Why Does the God of the Old Testament Seem So Harsh

Official answer 2026-08-22

This is the most common and most honest difficulty. Three things genuinely change how it reads. First, much of what you are reading is narrative, not command. Stories report what happened without endorsing it. Scripture records terrible things done by its own major figures, and recording is not recommending. Second, the law was given to a particular people at a particular time, and a great deal of it tightened rather than loosened the surrounding culture: it forbade what neighbouring societies permitted, and it legislated protection for people nobody else protected — widows, foreigners, servants. Read without that comparison, laws limiting violence get misread as authorising it. Third, there is far more mercy in the Old Testament than the impression suggests. The line that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love comes from the Old Testament and is quoted repeatedly within it. The same God judges and endures long in the same book. What about the passages that remain genuinely hard? Do not dissolve them by pretending they are mild. Admit honestly that they trouble you, read what serious believers have written about them across the centuries, and notice whether the text itself grieves over what it reports — often it does. A practical reading suggestion: finish one Gospel before going back. Christians do not read the Old Testament as a standalone book but backwards from the ending, and many threads turn out to be heading there. One caution: some have tried simply discarding the Old Testament — the church judged that wrong, because it amounts to saying God was replaced.