Most Old Testament passages offered as proof that God is a moral monster fall into a few kinds. Some are stories that report a wrong without approving it. Some are laws that take a practice already present in the ancient world and fence it in. Some are commands given to Israel at one point in its history. Reading these texts honestly starts with working out which kind of text you are holding. Only then can you ask what it shows about God.
This study is built for practice rather than reassurance. It walks through four specific passages and one harder case, and it asks you to do the reading yourself before you hear how anyone else reads them. It draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation in which Lisa Fields talks with Dr. Paul Copan, who teaches philosophy and ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University and wrote Is God a Moral Monster? in reply to Richard Dawkins’s use of that phrase. Working alone, you need a Bible, a pen and about an hour. A group can take one passage per meeting or cover the whole study in one long session.
Three questions to bring to every passage
Lisa Fields names the habit this study is meant to build. In reading any passage, she says, what matters is “not isolating the verse and saying, well, God condones this without looking at the context.” The questions below turn that habit into steps you can repeat.
- What kind of writing is this? A narrative reports what people did. A law regulates conduct inside a particular society. A command directs a particular person or people to act.
- Who is being addressed, and what situation does the text assume? A law written for soldiers in an ancient war assumes the war. A rule for Israel’s kings assumes a king.
- Where does the rest of Scripture take this subject? Later passages, and Jesus in particular, sometimes comment directly on earlier ones.
Copan puts the second question sharply: “We need to see what in scripture is normative and what is something that we call occasional or something that is situation specific so that we don’t blur those lines again.” A normative text states what holds for God’s people across time. An occasional text belongs to one setting. Much of the moral monster charge treats every Old Testament sentence as normative. The passages below test whether that assumption survives a close reading.
Before anyone starts, each person should write down, privately, the Old Testament passage that has troubled them most. No one needs to share it. Come back to it at the end.
First passage: a story that reports without recommending
Read Genesis 19:30-38, where Lot’s daughters conceive children by their father. Then read Genesis 4:19-24, the first mention in Scripture of a man with two wives.
Look for specific things before you decide anything. Does the narrator praise anyone? Is there a blessing on what was done, or a command for readers to do likewise? What does the story show next? In Genesis 4, notice what Lamech says to his two wives. He boasts of killing a man and claims a vengeance far beyond what was promised for Cain. The first polygamist in the Bible is introduced through a song about revenge.
Copan points to both texts as examples of practices the Bible records without condoning. He also observes that the households of Abraham and Jacob, where more than one wife was present, fill with rivalry and dispute. The stories make their point by showing consequences, not by pausing to lecture.
Here is the reading test this passage teaches. If you want to claim that a story shows God approving something, name the evidence of approval in the text itself. A report of an act is not that evidence. In many hard narratives, the text supplies the opposite: the norm is stated somewhere, and the story shows the damage of breaking it.
Second passage: a law that restrains a practice
Read Deuteronomy 21:10-14 slowly, one verse at a time. Pay closest attention to the last two verses:
And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.
Make two lists. First, what does the law require of the soldier? Second, what does it forbid him to do? Notice the month of mourning before any marriage. Notice that if the marriage fails, she must go free and may not be sold. Notice the last word. In the KJV of Deuteronomy 21:14, the word humbled means wronged or degraded; other translations render it as humiliated or dishonored. The law itself admits that what has happened to this woman is a wrong.
Copan reads the passage as a restraint on soldiers, not a license. In his words, “if you take a woman into your home and you engage in sexual relations with her, it must be by way of marriage.” He argues this departs from the common practice of rape in ancient Near Eastern warfare. That comparison is his claim about the surrounding cultures, and it is the comparison that gives the law its force. He connects it to the law’s wider concern for the vulnerable, including the orphan, the widow and the foreigner.
Do not rush past what still troubles a modern reader. The woman is a captive. The text does not ask what she wants about the marriage. A careful reading holds two observations together: the law assumes a brutal world it did not create, and inside that world it limits what a soldier may do to her. The question for interpretation is which reading better accounts for every verse, including the ban on selling her and the admission that she was humbled.
For whoever leads a group: this passage concerns sexual violence, and some people in the room may carry their own experience of it. Say before you begin that anyone may step out or stay silent, and keep the discussion on the text rather than on anyone’s story. If someone discloses abuse, listen first and help them reach support. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Third passage: a disputed verse and a king who ignored the rule
Read the law for Israel’s kings in Deuteronomy 17:14-20. Verse 16 forbids the king to multiply horses. Verse 17 continues: “Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold” (Deuteronomy 17:17). Then skim the account of Solomon in 1 Kings. Copan notes that Solomon fails in all three areas the law names.
