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."
• Matthew 5:43–48 — Jesus' reframing of how violence relates to God's people