Do the biblical reports of God commanding the killing of non-combatants during the conquest contain theological or moral errors regarding God's actual will or commands? This is a challenging question when we encounter texts like 1 Samuel 15, where Samuel relays a command from the Lord to Saul to "punish the Amalekites for attacking the Israelites when they were weak." The command instructs Saul to "devote to destruction everything," stating, "Do not spare them, put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

Comparing Rauser's View and Covenant Virtue Ethics

How should we approach such texts? Are they errors? Are they human projections onto God of intentions and commands He didn't actually have, causing God's true will to diverge from what the text presents? This post will examine this question by looking specifically at Randall Rausser's view, which concludes that these are ultimately errors, and contrasting it with my own view, "Covenant Virtue Ethics," which argues these texts are not errors when read properly within their context.

Randall Rausser's Position: Biblical Reports Contain Errors

Randall Rausser develops his view based on specific commitments regarding God and scripture.

God and Scripture

Like most theists, Rausser embraces perfect being theology, believing God possesses all perfections maximally. He also affirms the dual authorship of scripture, both human and divine. However, he thinks that there can be divergent intentions. While God's intention for the text is inerrant due to His moral perfection, human authors can misrepresent what they think God is commanding, leading to flaws or errors creeping into the text from the human side.

Rausser nonetheless holds to divine providence and meticulous superintendence, embracing a Molinist view (middle knowledge) where God knew how human authors would freely choose to include these errors and providentially allowed them for pedagogical purposes, namely to teach us, perhaps, what doesn't work, how to wrestle with the text, and how these accounts don't align with Christ's character.

Hermeneutical Principles

Rausser employs specific principles for interpreting scripture:

• Canonical Context: Parts of Scripture should be understood within the whole of scripture.
• Christocentric Lens: Jesus is the ultimate and fullest revelation of God's character and will. Therefore, any correct interpretation must align with Jesus' life and teachings and cannot contradict what He would command.
• Love Principle: Scripture's ultimate purpose is to teach us to love God and love neighbors. Any interpretation that promotes hatred, marginalization, or bigotry cannot be accurate.

Using this framework, Rausser handles difficult texts like 1 Samuel 15 by concluding that commands to kill non-combatants cannot represent God's actual will because they are not loving and contradict Jesus' commands to love enemies. He believes God allowed these commands to be attributed to Him, despite not actually commanding them, because the human authors freely chose to include them. God then uses these flawed reports for teaching purposes, helping readers recognize the moral problems in such commands when viewed through Christ, understand the limitations of ancient cultural contexts, condemn the perceived errors, and read empathetically with the victims.

Four Objections to Rausser's View

While Rausser's approach attempts to reconcile difficult texts with God's character, I see significant challenges:

1. Epistemic Circularity: Rausser uses the life and teachings of Jesus (primarily found in the Gospels) as the standard to identify errors elsewhere in scripture. However, if scripture, as Rausser admits, can contain human errors, how can we be certain that the gospel accounts themselves are completely error-free and perfectly represent God's actual will through Jesus? Using scripture to check scripture for errors, while simultaneously admitting scripture can be erroneous, seems circular. We must assume the reliability of the gospel accounts before using them as a filter, without an independent standard to justify that assumption beyond potentially subjective intuition (which itself faces reliability issues).
2. Imbalanced Moral Value Projection: Rausser appears to evaluate Old Testament actions primarily through a narrow set of moral values prominent in Western, individualized cultures: harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Joseph), other moral categories like loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation have been historically crucial, especially in ancient Near Eastern contexts relevant to the Old Testament narratives. These texts place high value on loyalty to the covenant, divine authority, and eliminating idolatrous defilement (sanctity). Judging God's actions solely through the lens of harm and fairness risks anachronistically projecting a modern moral framework onto a different cultural and covenantal context, potentially leading one to perceive errors where none exist within that broader moral landscape.
3. Impoverished Character or Love Assumption: Rausser risks reducing God's multifaceted moral character primarily to a specific, contemporary view of love focused narrowly on mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, often in a non-violent sense. While God is certainly loving, scripture reveals His character also includes holiness, righteousness, faithfulness, and justice. In different covenant contexts (Old vs. New), different aspects of God's unified character may be emphasized due to differing circumstances and His redemptive purposes. Actions like judgment and punishment, viewed through the lens of His holiness, justice, and faithfulness to covenant promises (e.g., the promise of land to Israel), can be seen as consistent with His character, even if challenging from a modern perspective heavily weighted toward preventing harm. Reducing God's character to a limited definition of love based on only certain New Testament emphases can lead one to erroneously conclude that actions stemming from His other attributes (like justice against pervasive sin) are errors.
4. Harmful Consequences: If God providentially allowed these problematic reports (which depict God commanding actions many perceive as horrific, like killing infants) into scripture, the resulting harmful consequences have been significant. These texts have been used to justify violence and atrocities throughout history and can cause immense difficulty, doubt, and loss of faith for modern readers who see God portrayed as a "moral monster." Rausser suggests pedagogical reasons for God allowing these errors, but these reasons (like teaching us to wrestle with the text or read empathetically) seem morally insufficient in light of the actual, severe harm caused by people taking these texts as God's literal commands. A morally perfect God would not allow such damaging errors based on insufficient justification.

