One of the most interesting “translations” of the Bible I’ve read is Brendan Powell Smith’s The Brick Bible. It features hundreds of photographs of small Lego toys intricately arranged to depict various Bible stories. The cover, with its image of God the Father as a little yellow man with a white plastic beard, seems harmless enough. But this Bible was not created as a loving tribute to Scripture.
According to an interview in Rolling Stone, Smith is an atheist, and he purposely dramatized the most “intense” scenes in the Bible. The interview went on to say that Smith “publishes his work in glossy, coffee-table-friendly books—if incest, gang rapes, beheadings, bestiality, and wholesale genocide are your idea of parlor chit chat” (no. 984, Oct. 6, 2005, p. 98). The retail outlet Sam’s Club refused to sell The Brick Bible because some customers complained that it was “vulgar and violent.”
For Christians who recall only Sunday school stories about Noah’s flood or David and Goliath, Smith’s Lego depictions of biblical murder and rape can come as quite a shock. But they aren’t out of place if you remember that the Bible shows how God saves human beings from their sins—including wicked and downright sickening sins.
Evil Bible or just evil people?
The thinking of the influential Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine are typical of many unbelievers’ attitude toward the Bible: “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God” (Age of Reason, 1.4).
Paine exaggerates when he says this content makes up “more than half the Bible,” but the Bible does describe some disturbing episodes. However, these exemplify an important Bible-reading rule: just because the Bible records it doesn’t mean God recommends it. The Bible is not evil because of the evil deeds it describes any more than high school history textbooks are anti-Semitic because they document the Holocaust. The Bible records depravities such as rape (Gen. 34:2, 2 Sam. 13:14), adultery (2 Sam. 11:4), and murder (Gen. 4:8, Mark 6:27), but it does not condone these acts.
This should be a commonsense principle, but you’d be surprised at how many critics simply list Bible passages that sound evil and then make the incorrect inference that the Bible itself is evil. Here are just a few examples:
- “Are they not finding and dividing the spoil? A maiden or two for every man” (Judg. 5:30).
- “Plunder the silver, plunder the gold! There is no end of treasure, or wealth of every precious thing” (Nah. 2:9).
- “As for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me” (Luke 19:27).
Judges 5:30 was not a divine command for the Israelites. It was a war song the Israelite judge Deborah sang after the death of the Canaanite commander, Sisera. The song imagines Sisera’s mother hoping that the reason her son is delayed is because he is taking spoil from the Israelites. In reality, Sisera was delayed because Deborah’s fellow Israelite Jael killed him by driving a stake through his head while he slept.
Likewise, Nahum 2:9 isn’t a record of God commanding the Israelites to plunder. Instead, it is a poem describing what the Babylonians thought to themselves when they conquered the Assyrian capital of Nineveh.
Finally, Luke 19:27 does record something Jesus said, but it was a parable, not instructions. It compared those who serve God with those who serve nobility. The people who are slain at the end of the parable, like those enemies killed by ancient kings for plotting rebellion, represent those who will lose their eternal salvation because they rebel against God’s authority.
Matthew’s version of the parable reveals this meaning since it ends with the Master saying, “Cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 25:30).
If someone presents you with a disturbing verse in the Bible in order to prove that the Bible is bad, you should read it in context and then note that just because the Bible records someone doing evil it does not mean that the Bible is evil. With that in mind, let’s look at what might be the paradigmatic example of a biblical story about evil actions that is used to condemn the Bible as an evil book in general.
The atrocity of Gibeah
After the death of Samson, there was no one to lead Israel, and Judges 19:1 grimly 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 are then introduced to an unnamed Levite and his concubine who are about to spend the night in the city square of Gibeah. An old man sees them and takes them into his home, apparently because he is afraid of what might happen should they spend the night in the square.
His fears are soon realized as the men of Gibeah come to his home and demand to rape the Levite 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. The men choose the concubine, and verse 25 says they “abused her all night.”
The next morning, the woman was found on the doorstep of the house, and the Levite proceeded to cut her body into twelve pieces and send the pieces throughout Israel. One atheist website places this account in its list of “Top 20 Evil Bible Stories.”
But does this story prove that the Bible is evil? No. It proves only that the inhabitants of 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 demonstrate how far Israel had fallen. First, upon finding his violated concubine on the doorstep of the house, he said, “Get up, let us be going” (Judg. 19:28), as if her being gang-raped was only an inconvenience for him! Second, the fact that he was able to dismember the woman’s corpse communicates how bad the situation was in Gibeah. In fact, the other tribes said that such an evil “has never happened or been seen from the day that the sons of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt” (Judg. 19:30).
