Despite their differences, it’s worth remembering that the God of the Old Testament is the same God at the foundation of all three major monotheistic religions. Jews worship Yahweh directly, Christians transform Him into a Trinity, and Muslims claim that He revealed His final will to Muhammad directly. Yet none reject Him outright. Instead, each tradition contends that the others have failed to properly understand or faithfully preserve His revelation as transmitted through their chosen prophets and sacred texts.
That all three faiths worship the same God is beyond question. “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing,” Jesus says. “My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me” (John 8:54). Saint Paul, more responsible than anyone else for the spread of early Christianity, makes the point even more explicit: “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13). Clearly, the God of the Jews is the God of Jesus. There is no need for any subtle theological reasoning to prove the point.
The same goes for the Quran: “And do not argue with the People of the Scripture except in the best manner possible,” says Quran 29:46, “…our God and your God is One.” So when the Western faiths claim to be monotheistic, they really mean it. They are all unequivocally referring to the same God.
And that’s precisely the problem, for each of them.
In their explicit acceptance of the God of Abraham, all Western “Abrahamic” faiths inextricably tether themselves to the temperament and character of Yahweh. Why this is a problem is about to be made painfully clear.
Richard Dawkins, who might otherwise have been accused of hyperbole by those unfamiliar with scripture, introduces our beloved Yahweh in the second chapter of The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Well, maybe don’t let Richard Dawkins write your eulogy, is the first thing to say.
Honestly, though, Dawkins is far more amiable and measured than people give him credit for. Those who actually read his books do not walk away with the same impression of militancy ascribed to him by hostile believers. But this is not an article about Richard Dawkins. It’s about the fact that, in a mere 43 words, he absolutely nailed the character of Yahweh—to the embarrassment of all three faiths.
Truly, if someone you knew spoke and acted like Yahweh—as we’re about to see—they would rank among the most reprehensible people you had ever met. And if any secular book contained passages as violent, vindictive, and intolerant as those found in the Old Testament, it would be quickly condemned and banned without a second thought.
But such is the effect of familiarity. Or, in some cases, a lack thereof.
Let’s correct that. We’re going to flesh out Dawkins’ paragraph with fresh eyes to see what God is really up to in the Bible. Then, we can decide for ourselves if this is truly a deity that is worthy of our devotion—or of our moral condemnation.
Starting with the Ten Commandments, God declares, “I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:3–6). Come again? By what conceivable principle of justice should innocent children be punished for the sins of their great-grandparents? Unless I’m missing something, we can safely conclude that the opening commandments are already fundamentally unjust.
But we’re just getting started. Our all-powerful yet jealous God is petty enough to kill 70 men for simply looking into the ark of the Lord (1 Samuel 6:19), unforgiving enough to have a man stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32–36), and controlling enough to command Israelites to kill even a close family member who tries to persuade them to worship another god (Deuteronomy 13:6–10)—thus making him familicidal (Dawkins missed this one).
He is vindictive enough to describe himself as an “avenging God” who “takes vengeance on his adversaries” (Nahum 1:2), and bloodthirsty enough to command his chosen people to “utterly destroy” entire populations. “Do not leave alive anything that breathes,” God commands, including men, women, and children (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). In the conquest of the Amalekites, the order is even more explicit: “Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3)—making God not merely genocidal, but infanticidal.
He is misogynistic enough to impose harsher ritual impurity on a woman who gives birth to a daughter than on one who gives birth to a son (Leviticus 12:2–5), and homophobic enough to declare that a man who lies with another man “as one does with a woman” has committed an “abomination” punishable by death (Leviticus 20:13).
He is filicidal, at least in intention, when he commands Abraham to take his beloved son Isaac and offer him as a burnt offering (Genesis 22:2). He is pestilential when he inflicts plague upon the Egyptians and their livestock (Exodus 9:3–6), and megalomaniacal in his insistence that there is no god besides himself: “I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me.” (Isaiah 46:9).
He is sadomasochistic in his threats against those who disobey him, promising that during a siege parents will eat the flesh of their own children (Deuteronomy 28:53–57). He further takes pleasure in his own punishments: “Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you” (Deuteronomy 28:63). And he is capriciously malevolent in the Book of Job, where he permits Satan to destroy a righteous man’s possessions, kill his children, and afflict his body—not because Job has done anything wrong, but as part of a test.
Yet this is the God, remarkably, that billions of people worship every day.
Well, that was unpleasant. I hope you are now sufficiently shocked out of your complacency to abandon any lingering reverence for this despicable text. And I hope you can see why dressing up its more barbaric passages in metaphor does nothing to redeem them. No amount of interpretive gymnastics can make commands to kill homosexuals any less barbaric—or transform a morally repugnant text into a morally respectable one.
Some believers may counter that the Bible also includes good, virtuous passages. So what? Imagine a human being responsible for the spread of hatred and death on unimaginably large scales, but then we let him off the hook because he occasionally said some nice things to us in between massacres. Would we absolve him? Of course not. Then why do our standards so quickly fall off a cliff when we discuss religion?
So by all means, argue that Richard Dawkins exaggerated his description of Yahweh, and contort yourself trying to justify biblical passages that condemn people to eat their own children. I, for one, am inclined to reach the opposite conclusion: Dawkins may have been more charitable than the text deserves.
Sources
Barker, Dan. God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. Lanham, MD: Prometheus Books, 2023.
Bible Gateway: https://www.biblegateway.com/.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Mariner Books, 2008.