Covenant Virtue Ethics: An Alternative View

In light of these challenges, I propose "Covenant Virtue Ethics" as an alternative approach.

Core Principles

• Covenant: Biblical narratives, including the conquest, occur within the overarching meta-narrative of God fulfilling His covenant promises, primarily to Israel. This provides a crucial context.
• Virtue: God's character is multifaceted, encompassing virtues like justice, faithfulness, holiness, and love (His covenant loyalty or hesed). We look at God's full character within the covenant context, not just a narrow slice.
• Context: We read the Old Testament texts deeply within their ancient Near Eastern cultural and literary context, recognizing features like hyperbole and merisms (figures of speech signifying totality, like listing "men, women, children, infants" to mean total destruction of the enemy nation or entity in battle, not necessarily a literal demographic checklist for killing).
• No Errors: Crucially, this view holds that the human authorial intent and divine authorial intent align. God used the human authors without error to report His actual will, although that will is expressed using the rhetorical conventions understood by the original audience. There is no need to separate a "reported will" from God's "actual will" because they are the same within their historical and literary context.

Handling Difficult Texts Via CVE

• Deuteronomy 7 & 20 (Canaanites): Covenant Virtue Ethics sees the herem commands as standard ancient Near Eastern hyperbolic war rhetoric signifying God's actual contextual will for decisive military victory and complete political/religious neutralization of a corrupting influence that threatened Israel's holiness and God's redemptive plan. God's multifaceted will here emphasizes justice against pervasive wickedness (detailed elsewhere in scripture) and faithfulness to covenant promises (land). The report accurately reflects this will expressed through covenantal rhetoric; there is no error.
• 1 Samuel 15 (Amalekites): Similar to Deuteronomy, the command to destroy "men and women, children and infants," etc., is understood as a merism signifying total judgment decreed against the Amalekite nation as a persistent, existential threat hostile to God's redemptive plan through Israel. God's actual contextual will focused on justice and faithfulness. The report accurately reflects this will for total judgment on the nation expressed by a merism; there is no error in the text itself.
• Numbers 31 (Midianites): This command, where Moses orders the killing of male children after the Midianite women lured Israelite men into idolatry and sin, is perhaps the most challenging. Covenant Virtue Ethics acknowledges it as a tragic and unique circumstance. However, rather than labeling it an error, it suggests the command reflects God's actual will in this specific context, potentially justified via divine foreknowledge. Given God's omniscience and wisdom, He may have known these male children would grow up to become combatants and continue the existential threat posed by the Midianites to Israel and God's plan. God, as the author of life, has the prerogative to take life. This preemptive act is seen as God's justice and faithfulness to protect His covenant people from a unique threat. While tragic, viewing it through the broader lens of God's authority, justice, and faithfulness (beyond just harm/fairness) allows one to see it as God's will without attributing evil intent to Him (as intending the death of innocents would be evil). The view maintains God did not intend the death of innocents; He acted based on foreknowledge of future combatancy in a rare scenario.

Covenant Virtue Ethics avoids the problems of epistemic circularity (because no errors are assumed), the limitations of imbalanced moral projection, and the difficulty of justifying why God would allow harmful errors on insufficient grounds. It shifts the focus to understanding the contextual and covenantal rationale behind the commands themselves, acknowledging tragedy while maintaining God's multifaceted character and the inerrancy of scripture in reporting His contextual will.

While wrestling with these texts is difficult and tragic elements remain, Covenant Virtue Ethics offers a coherent framework that respects both the biblical text in its historical context and God's perfect, multifaceted character, providing a compelling alternative to viewing challenging Old Testament commands as errors.