Three categories of Old Testament texts demand serious Christian engagement: (1) the slavery laws of Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25 — which, on careful reading, regulate a form of debt servitude radically more humane than Greco-Roman or Atlantic chattel slavery, with six-year maximum terms, mandatory manumission, the year of Jubilee, and prohibition of return of fugitive slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15-16); (2) the ḥerem warfare commands of Deuteronomy 7, Deuteronomy 20:16-18, and the conquest narratives of Joshua — which Christian Old Testament scholars (Younger, Walton, Wright, Copan) have approached through ancient-Near-East rhetorical analysis, theological-trajectory readings, and acknowledgement of the strict scope-and-time limit of the ḥerem command; and (3) the imprecatory psalms — Psalm 137:9, Psalm 69, Psalm 109 — which read in context are prayers of the oppressed handing vengeance over to God rather than calls to take it themselves. Each category has a serious Christian answer. The honest Christian engager knows the answers without pretending the texts are easy.
What the texts say, by category
Each category needs to be read carefully before any apologetic move.
Slavery laws
Exodus 21:2-11 opens the Mosaic civil code with slavery regulation. The fundamental institution regulated is debt servitude (Hebrew ʿeved) — a person who has fallen into debt sells his labour for a fixed term. Exodus 21:2: When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free. Leviticus 25:39-43 extends this with the Jubilee — every fiftieth year all debt-bound persons are released; they shall not be sold as slaves. Deuteronomy 15:12-15 mandates that the released slave not be sent away empty-handed: you shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your wine press.
For non-Hebrew slaves, the protections are weaker (some Greco-Roman analogues apply), but still notable: kidnapping into slavery is a capital crime (Exodus 21:16 — whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death); fugitive slaves are not to be returned to their masters (Deuteronomy 23:15-16 — exactly opposite to the US Fugitive Slave Act of 1850); slaves participate in Sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10) and Passover (Exodus 12:44).
Paul Copan's Is God a Moral Monster? walks the comparative ANE evidence in detail.
Ḥerem warfare
The ḥerem (devotion-to-destruction) command appears in Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Deuteronomy 20:16-18: In the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction... that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods. The execution of these commands is narrated in Joshua 6 (Jericho), Joshua 8 (Ai), and Joshua 10-11.
The scope is geographically limited (the seven Canaanite peoples of the promised land), morally framed (judgment for specific cultic depravity, Genesis 15:16 — the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete), time-bound (a single conquest era, not a continuing command), and not transferable to the Church.
Imprecatory psalms
A dozen or so psalms include cries for divine vengeance against the psalmist's enemies. The most extreme is Psalm 137:9: Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Others include Psalm 69:22-28, Psalm 109, and Psalm 139:21-22. The psalmic voice is often that of an oppressed person — frequently David hunted by Saul, sometimes the exiled Babylonian-captivity community of Psalm 137.
Christian engagement, category by category
Each category has a serious modern Christian Old Testament answer. None of them is a wave-of-the-hand.
Slavery — the redemptive-movement hermeneutic
The most rigorous evangelical engagement is William Webb's Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals (2001). Webb argues for what he calls the redemptive-movement hermeneutic: comparing the OT slavery laws to ANE practice (Mesopotamian, Hittite, Egyptian), the Mosaic legislation moves significantly in a more humane direction than its surrounding cultures — but does not yet reach the modern abolitionist position. The Christian theological move is to recognise that the trajectory of Scripture moves toward Galatians 3:28 — there is neither slave nor free — and that the moral fulfilment of the Mosaic regulation is the abolitionist movement of Wilberforce and the early Quakers, not a freezing of seventh-century-BC norms.
This is a real Christian answer. It does not deny the hardness of the texts; it locates them in a moral story whose direction is unmistakable. The Christian ethical witness has been Christians abolishing slavery, not Christians reinstating it.
The Christian engager can also note: comparable Qurʼānic and ḥadīth provisions on slavery — including the taking of female captives (Q 4:24), concubinage with slave women, and the ḥadīth on the manumission of some slaves — do not move with comparable directional force. Classical Islamic law has historically permitted slavery; abolition in the Muslim world came mostly from external pressure in the 19th-20th centuries. The asymmetry is meaningful.
Ḥerem warfare — three complementary readings
No single response settles ḥerem; serious Christian scholars have offered three complementary readings.
(1) Ancient-Near-East rhetorical conventions. K. Lawson Younger's Ancient Conquest Accounts (1990) and John Walton & J. Harvey Walton's The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (2017) compare the conquest narratives to other ANE conquest accounts — Egyptian, Hittite, Assyrian. Total-destruction language was a literary convention, not a literal description. We totally destroyed every man, woman, and child was the way every culture in the ancient Near East described a successful military campaign. The biblical narrative uses the same rhetoric. This is not Christian special pleading — it is mainstream OT scholarship.
