"Difficult Passages: God and Violence "
- Dr. Todd R. Wright
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
It is difficult to reconcile the God of love with the use of violence, either directly by God (in cases like the flood or the killing of the firstborn of Egypt) or by those following God’s orders (like the sacrifice of Isaac or the destruction of the Canaanites already living in the Promised Land).
Exodus 32:1-4, 15-16, 25-29 and Judges 11:29-40
July 27, 2025
Dr. Todd R. Wright
When the group gathered to talk about difficult texts for this series, divinely sanctioned violence was near the top of the list! It is difficult to reconcile the God of love with the use of violence, either directly by God (in cases like the flood or the killing of the firstborn of Egypt) or by those following God’s orders (like the sacrifice of Isaac or the destruction of the Canaanites already living in the Promised Land).
So the group selected two passages to explore. Both give us the opportunity to define what we believe about the nature of God and what we are called to do in response to violence. Let’s begin.
The first passage is familiar, at least to start with. Most people have heard the story of how Israel, fleeing bondage in Egypt, followed Moses into the wilderness; how God provided for them water from the rock and manna from heaven; and how, when God called Moses up the mountain to give the Ten Commandments, they became impatient and demanded that Aaron make them a god they could see, a golden calf like the Egyptians had.
This is a story that shows up in the lectionary three times.
It tells of a God who is so angry that it takes all of Moses’ negotiating skill to talk the Lord out of incinerating them on the spot.
But the story does not end there, except in the lectionary.
What happens next, as you just heard, is that Moses takes matters into his own hands.
He breaks the tablets of the covenant – effectively cancelling it. And forces Israel to drink
the ground up golden calf, symbolically relegating their so-called god to the latrine pits!
And then he commissions the Levites to kill the idolaters. They slashed their way through brothers and sons and neighbors. Some 3000 people fell that day.
And Moses said it was on God’s orders.
The group here raised several concerns, but chief among them was how to square this violence with the commandment “you shall not kill!”
The paint was still fresh and already Israel has broken the commandments about not making idols or worshipping any other god … and Moses has ordered a mass killing.
How do we make sense of this?
Is Moses simply enforcing the law?
(Elsewhere the punishment for idolatry is stoning, to purge the evil from your midst.)[1]
So, is the execution of the 3000 akin to capital punishment – like the state saying this person is so evil and such a threat to society that they must be killed?
I don’t know how you feel about the death penalty. Dean Thompson, who got his start as a pastor in Montgomery, spent a decade as the head of First Presbyterian downtown, and served as the eighth president of Louisville Seminary, wrote in an essay some years ago, “We are not good enough to kill those who kill. We are too good to kill those who kill.”[2]
He refers to the story in John where Jesus is invited to pass judgement against the woman caught in adultery. He does not deny the law, but he invites anyone who is without sin to cast the first stone … knowing that no one in the crowd is sinless ... and that they’ll be marked by such violence.
He also quotes theologian John Leith, “If we continue to answer hate with hate, violence with violence, vengefulness with vengefulness, how will hate, violence, and vengefulness ever end?”
Thompson is not advocating ignoring sin; he is simply asking us to come up with solutions that
treat people with the dignity they deserve as people made in the image of God.
I wonder what Thompson would have counseled Moses to do?
After all, God was willing to forego deadly punishment. It later says that the Lord sent a plague, a lesser punishment, which surely reminded them that they had done wrong.
Maybe Thompson would have trotted out Thomas Jefferson’s advice, "When angry, count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred."
Maybe, as a presbyterian, he would have rejoiced in our model of placing decisions in the hands of committees, rather than lodging such power in the hands of one person.
Maybe, as a seminary president, he would have encouraged the development of better leaders, since Aaron had clearly let everyone down.
Or maybe, with the benefit of hindsight and history, he would have warned Moses that such killing is fraught with legal and moral questions as evidenced by Lt. William Calley’s conviction in the My Lai massacre of more than 350 civilians, almost all women, children, and elderly men.[3]
I’m not sure Moses would have listened to any of Thompson’s advice, but I wish he had.
The second passage tells a different story. Israel is at war and needs a warrior to lead it. Jephthah is chosen … and filled with the Spirit. That should have been enough, but he makes a vow to God – “If you give the Ammonites into my hand, whoever comes out of my house to meet me when I return shall be the Lord’s to be offered up as a burnt offering.”
It is a foolish vow.
Lawyers like we have in this congregation would have counseled him to be more careful, more specific, with the language, perhaps limiting the possible sacrificial victim to livestock.
Wise men and women would echo Ecclesiastes:
“When you make a vow to God, do not delay fulfilling it, for [the Lord takes] no pleasure in fools. Fulfill what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not fulfill it. Do not let your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake; why should God be angry at your words and destroy the work of your hands?”[4]
But Shakespeare, or Sunday school teachers, would have itched to turn it into a cautionary tale!
And it is a cautionary tale, but don’t let that turn this girl into a cardboard figure.
Jill Peláez Baumgaertner does not. In the final words of her poem, she writes:
“She climbed upon the altar by herself
and smoothed her gown snagged on the rocks.
Her friends had garlanded her hair
so that what met her father’s nostrils first
was not singed hair
but chains of flowers crushed by fire,
this child of God.”[5]
Rachel Held Evens writes about her in her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood:
“Unlike the familiar story of Isaac, this one ends without divine intervention. Jephthah fulfilled his promise and killed his daughter in God’s name. No ram was heard bleating from the thicket. No protest was issued from the clouds. No tomb was erected to mark the place where she lay.
But the women of Israel remembered.”[6]
And so Evans bids us to remember too. But what will we remember?
To trust God more than Jephthah? To avoid foolish vows? To protect the powerless?
Those reasons alone would justify including this tale in scripture.
But we have spent far too much time talking about the violence of Moses and Jephthah. What about God? Does God approve of their violence, encourage it, ignore it?
Miroslav Volf writes that violence is one tool in God’s toolbox, but God’s work is love.
“We must acknowledge,” he says, “the tragic possibility that, through the practice of evil, some human beings will make themselves untouchable by the lure of God's love. When that happens, neither the evildoers themselves nor those who suffer at their hand can be freed from evil without some form of coercion. In such cases, ‘violence’ is an inescapable dimension
of God's unconditional love.”[7]
That explains why God uses violence to free Israel from slavery in Egypt.
It may explain why the cancer of idolatry had to be cut out of the heart of Israel.
But I am at a loss to explain why God does not intervene to save Jephthah’s daughter.
Sometimes, when confronting difficult texts, all we can say is God will have some explaining to do. Amen
[1] See Deuteronomy 17:2-7
[2] Here and following from “Wrestling with the Death Penalty” in the Presbyterian Outlook, 8/29/07, updated 2/27/14
[4] See Ecclesiastes 4:4-6
[5] From her poem, “Jephthah’s Daughter”
[6] From page 63
[7] From “Divine Violence?” in the Christian Century, 8/13/99