It was a Tuesday morning and I was eating cereal and reading 1 Samuel 15, which is the chapter where God commands Saul to commit complete genocide against the Amalekites. Men, women, children, infants, cattle, sheep, camels, donkeys, everything that breathes, and Saul does it, mostly, except he keeps the best livestock and spares the Amalekite king. And God tells Samuel that Saul has "turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments." The sin is insufficient thoroughness of slaughter.
I put down my spoon and thought: nobody at First Baptist ever preached this chapter.
Not the bit about sparing the livestock. Not the bit about infants. Nobody ever said, in any sermon I sat through in twenty years of evangelical church attendance, "and this week we're working through the divine command to kill babies, let's look at the original Hebrew." The chapter exists in the same Bible everyone carries to service every Sunday. It is right there. And the agreement, the unspoken collective arrangement, is that we will have a very thorough understanding of John 3:16 and a very selective memory about everything between Exodus and the Psalms.
I read it cover to cover. Without a commentary first. Without the apologetics filter pre-installed. And the experience was clarifying. Deeply, uncomfortably, permanently clarifying.
The Body Count Nobody Preaches
Let's just go through some of it. I have a copy of the Bible with margins wide enough for notes and those margins now look like a crime scene.
Numbers 31. The Israelites war against Midian. They kill all the men. They bring the women and children back as captives. Moses is angry, not because they killed people, but because they kept the women alive: "Have you let all the women live?" (Numbers 31:15). The women who have "known man" are to be killed. The female children who haven't "known man" are to be kept for the soldiers. The soldiers who killed people must perform ritual purification before reentering the camp. The text is very clear about all of this. Not ambiguous. Not metaphorical. A military directive about what to do with captive children and who gets to keep them.
I wrote a song about the women in Numbers 31. I've talked about it before. I wrote it because they have no names in the text. They appear as categories, "women who have known a man" and "women who have not," and as property to be distributed. If you want to know why I called the song what I called it, that's why.
Joshua. The conquest of Canaan, chapter by chapter. Jericho falls and "they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword" (Joshua 6:21). Ai: twelve thousand people killed, the king hung on a tree until evening, a heap of stones raised over his body (Joshua 8). The conquest goes on for chapters. The systematic destruction of a population, authorized and in many passages directly commanded by God, narrated with the detachment of a military log.
The Flood. I want to include this even though it's familiar, because familiarity has made it cozy and it should not be cozy. Genesis 6 through 9 describes God deciding to kill every human being on earth except one family and every animal except the pairs brought on the ark. Every child. Every elderly person. Every creature breathing. The mechanism is drowning. The reason given is that human wickedness was great, but the infants presumably hadn't done anything yet, and the text doesn't address this because the text isn't worried about it.
We put this on nursery murals. The rainbow and the ark. We give toddlers bath toys shaped like it. We have made the deadliest event in the entire narrative into a children's brand.
the "context" machine
I want to spend some time on the apologetic responses here because I know them from the inside. I was trained in them. I used them. They go like this:
"Context." The ancient Near Eastern context normalizes warfare and conquest. The commands to kill were culturally situated. You can't apply modern moral frameworks to ancient texts. The theological trajectory of the Bible moves toward mercy and Jesus changes everything. You have to read it as a whole arc.
I understand this argument. I can construct it with more sophistication than most people who deploy it. And here's what I want to say about it: it is doing a specific job that it needs to be honest about.
The contextual argument is fine as a historical-critical reading tool. Useful for understanding what the texts meant to their original audiences. But in the evangelical tradition I came from, the Bible is not described as a historically-conditioned human document. It is described as the inspired Word of God, infallible, authoritative, the same yesterday, today, and forever. The God giving these commands is presented as the God of the New Testament, the same God who is love, who counts every hair, who notes every sparrow's fall.
You can't have it both ways. You cannot say the Bible is the perfect, timeless, directly inspired Word of God when you want authority behind your sexual ethics, and then say it's historically conditioned and culturally situated when someone asks about the babies in Numbers 31. That's not a hermeneutic. That's a picking strategy.
I know the "hardened heart" argument for the Exodus plagues too, the theological puzzle of Exodus 7 through 11, where God repeatedly "hardened Pharaoh's heart" so that Pharaoh couldn't respond to the plagues, which then necessitated more plagues, which killed more people, eventually including every firstborn child in Egypt. The argument is that this was to display God's power and glory. I read that explanation at seventeen in a commentary my Sunday school teacher recommended, and even then, at seventeen, a fully committed front-row church girl, something in me went: that doesn't sound like love. It sounds like a demonstration. And the firstborn children were the demonstration materials.
1 Samuel 15 and the killing that wasn't thorough enough
Let me come back to 1 Samuel 15 because I think it's the most clarifying passage in the whole Old Testament for understanding what "context" does and doesn't explain.
Saul is commanded to "strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" (1 Samuel 15:3). This is not metaphor. This is not apocalyptic literature requiring special interpretive rules. This is a direct military command to the king of Israel from the prophet Samuel relaying God's instructions. Kill everyone and everything. No exceptions.
Saul does it, kills the people, but keeps Agag the king alive and keeps the best animals. God tells Samuel that he "regrets" making Saul king because Saul has not obeyed completely. Samuel confronts Saul. Saul argues that he kept the animals to sacrifice them to God, which Saul apparently thought was a reasonable justification. Samuel gives one of the most famous lines in 1 Samuel: "To obey is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22). Then Samuel personally kills Agag.
The moral of the chapter, as presented in the text, is that Saul's failure was insufficiently complete obedience. The killing wasn't the problem. The incomplete killing was the problem.
No context makes that easier to teach at a children's Wednesday night program. Which is why it doesn't get taught. The contextual defense is deployed after the fact, when the text gets noticed, not as a primary reading practice but as a cleanup crew sent in when the obvious reading raises obvious questions.
what I do with the anger
People ask me sometimes if I'm angry at God. I want to answer this precisely: I don't believe in the God described in these passages, so I can't be angry at him. What I'm angry at is the institution that handed me this book and told me it was perfect love. The people who assembled a theology around it and required you to accept the whole package without looking too carefully at the packaging. The systems that built shame mechanisms to prevent you from asking the obvious questions, because if you asked, that itself was evidence of a spiritually deficient heart, a faithlessness that needed to be corrected before you could trust your own reading.
My problem is the pulpit, not the pew. The people in those pews were, and are, trying to do what they think is right. Many of them haven't read Numbers 31 carefully and wouldn't have easy answers if they did. The institution, the apparatus of theological gatekeeping, the apologetics industry, the people who have professional stakes in never saying "I don't know how to reconcile this," that's who I'm talking about when I'm angry.
Reading the Old Testament without a filter didn't make me hate religion. It made me understand exactly what I had walked away from. Not the God of love the brochure described. A specific, ancient, human-authored set of texts that contain genuine beauty and wisdom alongside passages that describe atrocities committed in the name of divine mandate. Both things are in the book. Only one of them gets preached.
I'm still in the middle of writing songs about all of this. The record I'm working on is full of it, the grief of finding out you were handed a lie you believed completely, and the complicated love you still feel for the community that handed it to you, because the community was also where you learned harmony and potluck cooking and how to take care of people in crisis. It's all tangled. It stays tangled. Some mornings I sit with the annotations in the margins of my Bible, the actual physical Bible I grew up with, the one with my name on the cover in gold letters, and I feel very tender and very angry at the same time.
Both things are real. That's the whole deal. That's every song I'm currently trying to write.