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Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric?: Wrestling with Troubling War Texts
Christians cannot ignore the intersection of religion and violence, whether contemporary or ancient. In our own Scriptures, war texts that appear to approve of genocidal killings and war rape--forcibly taking female captives for wives--raise hard questions about biblical ethics and the character of God. Have we missed something in our traditional readings? In Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? William Webb and Gordon Oeste address the ethics of reading biblical war texts today. Theirs is a biblical-theological reading with an eye to hermeneutical, ethical, canonical, and ancient cultural contexts. Identifying a spectrum of views on war texts ranging from "no ethical problems" to "utterly repulsive," the authors pursue a middle path using a hermeneutic of incremental, redemptive-movement ethics. Instead of trying to force traditional Christian answers to fit contemporary questions, they argue, we must properly connect the traditional answers with the biblical storyline questions that were on the minds of Scripture's original readers. And there are indeed better answers to the ethical problems in the war texts. Woven throughout the Old Testament, a collection of antiwar and subversive war texts suggest that Yahweh's involvement in Israel's warfare required some degree of accommodation to people living in a fallen world. Yet, God's redemptive influence even within the ugliness of ancient warfare shouts loudly about a future hope--a final battle fought with complete and untainted justice by Christ.
452 pages, Paperback
Published December 3, 2019
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318 people want to read
About the author
William J. Webb
10 books16 followersDr. Bill Webb (Ph.D. Dallas Theological Seminary), is Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies at Tyndale Seminary. He has worked as a pastor, chaplain, and professor over a span of over twenty years. He is married (Marilyn) with three grown children (Jonathan, Christine, and Joel) and a dog (Muffin).
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April 19, 2020
Summary: Using an incremental, redemptive ethic approach, and careful textual study, the authors argue for assessing the Old Testament warfare and war rape narratives against the Ancient Near East cultural context, the constraints on warfare for Israel, and evidence in the arc of biblical narrative that God both grieves warfare and redemptively works for the end of it.
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing focus on religiously-motivated violence including renewed attention not only to the sometimes violent history of the church, but also to the violence in the Old Testament, commanded or allowed by God. The authors of this work recognize the very real difficulties in these texts, particularly in light of our Geneva Convention ethics.
They begin by arguing that the argument of divine commands rooted in divine holiness and the evil of the Canaanites is a round peg into the square hole of modern ethics. The authors advocate instead that war be understood in terms of the biblical storyline in the Ancient Near East (ANE) context. Key is understanding God's intention to restore the sacred space where God relates with his people lost in Eden, foreshadowed in Israel, decisively inaugurated through the death and resurrection of Jesus, looking forward to the peaceable kingdom of the new heaven and new earth, where evil is vanquished not by violence but by the word of the lamb.
The authors also develop the idea and show evidence that much of the "total kill" rhetoric of scripture reflects hyperbole, and that actually, death was most focused on military, and the kings who led them, where the general population may have been driven out of their homes. Often passages talk about "total" victories, only for subsequent passages to report continuing Canaanite presence.
Additionally, they contend that God accommodates the existing ethical practices of Israel. Perhaps the most significant argument for this "weeping God" portrayal is that unlike other victorious kings who often built temples, God banned David the warrior king from doing so, deferring the temple construction to Solomon ("shalom), the peaceful son.
It's also striking that by ANE standards, Israel's warfare practices are constrained. One chapter describes graphically an extensive list of atrocities common among the nations that were prohibited, as was battlefield rape. While warriors were permitted to take virgins who were attractives, they could not rape them on the battlefield. They were to be allowed 30 days to grieve during which they shaved their hair, and exchanged their clothing before the men could take them as wives (not slaves), who, if not pleasing, were not to be kept but released. None of this would be wholly acceptable by modern ethics (though often actual warfare still is accompanied by these atrocities) but these represented incremental improvements on a redemptive trajectory.
Ultimately, in Christ, God's kingdom comes, not by the exercise of violence, but by the incarnate Son taking violence upon himself, standing with the victims of violence through history. In the end, the Lion who is the Lamb who was slain comes to set things right, not through indiscriminate slaughter, no ethnic genocide, no real battle but conquest by the Lamb's word.