On this reading, the actual conquest involved displacement, conversion, intermingling (Rahab in Joshua 6, the Gibeonites in Joshua 9, the survivors who became Jebusites still living among Israel) — not total ethnic cleansing.
(2) Theological-trajectory reading. Christopher Wright's The God I Don't Understand (2008) emphasises that the ḥerem texts sit within a longer biblical narrative of God's character: the Judge of all the earth shall do what is just (Genesis 18:25). The Canaanite cult — child sacrifice in particular (Leviticus 18:21) — was the moral evil being judged, and Israel was warned that the same iniquity in their own land would bring the same judgment on them (Leviticus 18:28). This was carried out historically in the Babylonian exile.
(3) Strict scope-and-time limit. Whatever else it is, the ḥerem command is not a charter for ongoing Christian violence. The New Testament unambiguously redirects the Christian to non-violence (Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:17-21). The Christian who reads Joshua and applies it to twenty-first-century enemies is reading wrongly by the New Testament's own internal teaching.
Imprecatory psalms
The sustained Christian engagement here is to recognise the imprecatory psalms as prayers of the oppressed handing vengeance over to God. The function is not to model what believers should do but what believers should pray when they are tempted to take vengeance themselves. C. S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms treats them with both honesty and seriousness. Romans 12:19 — Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord — is the New Testament theological frame for what the imprecatory psalms are doing: the oppressed person not taking vengeance and entrusting it to God's justice.
The most extreme verse, Psalm 137:9, is a quotation of the kind of horror the Babylonian invaders themselves had already done to Judean children — and a prayer that the same justice be measured back to them. The psalm does not command Israel to do this. It places the matter before God.
The honest residue and the gospel
Even granting all of the above, some hardness remains in the OT. The Christian is not required to claim every difficulty has been fully resolved. He is required to claim that the God of these texts is the same God who became flesh and walked the road to Calvary.
The canonical trajectory. The Old Testament moves from primeval history through patriarchal narratives, the Mosaic civil code, the prophets' critique of injustice, the apocalyptic hope, and the post-exilic anticipation of a new covenant — all pointing forward to Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is not an abolition of the Old Testament; it is its fulfilment (Matthew 5:17). Read the OT through Christ — not Christ through the OT — and the moral arc becomes legible.
The Christian historical witness. The most morally formed Christian movements — abolitionism, civil rights, the early church among the Roman poor, modern relief work — have read the same OT texts and produced more mercy, not less. The texts that look like they should produce monsters have produced Bonhoeffers and Wilberforces. Whatever the OT is doing, it is producing the most radical movements of mercy in human history.
The honest comparative position. The Christian who has read his hard OT texts honestly is in a strong position to ask the Muslim friend to read the analogous Qurʼānic texts (Q 9:5, Q 9:29, Q 4:34, Q 47:4) honestly. Both traditions have hard texts. The Christian distinction — and it is real — is the trajectory through Christ and the historical-witness fruit. Christian ethics culminates in the Sermon on the Mount. Islamic ethics, on the popular reading, culminates in Q 33:21 and the uswa ḥasana of the seventh-century Prophet. The ethical asymmetry follows.
A note for the Christian reader
Do not pretend these texts don't exist. Be the Christian friend who has read them honestly, knows the modern Old Testament scholarship, and can walk Exodus 21 or Joshua 6 calmly with a Muslim friend who has been told by his imam that the Bible's God is a monster. Many Muslim friends have never had a Christian engage these texts seriously with them. Be that Christian.
How a thoughtful Muslim apologist responds
Three Muslim moves and the Christian engagement of each.
"The Bible commands genocide, so Allah is more merciful than your God." This is the popular dawah headline. The serious Christian counter: (1) the ḥerem command is geographically and temporally bounded; (2) the New Testament unambiguously redirects the Christian to non-violence; (3) the comparable Qurʼānic commands (Q 9:5, Q 9:29) are legal commands for Muslims in Muslim history, not historical narrative — and were applied in the conquest of much of the ancient world over the centuries that followed; (4) the historical-witness fruit of each tradition is what matters more than the bare-text comparison.
"Modern Christians ignore these texts; you're picking and choosing." All believing communities prioritise some texts over others. The Christian principle is that Christ is the hermeneutical center — every OT text is read through Christ (Luke 24:27). This is not arbitrary picking; it is the same hermeneutic the New Testament authors themselves used. The Muslim reader is invited to ask whether the Qurʼān has an analogous internal hermeneutical center to relativise its harsher verses — and whether the naskh tradition has done that work or has made the harsher verses more operative.
