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In this episode, Trent examines how some atheists falsely indict the Bible as evil or illogical because they didn’t read the text carefully.
Transcript:
Intro:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn.
In today’s episode, I want to go through three examples of Bible difficulties that are only difficult because the atheists who are reading them haven’t really read the biblical text carefully and are making some unfounded assumptions, so let’s jump right into that. Before we do though, I’m sure you can carefully read the subscribe and the like buttons on our channel. If you could hit those, it would be a huge help for me. We just passed 70,000 subscribers for the channel, and if we can make it to a hundred thousand by the end of the year, I’d be really grateful.
All right, with that said, let’s jump right into it. Here’s the first one. Number one, the all-powerful God can’t defeat iron chariots. This one pops up a lot in memes on the internet. There was even an atheistic apologetics website devoted to defending atheism called Iron Chariots, though it’s now defunct I think. Here’s a clip of Dan Barker, an atheist I’ve debated twice making this objection in a debate with the Christian apologist Kyle Butt.
Dan Barker:
Is he powerful? “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh,” in Jeremiah 32. “Is there anything too hard for me? Jesus said, ‘With God, all things are possible,'” and yet in Judges 1:19, read this, “The Lord was with Judah. He drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley.” Why? Because they had chariots of iron. God is all powerful? God cannot even fight chariots of iron. God does not exist.
Trent Horn:
All right, so what’s going on in this passage? This part of the Book of Judges describes the Israelites attempting to drive the remaining Canaanites out of the Promised Land. It says, “The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.”
The assumption here is God couldn’t drive out the chariots, but it doesn’t make sense to say God was incapable of doing that because, in Judges 4:15, it describes how God routed the Canaanite commander Sisera, and he had 900 iron chariots. It’s in the same book. The pronoun he in this verse, in Judges 1:19, refers to the nearest proper noun, the Tribe of Judah. It was Judah who took possession of the hill country, but was unable to secure the plains, not God.
This is similar to Genesis 39:2 which says, “The Lord was with Joseph, and he,” Joseph, “became a successful man, and he was in the house of his master, the Egyptian.” It’s true, the Lord was with Judah, but that doesn’t mean everything the Tribe of Judah did would be successful. The Lord was with Joseph in Genesis 39, but Joseph was still in prison. The phrase only means that God did not abandon the Tribe of Judah during their failure to capture that valley. The failure was Judah’s fault, not God’s.
According to James Jordan’s commentary on the book of Judges, he says this. “Chariots could not function in the hills, so Judah did not have to fight them there. Where the iron chariots could function, however, Judah did not succeed. As Judges 4 and 5 will show, God is fully capable of dealing with iron chariots. Thus, the problem was not the iron chariots. The problem was faith, or rather the lack of it.”
Other biblical commentaries reach a similar conclusion, so why was Judah unable to drive the people from the plains? Not because the Philistines had iron chariots, but because of spiritual factors that will be explained later in Judges 2. This is the Harris, Brown and Moore commentary on Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.
Likewise, Victor Hamilton in his book, Handbook on the Historical Books, says, “The Judahites failed to take an area that was far beyond their own borders, hardly a damning indictment.” Ultimately, the Book of Judges reveals that God keeps His promises to us even when we break our promises to Him. That’s why in the next chapter in Judges, after the defeat of the other Israeli tribes, God says, “You have not obeyed my command. What is this you have done? So now I say I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become adversaries to you.” For a more in-depth take on this verse, check out Inspiring Philosophy’s recent video on the passage that I’ll link to in the description below.
All right, number two, the Bible describes how to perform an abortion. I see this one everywhere on the internet, and I actually covered it in a recent conversation with Cy Kellett about Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks which you can check out on the link below, but it comes up so often, I felt it was worth visiting again. Here’s Cenk making this particular objection.
Cenk Uygur:
If you’ve gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband, here the priest is to put the women under this curse. May the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse into your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries. It is clear as day. There is no question about it. If you don’t believe me, just go read the Bible. It is pro-abortion. It’s not even pro-choice. It’s pro-abortion. It says, “If you think your wife has cheated on you, give her a toxic potion and make sure that she has an abortion.”
Trent Horn:
Numbers 5:11-31 describes a kind of trial by ordeal in the ancient world. It requires a wife suspected of adultery to drink water mixed with dust from the floor of the tabernacle. Pro-choicers claim this will cause the woman to miscarry if she’s been unfaithful, so this shows how God uses abortion. I do want to note though this test is much more humane than other ancient adultery tests like where a suspected woman is thrown into a river and, if she survives, that proves she’s innocent, or a good swimmer, I guess, but it’s unlikely the punishment in Numbers 5 causes the woman to miscarry. The passage never says the woman is pregnant, doesn’t mention an unborn child, and many acts of adultery don’t lead to pregnancy. The passage instead says, “Her body shall swell and her thigh shall fall away, and the woman shall become an execration among her people, but if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be free and shall conceive children.”
The biblical scholar Bruce Fisk agrees, saying, “The ritual in Numbers 5 rendered the guilty infertile.” Sometimes, the English translations like the NIV don’t get this right either, so it can be helpful to walk people through a Hebrew interlinear text. You can find it online really easily. Just look up Numbers 5:27, Hebrew text, and you can show that it does not mention pregnancy or a child. It just gives the literal translation that I just gave you.