The writers admit the warfare accounts in scripture will always be troubling. We should be troubled. What the authors propose is a God who was troubled with a fallen world, who rather than remaining aloof, accommodated to the human conditions of war, but also instituted a redemptive process that will ultimately end all war atrocities and injustices in his peaceable kingdom.
I suspect we want a God who would wave a magic wand and make it all go away, pacifying warriors into peace-loving automatons. That's not what's on offer here, but rather a God who mixes it up with our sorry mess, and works slowly through history and sacrificially through his Son to set things to rights.
________________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing focus on religiously-motivated violence including renewed attention not only to the sometimes violent history of the church, but also to the violence in the Old Testament, commanded or allowed by God. The authors of this work recognize the very real difficulties in these texts, particularly in light of our Geneva Convention ethics.
They begin by arguing that the argument of divine commands rooted in divine holiness and the evil of the Canaanites is a round peg into the square hole of modern ethics. The authors advocate instead that war be understood in terms of the biblical storyline in the Ancient Near East (ANE) context. Key is understanding God's intention to restore the sacred space where God relates with his people lost in Eden, foreshadowed in Israel, decisively inaugurated through the death and resurrection of Jesus, looking forward to the peaceable kingdom of the new heaven and new earth, where evil is vanquished not by violence but by the word of the lamb.
The authors also develop the idea and show evidence that much of the "total kill" rhetoric of scripture reflects hyperbole, and that actually, death was most focused on military, and the kings who led them, where the general population may have been driven out of their homes. Often passages talk about "total" victories, only for subsequent passages to report continuing Canaanite presence.
Additionally, they contend that God accommodates the existing ethical practices of Israel. Perhaps the most significant argument for this "weeping God" portrayal is that unlike other victorious kings who often built temples, God banned David the warrior king from doing so, deferring the temple construction to Solomon ("shalom), the peaceful son.
It's also striking that by ANE standards, Israel's warfare practices are constrained. One chapter describes graphically an extensive list of atrocities common among the nations that were prohibited, as was battlefield rape. While warriors were permitted to take virgins who were attractives, they could not rape them on the battlefield. They were to be allowed 30 days to grieve during which they shaved their hair, and exchanged their clothing before the men could take them as wives (not slaves), who, if not pleasing, were not to be kept but released. None of this would be wholly acceptable by modern ethics (though often actual warfare still is accompanied by these atrocities) but these represented incremental improvements on a redemptive trajectory.
Ultimately, in Christ, God's kingdom comes, not by the exercise of violence, but by the incarnate Son taking violence upon himself, standing with the victims of violence through history. In the end, the Lion who is the Lamb who was slain comes to set things right, not through indiscriminate slaughter, no ethnic genocide, no real battle but conquest by the Lamb's word.
The writers admit the warfare accounts in scripture will always be troubling. We should be troubled. What the authors propose is a God who was troubled with a fallen world, who rather than remaining aloof, accommodated to the human conditions of war, but also instituted a redemptive process that will ultimately end all war atrocities and injustices in his peaceable kingdom.
I suspect we want a God who would wave a magic wand and make it all go away, pacifying warriors into peace-loving automatons. That's not what's on offer here, but rather a God who mixes it up with our sorry mess, and works slowly through history and sacrificially through his Son to set things to rights.
________________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
February 14, 2021
This book is a prolonged engagement with what appear to be sometimes disturbing ethics in the Old Testament, particularly regarding the issue of Israel's warfare which included commands to kill Canaanites in what looks like genocidal fashion, and the authorization to take captive women as wives (cf. Deuteronomy 21:10-14, what the authors call "war rape"). Covering all the main arguments would require a much fuller review, as their discussion is detailed, nuanced, and thorough. Basically, they argue that some of the ethics of the Old Testament are less than ideal as God is working within the context of—an accommodating—a fallen world, and we rightly reject some of the practices that Israelites were authorized to engage in, but that there are legitimately helpful and hopeful ways in which to understand them in the context of the Bible's progressive story of redemption. Their overall perspective is one that takes a lot of fleshing out and that (by their own admission) does not answer all questions. However one ultimately evaluates their overall perspective, they can't be faulted for lack of sincere engagement with the biblical witness and desire to honor it in its fulness.