"You acknowledge slavery in your Bible. How can it be God's word?" Yes, the Mosaic civil code regulates slavery. It also regulates it in directions that are dramatically more humane than its ANE surroundings, mandates abolition every fifty years (Jubilee), prohibits kidnapping for slavery on pain of death, and forbids returning fugitive slaves. The redemptive-movement hermeneutic recognises this as a bounded moral progress not yet at its destination — and notes that the Christian theological tradition (Galatians 3:28) is what produced the abolitionist movement that ended slavery globally. By contrast, abolition in the Muslim world came largely from external pressure. The asymmetry is real and pastorally important.
Sources to read
Click a source title to read it on an authoritative site (quran.com for the Qurʼān and tafsīr; sunnah.com for ḥadīth).
| Source | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Exodus 21:2-11 | The opening Mosaic slavery laws — six-year maximum. |
| Exodus 21:16 | Capital punishment for kidnapping into slavery. |
| Leviticus 25:39-43 | Year of Jubilee — abolition every fifty years. |
| Deuteronomy 15:12-15 | The released slave is to be sent away with provision. |
| Deuteronomy 23:15-16 | Fugitive slaves are not to be returned. |
| Deuteronomy 7:1-6 | The ḥerem command on the Canaanite peoples. |
| Deuteronomy 20:16-18 | The 'save alive nothing that breathes' command. |
| Joshua 6 | Jericho — the conquest narrative. |
| Genesis 15:16 | The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. |
| Leviticus 18:21 | Canaanite child sacrifice — the moral evil being judged. |
| Psalm 137:9 | The most extreme imprecatory verse. |
| Romans 12:17-21 | The NT redirect — vengeance is the Lord's. |
| Matthew 5:38-48 | Love your enemies — the Christian ethical fulfilment. |
| Galatians 3:28 | Neither slave nor free — the redemptive-movement destination. |
| Paul Copan, *Is God a Moral Monster?* | The standard popular-level evangelical engagement of these texts. |
| John Walton & J. Harvey Walton, *The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest* | The ANE rhetorical-conventions reading of the conquest. |
| William Webb, *Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals* | The redemptive-movement hermeneutic. |
| Christopher Wright, *The God I Don't Understand* | The theological-trajectory reading of OT difficulty. |
How to think about it
- Walk the texts in their own voice first. Don't dodge — read Exodus 21, Deuteronomy 7, Psalm 137 plainly before any apologetic move.
- Use real OT scholarship. Copan, Walton, Webb, Wright. Don't invent answers; cite the field.
- Note the trajectory. Mosaic regulation → prophetic critique → fulfilment in Christ. The arc bends decisively.
- Acknowledge what remains hard. Not every difficulty has a clean resolution. The Christian holds Scripture in trust, not as a system that owes him explanations.
- Land on Christ as hermeneutical center. Read the OT through Christ. That is what the NT itself does.
Common objections
- You're spiritualising slavery. The texts permit slavery, end of story.
The texts permit and regulate a form of debt servitude that, on careful comparison with surrounding ANE codes, is dramatically more humane. They prohibit kidnapping into slavery on pain of death. They prohibit return of fugitive slaves. They mandate manumission and material provision at release. They institute Jubilee abolition every fifty years. None of this is the modern abolitionist position; all of it is moral motion in that direction. The Christian tradition produced the abolitionist movement that ended slavery globally — that is the historical fruit of these texts read through Christ.
- Joshua 10 says the sun stopped — clearly the conquest narrative is just a triumphalist legend.
The Joshua narratives are widely held in mainstream OT scholarship to use ancient-Near-East literary conventions of total victory and miraculous intervention. The presence of conventions does not entail pure fiction; conventions describe real events in conventional ways. The honest engager grants the rhetorical reading, notes the historical residue (the Israelite settlement of the highlands is archaeologically attested), and reads the theological message — that God is sovereign over nations and history — through Christ.
- Psalm 137:9 wishes for babies to be killed. How is that God's word?
Psalm 137 is the prayer of an exile whose own children have been killed by Babylonian invaders. It is a cry of anguish handed over to God's justice — not a command, not a model, and not something the Christian is asked to do. The New Testament redirects the same emotional reality through Romans 12:19: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. The imprecatory psalms model what to pray when you are tempted to take vengeance yourself. They show God a corner of the human heart and ask him to handle it.
- But the Qurʼān has nothing this hard.
The Qurʼān has Q 9:5, Q 9:29, Q 47:4, Q 4:24 on female captives, Q 4:34 on the discipline of disobedient wives. The classical naskh tradition holds that some of the most-quoted peaceful verses (e.g., Q 2:256 — no compulsion in religion) were abrogated by the harsher verses (see Abrogation in the Qurʼān (naskh)). The honest comparative position is that both traditions have hard texts; the question is which tradition's harshest texts function as historical (the OT ḥerem, bounded and complete) and which function as legal-and-current (the classical Sharīʿa application of Q 9:29 jizya, etc.).
Related questions
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