We see the punishment isn’t miscarriage. It’s infertility, but even if God did cause a miscarriage, God’s killing of an unborn child conceived in adultery doesn’t prove the unborn aren’t human or that we can kill them. God punished King David’s disobedience through the death of David’s newborn son in 2 Samuel 12, but that doesn’t mean that human infants aren’t persons or that human beings can commit infanticide. God can take human life. We can’t.
This also answers a common gotcha question that atheists will ask pro-life Christians. They’ll say, “Is the Bible pro-life?” A lot of times, Christians will say, “Yeah, of course, the Bible is pro-life,” and the atheists will say, “Yeah, but what about all these cases where God kills people in the Bible like Noah’s flood or the death of the firstborn in Egypt?” If this happens, you should ask the person what he means by the term pro-life. If he means all killing is wrong, well, the Bible isn’t pro-life, but neither is almost anybody else. Almost everybody agrees you can kill in self-defense, for example.
Because life is a gift from God, God doesn’t do anything wrong by only giving people a certain amount of life, but if by pro-life they mean it’s always wrong for human beings to kill innocent human beings, then, yeah, the Bible is pro-life. We can make that case from scripture. We just have to be careful how we do it. Check out my video in the description below where I respond to a pro-abortion TikTok that makes this objection.
All right, number three, the Bible thinks gang rape is okay. Given that states like Florida are banning obscene books in school libraries, and rightfully so, some secular critics say the Bible should be banned because it contains obscenities. Here’s how one activist put it in a recent news story.
News Story:
It talks about adultery. It talks about bestiality. It talks about cannibalism. One doesn’t have to turn very far in the Bible to find something that is just egregious, and I’m not sure why we teach those lessons to our children.
Trent Horn:
One favorite story these critics like to bring up is the gang rape, murder, dismemberment, and subsequent rape and kidnappings that took place in Judges 19 through 21. You can find it in books like The Brick Bible, which looks like a Lego Bible for kids. It was actually made by an atheist for the purpose of mocking the Bible, so strap yourselves in. This is not a story you will hear on VeggieTales anytime soon.
After the death of Samson, there was no one to lead Israel. Judges 19:1 reminds the reader there was no king in Israel. In other words, there was no central authority to maintain order, so lawlessness was rampant. We’re then introduced to an unnamed Levite and his concubine. They’re about to spend the night in the city square of Gibeah. An old man sees them. He takes them into his home because he’s afraid about what might happen if they spend the night in the city square. However, his fears are soon realized as the men of Gibeah come to his home and they demand to rape the Levite that is staying there. The old man tries to protect his male guest, so he begs the mob to rape either his daughter or the Levite’s concubine instead, standup guy, right? The men chose the concubine. Verse 25 says, “They abused her all night. The next morning, the woman was found on the doorstep of the house, and the Levite cut her body into 12 pieces and sent the pieces throughout Israel.”
To see how awful this was, one atheist website calls this one of the top 20 evil Bible stories. Does this prove the Bible is evil though? No. It just proves the people who lived in Gibeah were evil. God never commanded this behavior, and the text does not approve of what happened. In fact, the entire passage serves as proof that Israel had descended into moral madness during the time of The Judges. Even the Levite’s actions to dismember the woman to send to the other tribes to send a message shows how far they had fallen.
As bad as this episode was, it even got worse. The leaders of the Tribe of Benjamin where Gibeah was located did not want to hand over the people who killed this woman. This resulted in a war among the tribes that resulted in the death of all but 600 members of Benjamin and, in order to keep the Tribe of Benjamin from going out of existence, the Israelites kidnapped dancing girls from the region of Shiloh for the men of the Tribe of Benjamin to marry, so all very bad.
One atheist website says of this episode, “These sick people killed and raped an entire town and then wanted more virgins so they hid beside the road to kidnap and rape some more. How can anyone see this as anything but evil?” John Loftus, the author of Why I Became an Atheist, says, “Why should we trust the writings of people who saw nothing wrong with this?” but how do Loftus and other critics like him know that the author of Judges saw nothing wrong with this?
No morally sane person, including the author of Judges, would disagree with Loftus’ assessment that the events described in Judges 19 through 21 are evil. The author of Judges did not think his audience was so inept and stupid that he had to write in block letters what these people did was bad. Instead, the final verse in Judges hauntingly indicts Israel. “In those days, there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes,” and that’s the end of the book.
The Bible often records events for the express purpose of not recommending them but to use them as a graphic warning. The Book of Judges in particular is not an instruction book on how we should live our lives. It’s a warning about what happens when God’s authority is rejected. Pope Pious XI once put it this way, “As should be expected in historical and didactic books, the Old Testament books, reflect in many particulars the imperfection, the weakness and sinfulness of man.”
Well, I hope this was helpful for you all. If you want more resources on how to explain difficult Bible passages to critics, I’d recommend my book, Hard Sayings, A Catholic Approach to Bible Difficulties published by Catholic Answers Press. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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