Rather than summarizing and evaluating all the main points, here are some takeaways that stood out to me. There are more—the book doesn't waste space on fluff—but here are just a few.
1) The texts about slaughtering "everything that breathes" among the Canaanites, texts that look to us like genocide, are best understood as ancient war rhetoric that should not be taken literally. The case for this is based, first, of the biblical text itself, which despite speaking with this absolute rhetoric would contain inconsistencies if it was taken literally. Cities and peoples who are said to be "utterly destroyed" including "men, women, and children" sometimes show up later in the text without every single person having been literally killed. The authors provide numerous examples of this and respond to and reject several arguments in favor of a literal understanding. Second, the authors demonstrate with bunches of instances of identical rhetoric from Israel's contemporary neighbors (the Egyptians, Assyrians, etc) who spoke of slaughtering everything that breathed when in fact they did not. This does not mean the biblical text is false. It means that it contains ancient trash talk that the readers would have naturally understood as such. This is how people in the Old Testament world spoke about warfare. I found the authors' case on this point pretty persuasive.
2) Israel's war practices as described in biblical narratives and regulated in the Mosaic Law were actually, in the context of typical Ancient Near Eastern warfare, astonishingly humane and mild. There is no mass and ritualized torture, for example, nor glamorized depictions of it carved into memorials. Those were par for the course among the nations surrounding Israel. Israel had none of it. The authors go into gory detail on much of this, and while we sometimes find Israel's war practices in the Bible disturbing, in its own cultural context it might as well be the Geneva Convention.
3) In contrast to the deities of the nations surrounding Israel, Yahweh is distanced in multiple significant ways from being a God of violence. Yes, he is sometimes depicted as a warrior, and sometimes spoken of as destroying his enemies and such, but this is not the whole story. As an example of what the authors are talking about here, Yahweh specifically disallows David from building him a temple, precisely because David was a man of war with bloody hands. In the Ancient Near East, it is the warrior king who had most fully dominated his enemies who would be expected to build a temple for his god in celebration, and who would memorialize his victories in it. The Temple in Jerusalem had no part of this. Likewise the creation story completely lacks bloody violence, which other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories are full of. Yahweh is also often depicted as weeping over the destruction of war, sometimes even the devastation of non-Israelite nations. No god of the nations is ever represented as doing this for enemies. The authors argue along these lines for understanding Yahweh as a "reluctant" war God.
One does not need to agree with everything the authors say or all their conclusions to appreciate the depth of engagement and the wide-ranging considerations they bring to these questions. They don't say all that needs to be said, of course, but they have given a very helpful and valuable contribution and clearly seek to be faithful to the full witness of the word of God, even in the passages that we today find disturbing.
Rather than summarizing and evaluating all the main points, here are some takeaways that stood out to me. There are more—the book doesn't waste space on fluff—but here are just a few.
1) The texts about slaughtering "everything that breathes" among the Canaanites, texts that look to us like genocide, are best understood as ancient war rhetoric that should not be taken literally. The case for this is based, first, of the biblical text itself, which despite speaking with this absolute rhetoric would contain inconsistencies if it was taken literally. Cities and peoples who are said to be "utterly destroyed" including "men, women, and children" sometimes show up later in the text without every single person having been literally killed. The authors provide numerous examples of this and respond to and reject several arguments in favor of a literal understanding. Second, the authors demonstrate with bunches of instances of identical rhetoric from Israel's contemporary neighbors (the Egyptians, Assyrians, etc) who spoke of slaughtering everything that breathed when in fact they did not. This does not mean the biblical text is false. It means that it contains ancient trash talk that the readers would have naturally understood as such. This is how people in the Old Testament world spoke about warfare. I found the authors' case on this point pretty persuasive.
2) Israel's war practices as described in biblical narratives and regulated in the Mosaic Law were actually, in the context of typical Ancient Near Eastern warfare, astonishingly humane and mild. There is no mass and ritualized torture, for example, nor glamorized depictions of it carved into memorials. Those were par for the course among the nations surrounding Israel. Israel had none of it. The authors go into gory detail on much of this, and while we sometimes find Israel's war practices in the Bible disturbing, in its own cultural context it might as well be the Geneva Convention.