As bad as this was, the situation continued to spiral out of control when the leaders of the tribe of Benjamin (where Gibeah was located) refused to hand over those responsible for this crime. This prompted a war among the tribes that resulted in the death of all but 600 members of the tribe of Benjamin (Judg. 20:46–48). In order to keep the tribe from going out of existence, the Israelites resorted to kidnapping dancing girls from Shiloh for the men of the tribe of Benjamin to marry (Judg. 21:21–23).
One atheist website says of this disturbing 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 wrote, “Why should we trust the writings of people who saw nothing wrong with this?” (The Christian Delusion, 189).
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 the book of Judges) would disagree with Loftus that the events described in Judges 19–21 are evil. But that does not equate to the Bible, which only recorded them, being evil.
The author of Judges didn’t think his audience was so inept that he needed to write in block letters, “WHAT THESE PEOPLE DID WAS BAD.” Instead, the final verse in Judges hauntingly indicts Israel’s decrepit condition: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25).
Judges is not an instruction book on how we should live our lives. It is instead a warning about what happens when God’s authority is rejected. Pope Pius XI said, “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” (Mit Brennender Sorge, 15).
The atheist’s dilemma
Atheists such as Loftus who loudly protest the evil deeds in these stories don’t have a metaphysical leg to stand on. They act as if it is a fact that what the people of Gibeah and the rest of Israel did was wrong. But how would an atheist prove this “fact” is true?
Other facts—for instance, the size of the Earth or its distance from the sun—can be proven empirically, or they can be proven with tools that measure and quantify reality. Right and wrong, however, are immaterial, universal concepts that can’t be proven in an empirical way. There’s no experiment a scientist can perform and no measuring device that can tell us if a certain action is morally right or morally wrong.
In the atheist worldview, the concept of a moral wrong means only “something I don’t like,” because if it meant “something that ought not to be,” that would imply there is a way that our actions “ought to be.” But if our actions, or even the universe itself, “ought to be” a certain way, that implies further that there is a cosmic plan for human beings, their moral behavior, and even the universe itself. And if there is a cosmic plan, then that implies the existence of a cosmic planner, or what we call God.
On the other hand, if there is no way the world ought to be, then, to quote Judges 21:25, each man could simply do “what was right in his own eyes.” There would be no objective truth about how he ought to live. There would instead be only other people’s opinions about how we should live, and who’s to say one person’s opinion is better than anyone else’s?
The existence of such objective moral truths, such as the fact that what happened in Gibeah was wrong no matter what anyone says, actually provides evidence against the atheistic worldview. As the famous atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie put it, “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them” (The Miracle of Theism, 115).
Mackie rejected objective morality in favor of his atheism, but for the rest of us who believe that moral truths are objective facts and not matters of opinion, a better approach would be to reject atheism and embrace the moral standard God has revealed to us through reason and divine revelation.
Sidebar: Trouble in the Psalms
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! (Psalm 137:8-9)
Some people think this passage is indisputable proof that the Bible not only records evil but that it commands and even applauds it. But this is an imprecatory prayer and not a literal command of the psalmist. This genre of psalms helps us resist the temptation to treat God as our “employer” or someone from whom we hide our true feelings. We must obey and respect God as we do an employer, but unlike a mere employer, God is our Father (Matt. 6:9, Rom. 8:15), and he wants us to cast all our “anxiety on him because he cares for us” (1 Pet. 5:7).
When the psalmist writes about babies being dashed against a rock, he no doubt thought of his fellow Jews, and possibly his own family, who had been brutally murdered. This theme is also found in Hosea 13:16 and 2 Kings 8:12, which describe pregnant women being cut open and having their unborn children ripped out of them. In this passage, the psalmist expresses heartfelt anger at what seems to be a lack of punishment against evildoers.
Although they were guided by divine inspiration, the authors of Scripture had human worldviews and emotions, and these can be found within the Bible. Also, keep in mind that the psalmist did not know of Christ’s future victory over evil and Christ’s future command to love our enemies. As a result, the best response he hoped for in the face of the tremendous evils he and his family suffered was some kind of retributive justice in this life.
But God was able to use this author’s words to convey a literal truth about war as well as a deeper spiritual truth for believers who read the Psalms today.