Holy Genocide: The Danger of Bible-Based Morality
By: Joe Omundson
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Bible, Ethics, God

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

“It is wrong to kill people based on the belief that your ethnicity is superior and preferred by God.”

Most of us, I hope, would agree without hesitation. Racism and genocide are frowned upon for good reason.

There’s no such thing as “good genocide”. It’s a flaw in human reasoning to think another group of people deserves to die because of their culture, genetics, nationality, or religious traditions.

The example that typically comes to mind is the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Maybe some will think of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the more recent Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

I don’t know any religious people who think modern genocides are justified.

And yet, the holy books of the Abrahamic religions include many passages describing how the Israelites massacred over a million people because they believed they were God’s chosen people. This destruction of opposing nations is recorded in boastful detail.

According to the scripture, God was pleased with this, and directly killed millions himself. He often commanded his people to wipe out entire tribes and to leave no one alive:

…you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 20:16–18)

Sometimes God’s instruction was to leave nothing alive. Other times, the men were allowed to kidnap and rape the virgin women:

When … the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take them away captive, and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall also remove the clothes of her captivity and shall remain in your house, and mourn her father and mother a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. (Deuteronomy 21:10–13)

Around 2.8 million murders are recorded in the Bible, and that only counts the killings with specific numbers attributed to them. This number also ignores the flood that allegedly drowned everyone on Earth except for one family.

David, the “man after God’s own heart”, is recorded as being responsible for 81,050 deaths — 81,049 of which God was pleased with.

I’m not familiar with how these stories are handled within modern Judaism; I have no idea what percentage of Jews believe these stories literally happened and were justified. I have even less of a concept of how Muslims think about these stories.

However, I’ve heard roughly a thousand evangelical Christian sermons, and I’ve never heard a pastor say these deaths were tragedies or they shouldn’t have happened. I don’t recall a single message implying the Hebrews were wrong to purge other peoples from the “promised land”, or that the killing was anything but sanctioned. On the contrary, I was raised to believe it was holy.