3) In contrast to the deities of the nations surrounding Israel, Yahweh is distanced in multiple significant ways from being a God of violence. Yes, he is sometimes depicted as a warrior, and sometimes spoken of as destroying his enemies and such, but this is not the whole story. As an example of what the authors are talking about here, Yahweh specifically disallows David from building him a temple, precisely because David was a man of war with bloody hands. In the Ancient Near East, it is the warrior king who had most fully dominated his enemies who would be expected to build a temple for his god in celebration, and who would memorialize his victories in it. The Temple in Jerusalem had no part of this. Likewise the creation story completely lacks bloody violence, which other Ancient Near Eastern creation stories are full of. Yahweh is also often depicted as weeping over the destruction of war, sometimes even the devastation of non-Israelite nations. No god of the nations is ever represented as doing this for enemies. The authors argue along these lines for understanding Yahweh as a "reluctant" war God.
One does not need to agree with everything the authors say or all their conclusions to appreciate the depth of engagement and the wide-ranging considerations they bring to these questions. They don't say all that needs to be said, of course, but they have given a very helpful and valuable contribution and clearly seek to be faithful to the full witness of the word of God, even in the passages that we today find disturbing.
October 25, 2022
This is the second most thorough, detailed, and comprehensive treatment of the Old Testament war texts I have read (the most being Boyd's 2 Volume 1200 page work). It's conclusions and solutions are views I once held: a combination of explanations from Ancient Near Eastern context and divine accommodation. The authors describe their view as a middle way between more conservative views like Merrill, Longman, Copan, Walton and others and more progressive views like Boyd, Seibert, and Cowles. While this is well worth reading and much more compelling than the more popular or more conservative works on the topic, I am no longer satisfied with these answers, and think the authors overlook the implications of their views, stopping short of explaining what divine accommodation implies. They themselves admit that they rely on viewing justice as being incomplete, appealing to the eschaton. Webb is an excellent scholar, and it feels as if something is missing or has been removed from this book. I suspect Webb's sympathies are more progressive than this book lets on.
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September 4, 2025Sehr gut recherchiert und sauber nachvollziehbare Argumentationslinie.
Wer mit Webbs redemptive movement hermeneutics was anfangen kann, der wird hier glücklich (so sehr das bei alttestamentlichen Gewalttexten halt geht).
Wer mit Webbs redemptive movement hermeneutics was anfangen kann, der wird hier glücklich (so sehr das bei alttestamentlichen Gewalttexten halt geht).
June 12, 2020
Excellent and helpful analysis of a tough subject.
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December 20, 2025The horrific war violence texts in the OT pose possibly the most challenging and difficult questions for Christians. I regularly struggle with the complex issues these texts raise. Alongside Nicholas Wolterstorff's essay "Reading Joshua," this is the most helpful work I've read on the topic.
Webb and Oeste have clearly wrestled with these issues and they do not settle for easy answers. They defend some of the now well-known apologetic strategies (such as arguing that hyperbole is employed) but with stronger arguments than I've encountered before (such as in Paul Copan's books). This book in particular is elevated by the fact that Webb and Oeste go further than other treatments, using their redemptive-movement hermeneutic to make ethical sense of the troublesome texts. This ethical hermeneutic is a much-needed missing piece in other treatments that invoke divine accommodation.
In addition to strong historical arguments and a well-reasoned ethical framework, Webb and Oeste also make good use of biblical theology to paint a picture of the broad sweep of the Bible's teaching on war and violence. The results are surprising, and encouraging. A deep reading of the OT and NT reveals a God who is fundamentally dissatisfied with violence and war-making. This was the aspect of the book I found the most personally encouraging; it helped me to see these difficult texts could be more than 'not-as-bad-as-they-look' (the furthest most apologetics books manage to argue). It persuaded me that these texts are powerfully subversive - they reveal a God astonishingly distinct from violent ANE deities.