Now read a harder verse. “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time” (Leviticus 18:18). Interpreters genuinely divide here. One reading takes it narrowly: a man may not marry his wife’s sister while his wife lives. On that reading, polygamy itself was tolerated. Copan argues for a wider reading. He holds that the structure of the chapter shifts at verse 18, moving from relatives to relationships outside the family, and that the phrase rendered “a wife to her sister” works as a general expression, one woman beside another. On his reading, the verse forbids taking a rival wife at all.
Try this before discussing. Write each reading in one fair sentence, the way someone who holds it would want it put. Then notice what Copan does with the dispute. Whichever reading is right, he says, “the main point is that it certainly is not ideal.” His case does not depend on winning the argument over one verse. The king’s law and the stories of trouble in polygamous households point the same way on either reading. A conclusion that holds on both sides of a contested verse is sturdier than one built on that verse alone.
Fourth passage: Jesus reads the law of Moses
Read Matthew 19:3-9. The Pharisees ask about divorce, and Jesus answers by going behind Moses to creation: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). When they press him about the permission in Moses, he answers: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). In the KJV of that verse, the word suffered means permitted.
Look closely at what Jesus distinguishes. There is what the law allowed, and there is what was true from the beginning. They are not the same. Jesus does not call the permission wicked, and he does not treat it as God’s design.
Copan builds on exactly this distinction. “God’s ideals are not always articulated in the law of Moses,” he says. He also argues that “the law is not something static, but that God is modifying things in order to meet the needs of the Israelites,” pointing to the change from altars of uncut stone to altars covered in gold. He borrows N. T. Wright’s picture of the law as a booster rocket that serves its purpose and then falls away, and he describes the movement as “moving from the shadow to the substance of Jesus himself.” Hebrews 1:1-3 makes a related claim: God spoke in many ways through the prophets and has now spoken in his Son.
Faithful Christians describe how the law of Moses applies to believers in more than one way, and this study does not settle that question. The narrower point holds across those views. If Jesus himself says some laws were concessions to hard hearts, then quoting one statute as God’s timeless ideal skips a step Jesus required.
The hardest case: commands to make war
Turn to the commands concerning the Canaanites in Deuteronomy and Joshua. Run the first question, and the answer changes. These are not stories reporting a wrong. The text presents them as commands. The tools that helped with Lot’s daughters do not help here.
Copan addresses one question about these texts in the conversation: whether they authorize violence by believers now. He answers with an example from Abraham’s call to leave his homeland: “we don’t say, oh, God told Abraham to do this, therefore God is telling me to do this.” The war commands, he argues, belonged to God’s purposes through national Israel at one stage of history. “We don’t have the signs and wonders that accompany these sorts of commands,” he says. He is candid that the sorting is not always easy: “Sometimes it can get a little tricky.”
Notice what this answers and what it leaves open. It explains why the conquest is not a pattern for Christians. It does not, by itself, show that the commands were just. Copan takes up that second question at length in a later book, Did God Really Command Genocide? An honest reader should name this as the place where the challenge presses hardest.
Practice: one passage, start to finish
Take the passage you wrote down at the start and work it through on paper.
- Mark where the literary unit begins and ends. Read the whole unit, not only the verse that bothered you.
- Label it: story, law or command. If it mixes these, mark which verses are which.
- Write who is addressed and what situation the text assumes.
- If it is a story, list any evidence of approval the text gives, and any consequences it shows. If it is a law, list what it requires and what it forbids. If it is a command, write to whom it was given and whether anything in the text extends it beyond them.
- Find one later passage that speaks to the same subject. Write what it adds.
- Write what still troubles you. Leave that line in place.
Then practice the conversation. With a partner, one person states the moral monster objection about this passage as strongly as they can, and the other restates it until the first person agrees it was put fairly. Only then walk through your notes together. Copan’s counsel fits this exercise: “we need to be people who are good listeners.” He describes the posture by repeating a saying he credits to someone else: “we’re like one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”
Questions for discussion
- Which of the three questions changed your reading of a passage most, and which passage was it?
- In Deuteronomy 21:10-14, what does the word humbled in verse 14 do to your reading of the whole law?
- Restate the two readings of Leviticus 18:18 in your own words. What evidence in the chapter would make you favor one over the other?
- Jesus distinguishes what Moses permitted from what was true from the beginning. Are there other Old Testament laws where you suspect that distinction applies? What in the text makes you think so?
- What is the difference between showing that a command does not apply to Christians and showing that the command was just? Why does it matter to keep those apart in a conversation?
- When someone raises the moral monster charge, what would you want to understand about them before you answer?
Something to carry into the week
Before the next time you read a hard passage, decide in advance that you will read the whole unit and label it before forming a judgment. Then return to the one line on your worksheet you left unresolved. Ask what you would need to learn about the text, its setting or the rest of Scripture to see it more clearly, and go looking for that.