The Old Testament Tyrant

“I’ve spoken before about the primary example of Old Testament barbarism,” the professor said. “Recall the story of Abraham being told to kill his only son as a sacrifice to his God. Far from the New Testament God of love, this Old Testament morality is a clear example of blind pagan worship.”

Well, Actually…

I wasn’t yet a student at Harvard; I had come to visit the campus and sit in on a couple classes before deciding which college’s offer to accept. I knew the professor was wrong, but I was 17, and I wasn’t even in the class, so I didn’t say anything. If I’d had then the confidence I have now, I would have raised my hand (no one else did) and said something like this:

“Well, actually, in this passage, Abraham tells his servants that he and Isaac will return from their trip up the mountain. God had promised him descendants through Isaac specifically, and Isaac was still a boy at this point. The point of the story isn’t that Abraham was willing to blindly kill his son; it was that Abraham trusted God enough to sacrifice everything he loved, confident that God would return it to him.* And that’s exactly what happened. This is completely consistent with the New Testament, such as Jesus’ teaching that only the man who loses his life for Christ’s sake will save it.”

I don’t have time to go into a similar discussion of every so-called pagan atrocity of the Old Testament God. Others with far more knowledge than me have covered these in great detail, but I only have a few paragraphs. Thus, instead of talking about all the individual instances,** I would like to take a look at the underlying assumptions.

The Old Testament Tyrant

The God of the Old Testament, the argument goes, is nothing like the benevolent God that Christians claim to worship. He is a god of wars and blood, of cruel heartlessness, arbitrary paganism, and unrelenting legalism. He’s overbearing, demanding, and full of himself. No morally upright person could accept such a God.

The first major problem with this is one I mentioned last week. The very people who first believed in the New Testament God unquestionably thought he was the same as the Old Testament God. They found an immense outpouring of love and mercy entirely consistent with God’s nature as expressed in the Old Testament. Jesus, often cited as an example of great mercy and enlightenment, fully embraced the Old Testament; he said not one stroke of it would pass away.

You cannot claim, then, that the Old Testament and New Testament talk about two different gods; to do so is to break with the core of Christian belief. We must, then, confront the God of the Old Testament. Is he as horrible as they say?

In order to discover the nature of the God of the Old Testament, we need to look at the overarching themes of the “law and the prophets,” ideas they repeat over and over. These are resoundingly clear if you go to the actual text. We may divide their main thrust into three foci: purity, protection, and remembrance.

Purity, Protection, and Remembrance

The law repeatedly gives three reasons for its rules: 1) the Israelites are a people set apart to God; 2) they were slaves and sojourners in Egypt, and 3) God delivered them from bondage in Egypt. Because of the first, the Israelites are to keep themselves pure, rejecting the works of the people around them – works like child sacrifice, idolatry, bestiality, and prostitution. Because of the second, they are to protect the helpless: the widows, the orphans, the poor, the resident foreigners. Because of the third, they are to keep the festivals and teach their children God’s covenant.

Go and look at the Old Testament law. Think about how many laws our country has and compare the volumes of text we have with the Law of Moses, which you could read over a weekend. The Old Testament Law, for being the law of a nation, is surprisingly short. It doesn’t ask for unreasonable things. It asks people not to sleep with their mothers, not to eat dead animals they find on the side of the road, not to share utensils with people who are sick, not to burn their children as sacrifices. It reminds them to treat resident foreigners with respect and to show mercy in cases of manslaughter.

The Law of Moses isn’t arbitrary, capricious, or bloodthirsty. It’s a set of understandable rules, almost all of which can be sorted into the three themes of 1) purity from idolatry and moral corruption, 2) protection for the weak, and 3) remembrance of God’s covenant. Themes of purity, protection, justice, and compassion are found throughout the Old Testament, first in the Law which set them out, and then in the prophets who continually speak against injustice, oppression, and idolatry. It is these themes that show us the heart of the Old Testament God.

*I didn’t make up this analysis on my own, by the way; it’s found in the book of Hebrews.

**I will say that, when you read the entire Old Testament, the examples usually given start to seem more and more cherry-picked.

“Moses and the Law” by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0