If these texts are troubling for you, and keep you up at night wrestling with doubts about God's goodness, then read this book. I've read, watched and listened to a copious amount of material on this question and this is the first to give me genuine relief about some of the issues. It doesn't resolve everything, but it has left me feeling significantly better about the texts as a result of reading it.
Webb and Oeste have clearly wrestled with these issues and they do not settle for easy answers. They defend some of the now well-known apologetic strategies (such as arguing that hyperbole is employed) but with stronger arguments than I've encountered before (such as in Paul Copan's books). This book in particular is elevated by the fact that Webb and Oeste go further than other treatments, using their redemptive-movement hermeneutic to make ethical sense of the troublesome texts. This ethical hermeneutic is a much-needed missing piece in other treatments that invoke divine accommodation.
In addition to strong historical arguments and a well-reasoned ethical framework, Webb and Oeste also make good use of biblical theology to paint a picture of the broad sweep of the Bible's teaching on war and violence. The results are surprising, and encouraging. A deep reading of the OT and NT reveals a God who is fundamentally dissatisfied with violence and war-making. This was the aspect of the book I found the most personally encouraging; it helped me to see these difficult texts could be more than 'not-as-bad-as-they-look' (the furthest most apologetics books manage to argue). It persuaded me that these texts are powerfully subversive - they reveal a God astonishingly distinct from violent ANE deities.
If these texts are troubling for you, and keep you up at night wrestling with doubts about God's goodness, then read this book. I've read, watched and listened to a copious amount of material on this question and this is the first to give me genuine relief about some of the issues. It doesn't resolve everything, but it has left me feeling significantly better about the texts as a result of reading it.
June 30, 2021
William Webb's book on wrestling with the many troubling war texts of the Old Testament is a helpful resource when it comes to questions of violence and the character of God. To put it simply, Webb contends that the violence in the Old Testament, specifically the violence found in the Canaanite conquest narratives, are ethically troublesome from our vantage point; yet, from the vantage point of the original authors and audiences, the war ethics of Israel and their God were rather progressive and redemptive in comparison to the practices of other ANE (Ancient Near East) nations and kingdoms. One of Webb's primary theses in the book is that God exhibits an "accommodating" attitude in the Old Testament war, in which he is willing to "fight" in ways that he does not believe are best or just, because of God's desire to be close to his people. At the same time, however, God consistently pushes the envelope with his people, subtly and slowly moving them closer and closer to his perfect and better will, what Webb calls an "incremental, redemptive-movement ethic" towards something better.
Much of the book emphasizes the war atrocities and practices of ANE nations at the time of the Israelites, comparing and contrasting Israel with her neighbors. This is obviously helpful for readers of the stories, who are judging it from their own point of view, rather than from the point of view of the original audience(s). The other primary emphasis in the book (taking up around 4 or 5 chapters) is on the "total-kill language" in the conquest narratives; like many others, Webb advocates for reading this total-kill language as hyperbolic language, not literal language, because using this type of hyperbole was quite common in the ANE, and because the internal evidence from the stories themselves point in this direction. This can also be helpful for readers today, who may be comforted knowing that most likely not "all men, women, and children" were indiscriminately wiped away.
Still, however, many questions are left unanswered (which is something that Webb makes quite plain in his closing chapter). While this book helpfully gives some perspective and clarity, making these troubling texts more palatable, this does not mean that these texts stop being troublesome. They are, and they will be, and most likely, they should be.
Sadly, I did not particularly enjoy reading this book, as I found Webb's writing style somewhat annoying at times (probably just a personal preference). I also think that the book could have been significantly shorter; as stated earlier, Webb devotes around 5 chapters to his argument in favor of reading the total-kill language as hyperbolic language, and I think that this could have been done in a considerably shorter amount of space (see, for example, Preston Sprinkle’s treatment of the topic in his book “Fight,” in which he discusses it convincingly enough in only a chapter). Furthermore, in these chapters, the majority of the time Webb was using the work of G.K. Beale as a punching bag of sorts; while I do not agree with Beale's reading and interpretation of the conquest narratives, I would have appreciated if Webb would have "picked on" some other scholars and interpreters too, not just Beale.
