Did God order the Israelites to commit genocide?

The Old Testament contains many passages that are difficult to believe.  There are of course problems with scientific, geographical, or historical details, the most famous of these being the six-day creation.  These issues do not present severe difficulty except to the fundamentalist who insists on taking every word literally.  Allegorical interpretations of the Genesis story have been part of mainstream Christian thought since long before the scientific age.

The more serious concerns with the Old Testament come from passages where either the “moral of the story” itself, or the life lesson that a believer could be expected to draw from a passage, or the depiction of the character of God, strikes us as terribly wrong.  For example, in Numbers 5:11-29, we read that Continue reading “Did God order the Israelites to commit genocide?”