Professor Sheldon,
I too have had trouble making sense of a “vengeful god”.
However, I am not at all surprised that the Israelites believed as you put it, “wholeheartedly in violence”. Had not their own God placed them in slavery to the Egyptians for FOUR CENTURIES??
If this was not vengeance, what was? Would forty years or one hundred forty years have been adequate? Slavery is one of the most nefarious, noxious, pernicious, plagues on the planet. The Israelites would have been subjected to brutish beatings, heinous humiliations, abhorrent atrocities, all at the instigation of their God, who allowed this slavery to endure so long.
Then later, the Babylonian captivity was for SEVENTY years. Would seventeen not have been enough?
The old mantra, if God be for us, who can be against us, rings hollow!
Yes, the Old Testament is steeped in such great genocide ( many God-ordained ), so much agony and anguish, brutality and bloodshed, it would be impossible to screen an authentic Biblical movie that was not X and R rated.
Then we come to the New Testament where Paul wholeheartedly endorses the very slavery that his ancestors endured. His command “slaves obey your masters” was clearly followed in our southern states, where young slave girls were forced to bed their masters!
Then Paul says: “wives submit yourselves to your husbands”, justifying generations of wife beatings, and marital rape. So even the New Testament is condoning future cycles of violence.
Marital rape is not legally recognized in Islamic countries, maybe proving that the Islamic Allah and the Hebrew “Yahweh” are one and the same?
AN EYE FOR AN EYE-- SHARIA LAW, epitomizes the egregious excesses exemplified by the Yahweh of the OT – genocides, stonings and other barbarities.
What is most disturbing, is Christ predicting in Matthew 24: 7 that His Second Coming, of necessity, had to be preceeded by wars, FAMINES and earthquakes. While wars are man made, famines and earthquakes are “acts of God”
Our recent exposure to photo journalism of the most recent earthquakes, not to mention starving children in Somalia, underscores the horrors of these events.
Does a loving Saviour really find it necessary to herald His Second Coming with such God-made atrocities?
It seems the “vengeful God” will still be with us orchestrating the anticipated “time of trouble such as never was”.
Not an endearing thought!
EDIT: REPLY TO SIRJE
I absolutely agree with you that OT stories do not connect with the Gospel
However when you say: NATURE ACTS OUT OF LAWS OF NATURE, NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD.
Was it not God Himself who instigated, set in motion, these “laws of nature”?
The Bible tells us the rain falls on both the just and the unjust, so when God withholds the rain,and the ensuing drought causes famine, is He not ultimately responsible? Likewise with hailstorms damaging crops.
God is the SOLE creator. ( Satan, himself a created being, has not such power )
So when locusts destroy crops, rodents destroy granaries, and the potato fungus causes one million of my Irish ancestors to die in the "Great Hunger"
did not God in His omniscience foretell these calamities due to the creatures He created?
Starvation is an horrific way to die.
That Christ would proclaim that huge populations would perish in this protracted, unpleasant way, as a pre-condition for His return, is highly PROBLEMATICAL!