Two chapters in particular were helpful and insightful, one of which was on God's portrait in the Old Testament as an "uneasy war God," who cries over the loss of life in war and who foresees a future in which no more war takes place. This is crucial to emphasize, and I am thankful that Webb does so. However, it leads one to naturally ask, "What, then, do we do with the conflicting portraits of God, which depict him as a 'man of war' (Exod 15), among other things? Which portrait of God is 'accurate,' or do these conflicting portraits say more about the authors of the respective texts than they do about the God they are talking about?" I wish that Webb would have addressed this more thoroughly.
The other chapter I especially enjoyed was the penultimate chapter, which focuses on the role of Jesus as divine/messianic warrior in the Apocalypse of John, which was insightful: John carries forward OT themes but dramatically changes their meaning and significance in his Apocalypse.
Much of the book emphasizes the war atrocities and practices of ANE nations at the time of the Israelites, comparing and contrasting Israel with her neighbors. This is obviously helpful for readers of the stories, who are judging it from their own point of view, rather than from the point of view of the original audience(s). The other primary emphasis in the book (taking up around 4 or 5 chapters) is on the "total-kill language" in the conquest narratives; like many others, Webb advocates for reading this total-kill language as hyperbolic language, not literal language, because using this type of hyperbole was quite common in the ANE, and because the internal evidence from the stories themselves point in this direction. This can also be helpful for readers today, who may be comforted knowing that most likely not "all men, women, and children" were indiscriminately wiped away.
Still, however, many questions are left unanswered (which is something that Webb makes quite plain in his closing chapter). While this book helpfully gives some perspective and clarity, making these troubling texts more palatable, this does not mean that these texts stop being troublesome. They are, and they will be, and most likely, they should be.
Sadly, I did not particularly enjoy reading this book, as I found Webb's writing style somewhat annoying at times (probably just a personal preference). I also think that the book could have been significantly shorter; as stated earlier, Webb devotes around 5 chapters to his argument in favor of reading the total-kill language as hyperbolic language, and I think that this could have been done in a considerably shorter amount of space (see, for example, Preston Sprinkle’s treatment of the topic in his book “Fight,” in which he discusses it convincingly enough in only a chapter). Furthermore, in these chapters, the majority of the time Webb was using the work of G.K. Beale as a punching bag of sorts; while I do not agree with Beale's reading and interpretation of the conquest narratives, I would have appreciated if Webb would have "picked on" some other scholars and interpreters too, not just Beale.
Two chapters in particular were helpful and insightful, one of which was on God's portrait in the Old Testament as an "uneasy war God," who cries over the loss of life in war and who foresees a future in which no more war takes place. This is crucial to emphasize, and I am thankful that Webb does so. However, it leads one to naturally ask, "What, then, do we do with the conflicting portraits of God, which depict him as a 'man of war' (Exod 15), among other things? Which portrait of God is 'accurate,' or do these conflicting portraits say more about the authors of the respective texts than they do about the God they are talking about?" I wish that Webb would have addressed this more thoroughly.
The other chapter I especially enjoyed was the penultimate chapter, which focuses on the role of Jesus as divine/messianic warrior in the Apocalypse of John, which was insightful: John carries forward OT themes but dramatically changes their meaning and significance in his Apocalypse.
January 26, 2025
"Why should he [God] suffer? In the quietness of my mind comes only one answer... because he loves. Because he loves infinitely, one could speculate that he suffers infinitely. This realization begins to melt my bitterness. It begins to heal my wizened and gnarled soul. For I cannot stay angry at someone who suffers with me in my suffering."
I believe this is necessary reading for anyone wanting to further understand OT violence. Webb and Oeste's approach centers around arguably the two most troubling aspects of ancient Near Eastern warfare that find their way into the Bible: total annihilation (e.g. "kill everything [man, woman, child] that breathes", what they call "total-kill language") and war rape (Numbers 31). They approach these topics with sensitivity and do not try to minimize the moral and ethical dilemmas these passages of Scripture pose, all while applying their "Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic". Each chapter is neatly outlined with what they plan to propose, and neatly concluded with summarizations of each concept.
