Christians interpret violence in the Old Testament in several different ways; there is no single explanation accepted across all churches and theologians. The difficulty is especially sharp where a text presents destruction as commanded by God, while the Gospels portray Jesus teaching love of enemies and restraint from retaliation.
Responses draw on historical context, literary form, beliefs about divine judgment and Christian readings centered on Jesus. Some readers find these approaches persuasive; others consider serious moral and theological questions unresolved. A careful discussion should identify what a passage says before explaining how particular Christians interpret it.
Why the difficulty is real
Not every violent biblical story endorses the violence it describes. A narrative can expose wrongdoing or depict a disastrous consequence. However, this observation does not explain every difficult passage, because some texts explicitly present violence as a religious command.
In 1 Samuel 15, Samuel communicates a command to Saul to destroy Amalek, including people and livestock. The passage makes Saul’s failure to carry out the command part of the account of his rejection as king. Calling it merely a warning against human aggression would miss the particular problem readers encounter.
Joshua 6, with its account of Jericho’s destruction, raises related questions about warfare, civilian lives and the language of devotion to destruction, often discussed through the Hebrew term herem. The interpretation must address the text’s presentation of divine authorization as well as the violence itself.
Avoid a simple contrast between Judaism and Jesus
The Old Testament also contains commands of care and visions of peace. Exodus 23:4–5 instructs people to return an enemy’s wandering animal and help an overburdened animal belonging to someone who hates them. Isaiah 2:4 imagines nations transforming weapons into agricultural tools and no longer training for war.
Jesus’ teaching about enemies therefore arises within a scriptural world that already contains demands for mercy and justice. Describing Judaism as simply vengeful and Christianity as its humane replacement distorts the texts and the religious traditions that interpret them.
The New Testament is not free of judgment imagery either. Revelation 19 depicts judgment and symbolic warfare. Comparing two collections of scripture requires attention to their variety, rather than selecting only peaceful passages from one and violent passages from the other.
What Jesus teaches in Matthew
In Matthew 5:38–48, Jesus addresses retaliation and calls on followers to love enemies and pray for persecutors. These teachings are central to Christian approaches that reject revenge and interpret discipleship through peacemaking.
The same chapter presents Jesus as fulfilling rather than abolishing the Law and the Prophets. Christians therefore face an interpretive task: how to understand continuity with inherited scripture while giving Jesus’ teaching a decisive role. Simply claiming that he discarded everything earlier does not describe Matthew’s presentation.
That task produces different answers because Christians disagree about how divine inspiration works, how a command is situated in history and how later revelation should shape the reading of earlier texts.
Approach one: historical context and literary form
Historical interpretation asks what ancient audiences might have understood, how warfare was described and how a text’s rhetoric relates to its wider narrative. These questions are different from assuming that an ancient account is a complete modern report of a campaign.
In an excerpt from her Joshua commentary published by Zondervan Academic, biblical scholar Lissa Wray Beal argues that conquest language should be read alongside ancient Near Eastern war accounts and passages in which populations remain. She points to the Moabite Stele’s claim that Israel had perished forever even though Israel continued to exist. Her argument is that totalizing language can be rhetorical rather than a literal population count.
This approach can change how a claim of complete destruction is understood. Its limit is equally important: establishing rhetorical exaggeration does not make all warfare harmless or by itself answer why a religious text portrays God as authorizing it. Literary and moral questions overlap without being identical.
Approach two: revelation within a developing history
A Catholic example appears in Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini, section 42. It directly acknowledges passages involving violence and immorality and places them within a history in which God’s purposes unfold gradually amid human resistance.
The document calls for historical and literary expertise and for Christian interpretation in light of the Gospel and Christ’s death and resurrection. It also points to prophetic challenges to injustice within the Old Testament. This is a theological account of revelation and interpretation, not a claim that every biblical action is an example Christians should copy.
The approach explains how a church can retain difficult texts within scripture while refusing to treat all their depictions as timeless instructions. It still leaves readers asking how divine guidance and the human limitations of a particular passage relate. Invoking gradual development names an interpretive framework rather than removing every difficulty.
Approach three: exceptional divine judgment
Some Christians defend the commands as particular acts of divine judgment, while rejecting their transfer to present-day religious communities. In a 2010 answer, pastor John Piper grounds his explanation in God’s authority over life and death and distinguishes ancient Israel from the contemporary Church.
Piper concludes that Christians are called to love enemies and give their lives in spreading the Gospel, rather than kill to spread it. His position should therefore not be rewritten as saying the difficult commands were merely metaphors or that he denies their divine authorization.
The central moral question for this defense remains how divine authority can justify the deaths of those described in the narrative, particularly children. A reader may accept the underlying theology or find the explanation inadequate. Reporting the view accurately does not require presenting it as an agreed Christian solution.
Approach four: reading violent portraits through the cross
Theologian Greg Boyd proposes a different account in his explanation of The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. He treats the crucified Christ as the decisive revelation of God’s character and interprets violent divine portraits through God’s willingness to accommodate a culturally conditioned and sinful people.
On this view, a portrait’s theological meaning may lie beneath its surface: it can witness to divine accommodation rather than directly describe God’s ideal character. Boyd thus tries to maintain scriptural inspiration while resisting a straightforward equation between a violent portrayal and what God is ultimately like.
This differs substantially from Piper’s defense. The two approaches cannot simply be combined into a claim that Christians all read the texts the same way. Boyd’s proposal also raises questions about how interpreters distinguish accommodation from direct revelation and justify that distinction in a particular passage.
What follows for reading and practice?
These approaches operate at different levels. Historical context asks about language and setting; a theology of revelation asks how scripture communicates divine truth; moral interpretation asks what conduct is justified. Answering one question may clarify another, but it should not be presented as automatically settling it.
The distinction between divine judgment and personal retaliation also appears within the New Testament. In Romans 12:17–21, Paul tells readers not to repay evil with evil or take revenge, and to feed a hungry enemy. His argument leaves judgment to God while directing the community toward doing good.
A useful reading process therefore identifies the passage, its genre, the speaker and the claimed audience before asking about present application. It also recognizes that Christian readings centered on Jesus are specifically Christian interpretations of texts that have their own place within Jewish scripture and interpretation.
Conclusion
Christians address Old Testament violence through several distinct frameworks, including ancient literary conventions, historically unfolding revelation, exceptional divine judgment and interpretation through the cross. Each answers some questions while raising others. Jesus’ teaching about enemies remains central, but its relationship to difficult earlier passages is debated.
Careful interpretation neither ignores the violence nor reduces the Old Testament to it. It reads concrete passages, names the theological assumptions involved and acknowledges unresolved moral questions. That gives readers a more accurate understanding than claiming an effortless harmony or a simple replacement of a violent religion by a peaceful one.
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