I learned a great deal by reading this book, the way they compared Biblical texts with other ANE texts or practices about war was particularly illuminating. As they put it, God puts on his waders as he wanders into the sewage of a fallen world, all while hoping to shepherd is people into his ethical ideal.
Perhaps the thing that stuck with me the most was their analysis of Biblical passages that depict Yahweh as an uneasy, reluctant war deity. This is especially clear when it comes to God denying David's (Israel's most successful warrior king) request to build the temple specifically because of the blood on his hands and many battles he fought. This flies in the face of standard ANE warrior king practice, what they dub "battle, build, boast". If a king was victorious in battle, he would follow it up by building a temple dedicated to their warrior deity, and the art of said temple was decorated with graphic depictions of their war exploits. What do you find in Israelite temples? Garden imagery. Images of life and wholeness; a longing for Eden.
They also shed light into how the total miscarriage of justice in Jesus' war-like crucifixion makes Jesus qualified to hear and address the injustice others have experienced. "They would know from the cross what Jesus had experienced; Jesus would know about their suffering. There is something about standing in the presence of someone with a shared-atrocities horizon that quiets the conversation."
As with Matthew Lynch's Flood and Fury, this book does not seek to solve every issue surrounding OT violence, but encourages the reader to trust in the goodness, mercy, and ultimate love of God to right all wrongs and administer perfect justice at the end of the age.
I believe this is necessary reading for anyone wanting to further understand OT violence. Webb and Oeste's approach centers around arguably the two most troubling aspects of ancient Near Eastern warfare that find their way into the Bible: total annihilation (e.g. "kill everything [man, woman, child] that breathes", what they call "total-kill language") and war rape (Numbers 31). They approach these topics with sensitivity and do not try to minimize the moral and ethical dilemmas these passages of Scripture pose, all while applying their "Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic". Each chapter is neatly outlined with what they plan to propose, and neatly concluded with summarizations of each concept.
I learned a great deal by reading this book, the way they compared Biblical texts with other ANE texts or practices about war was particularly illuminating. As they put it, God puts on his waders as he wanders into the sewage of a fallen world, all while hoping to shepherd is people into his ethical ideal.
Perhaps the thing that stuck with me the most was their analysis of Biblical passages that depict Yahweh as an uneasy, reluctant war deity. This is especially clear when it comes to God denying David's (Israel's most successful warrior king) request to build the temple specifically because of the blood on his hands and many battles he fought. This flies in the face of standard ANE warrior king practice, what they dub "battle, build, boast". If a king was victorious in battle, he would follow it up by building a temple dedicated to their warrior deity, and the art of said temple was decorated with graphic depictions of their war exploits. What do you find in Israelite temples? Garden imagery. Images of life and wholeness; a longing for Eden.
They also shed light into how the total miscarriage of justice in Jesus' war-like crucifixion makes Jesus qualified to hear and address the injustice others have experienced. "They would know from the cross what Jesus had experienced; Jesus would know about their suffering. There is something about standing in the presence of someone with a shared-atrocities horizon that quiets the conversation."
As with Matthew Lynch's Flood and Fury, this book does not seek to solve every issue surrounding OT violence, but encourages the reader to trust in the goodness, mercy, and ultimate love of God to right all wrongs and administer perfect justice at the end of the age.
February 7, 2025
This is a well written, well researched and well referenced book that is also a good read. The Authors have done a good job in making a case for their argument, and have been gracious in how they have dealt with differing views.
Note: sections of this book are quite graphic when it comes to warfare, violence, rape and torture. Those sensitive to such things be warned. It is not surprising that most of us will find that the Ancient World had horrific practices (sadly many of which still exist).
I appreciated the thorough examination of Ancient Warfare Reporting as a genre that was common and well understood in the Ancient Near East. Many of the extra-biblical examples that they reference were ones I knew, but they were far more exhaustive - and nice to have this all in one place. I also applaud the handling and examination of the concept of hyperbole. I found that many of the arguments the authors make are akin to ones I have made over the past few decades, but they do it much better.
I also appreciated that they address Greg Boyd’s approach, and seem to come to a similar conclusion as I did after reading his material. Whereas I though that Boyd ends up almost with an “Injustice doesn’t matter” and in doing this I feel makes Scripture less inspired. The authors of this book do not do this - in fact they handle this very matter of Injustice in their conclusion. I also appreciate that they are not claiming that the problem is solved - rather that the hermeneutic that they are proposing works better with OT + Gospels/Letters + Revelation.
While probably not the best book for a young Christian (unless the are serious distraught by the topic), I would highly recommend this book for those who want to take the Old Testament seriously - especially the warfare side of things - but want to see how this fits in with being “all about Jesus”. Not saying all the answers are here, and you may disagree with some (or most!) of what the authors say - but it will be a worthwhile journey.
Only downside I think was I had to go and download the appendices - I would much rather have had them included in the book - as they are quite useful!
Note: sections of this book are quite graphic when it comes to warfare, violence, rape and torture. Those sensitive to such things be warned. It is not surprising that most of us will find that the Ancient World had horrific practices (sadly many of which still exist).
I appreciated the thorough examination of Ancient Warfare Reporting as a genre that was common and well understood in the Ancient Near East. Many of the extra-biblical examples that they reference were ones I knew, but they were far more exhaustive - and nice to have this all in one place. I also applaud the handling and examination of the concept of hyperbole. I found that many of the arguments the authors make are akin to ones I have made over the past few decades, but they do it much better.
I also appreciated that they address Greg Boyd’s approach, and seem to come to a similar conclusion as I did after reading his material. Whereas I though that Boyd ends up almost with an “Injustice doesn’t matter” and in doing this I feel makes Scripture less inspired. The authors of this book do not do this - in fact they handle this very matter of Injustice in their conclusion. I also appreciate that they are not claiming that the problem is solved - rather that the hermeneutic that they are proposing works better with OT + Gospels/Letters + Revelation.
While probably not the best book for a young Christian (unless the are serious distraught by the topic), I would highly recommend this book for those who want to take the Old Testament seriously - especially the warfare side of things - but want to see how this fits in with being “all about Jesus”. Not saying all the answers are here, and you may disagree with some (or most!) of what the authors say - but it will be a worthwhile journey.
Only downside I think was I had to go and download the appendices - I would much rather have had them included in the book - as they are quite useful!
January 27, 2021
One the toughest problems in Christian theology is trying to reconcile the Violent warrior God of the Old Testament who commanded Israel numerous times to totally destroy foreign enemies with the nonviolent loving God reflected on Jesus.
These authors admit there findings do not answer all questions. Their main contribution is reading violent texts redemptively and hyperbolically. They say they have other helpful tools, but they are not at all. They spend a 80% of their book on these two tools out of 5. The last three are more like brief shallow theological essays on Jesus and revelation.
Reading redemptively is close to what-aboutism
OT god told Israel they could take pretty women from conquered cities as their wives. Reading redemptively would tell you, look how bad their neighbors treating women in battle...(it was terrible). Israel was way better. Their ethic was incrementally better, pointing to the ultimate ethic.
Total kill language in the Bible is Hyperbolic
They spent most of the work addressing this. So when God told them to kill every man, woman, child, and animal...he was speaking hyperbolically.
Proving that the herem/total destruction passages are hyperbolic may lessen the ugliest a little, but you still have a massive violence/evil problem.
It’s like poop covered burger, and they took the pickles off...yeah, the burger is a little better...but it’s still a crappy burger.
If your interested in the topic of how to reconcile Jesus and the violence in the Old Testament, read Greg Boyd’s cross vision or crucifixion of the warrior god.
November 12, 2023
Definitely worth the read. I have a much better grasp now of how it's possible to deal with those texts. I can't say I follow Webb and Oeste entirely and at times their argumentation felt a bit labored. But as a whole, their argument for an incremental redemptive arc is quite compelling and I appreciated how they clearly positioned themselves within the other ways of reading/explaining these texts. The organizational structure made this feel a bit repetitive at times--I suspect there might have been a way to do this that was just as thorough but a bit more streamlined. While I felt the conclusions to each chapter were needless at the time, they do offer nice summaries. For anyone not wanting to read the whole text, just reading the introduction and then each chapter conclusion should give a nice overview.
October 18, 2025
Undoubtedly the best treatment of the topic.
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