Slavery, Violence, Women, Hell

A rigorous apologetics cannot sidestep the moral objections. They are the ones that keep people awake. If the Bible is the word of a good God, it ought to be good — and its worst passages ought to reveal, on careful reading, something deeper than the surface cruelty. This chapter works through the four objections that come up most often.

1. Slavery

The charge: the Bible endorses slavery. If it truly came from a God of justice, it would have abolished slavery outright, not legislated around it.

The honest response begins by distinguishing between two very different institutions. Ancient Near Eastern slavery — what the Torah regulates — was largely indentured servitude. A person entered it to pay off debt, to feed his family through famine, or as a prisoner of war. Hebrew slaves were released in the seventh year (Exod 21:2). Sabbath rest applied to them (Exod 20:10). They could own property, marry, and become part of the family. Escaped slaves had to be sheltered, not returned (Deut 23:15–16) — the opposite of the American Fugitive Slave Act. Kidnapping a person to enslave them was a capital crime (Exod 21:16; 1 Tim 1:10, which Paul lists as among the worst sins). The Atlantic slave trade of the 16th–19th centuries — the institution modern readers rightly abhor — was kidnapping-based chattel slavery, and the Bible's own law would have made it a capital offense.

In the New Testament, Paul's letter to Philemon sends the escaped slave Onesimus back not as property but as "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Phlm 16). The ethical dynamite in that sentence was such that it undermined the master-slave distinction at its root. And it was Christians — from Gregory of Nyssa (4th century, the first person in world history to denounce all slavery as evil) to William Wilberforce, from the Quakers to Frederick Douglass — who led the global movement to abolish it. The Bible did not endorse slavery. It planted the seed that eventually uprooted it.

2. The Canaanite Conquest

The charge: God commanded genocide when Israel entered Canaan (Deut 7; Josh 6–11). No good God would command the killing of women and children.

This is the hardest passage in the Bible for modern readers, and we should not pretend it is easy. But several things matter for honest interpretation.

First, the Canaanite culture Israel was to displace was not morally neutral. Archaeology confirms what the Bible describes: ritual child sacrifice at tophet sites, cultic prostitution, bestiality in fertility rites. God told Abraham four centuries earlier that his descendants would wait to inherit the land "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" (Gen 15:16) — a waiting period of 400 years of divine patience before judgment.

Second, Hebrew idiom and ancient Near Eastern warfare rhetoric employ hyperbolic language. Joshua's reports of "leaving no survivors" in Joshua 10–11 are followed in Judges by large populations of the same peoples still living in the land. Paul Copan and Richard Hess have argued persuasively that the language is standard ANE battle report rhetoric (compare Mesha's Moabite stone or the Egyptian Merneptah's inscriptions), and that the actual military targets were fortresses — military outposts, not civilian villages. Civilian casualties certainly occurred, but the "genocide" framing overreads the rhetorical conventions.

Third, the conquest was a limited, time-bound, geographically specific judgment — not a general permission for religiously motivated violence. When Israel later tried to use the same framework against non-designated enemies, they were rebuked (see Deuteronomy 20 for the rules governing ordinary warfare, which explicitly forbid scorched-earth destruction).

Fourth, the God who judged Canaan also judged Israel. When Israel took on Canaanite practices, God sent Assyria and Babylon to remove them from the same land. The covenant is not ethnic favoritism; it is moral consistency.

None of this makes the passages cozy. They remain hard. But they are not the warrant for modern religious violence that critics sometimes imply.

3. Women in the Bible

The charge: the Bible devalues women, enforces patriarchy, and is the root of Christian misogyny.

Read the book. You will find women among the most courageous, wise, and theologically important characters: Eve as the mother of all living; Sarah as a patriarch in her own right; Rahab as a Gentile hero of the conquest; Deborah as Israel's ruling judge; Ruth as the ancestress of David; Hannah as a prophetic poet; Esther as deliverer; Huldah as the prophet consulted during Josiah's reform over male contemporaries Jeremiah and Zephaniah; Mary as the one whose "yes" makes the incarnation possible; the women who funded Jesus' ministry (Luke 8:1–3); the women who stood at the cross when the male disciples had fled; the women who were the first witnesses of the resurrection in a culture where women's testimony was inadmissible (a detail no first-century forger would invent).

Paul — often charged as the great misogynist — wrote Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus." He names women as "fellow workers" (Rom 16), lists Junia among "those of note among the apostles" (Rom 16:7), and writes 1 Corinthians 7 in a way that is remarkable for its time for insisting on reciprocal obligation between husband and wife (the wife has authority over her husband's body, and the husband over hers). The harder Pauline passages (1 Cor 11, 14; 1 Tim 2) are heavily debated among Christians — but even on the most restrictive reading, they describe roles within the church, not a denial of women's worth, intelligence, or spiritual equality.

The context for all this is not modern egalitarianism, but the ancient world. And against that backdrop, the Bible's treatment of women is astonishingly elevating. The first universities, women's literacy, widow-care, end of female infanticide, anti-concubinage, anti-polygamy, hospitals staffed by nuns, the radical elevation of marriage as a covenantal union of equals — all of this comes from Christian soil.

4. Hell

The charge: eternal conscious torment for finite sins is monstrous.

Hell is the hardest Christian doctrine for most modern people, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. Several clarifications:

First, the Bible's language about hell is largely metaphorical (fire, darkness, weeping, gnashing of teeth — fire and darkness being opposite sensory experiences, the point cannot be literalism). What the images consistently convey is final separation from God, the source of all good. C. S. Lewis: "The doors of hell are locked on the inside."

Second, hell is described in Scripture as the culmination of a choice, not an arbitrary punishment. People who do not want God in life are not forced to spend eternity in his presence. As Tim Keller summarizes: "Hell is God giving people what they have wanted all along — a self apart from him."

Third, Christian theology has always insisted that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek 33:11) and that Christ's work on the cross is the measure of how far God will go to prevent it. "The God who is described as sending people to hell is the same God who hung on a cross to keep them from going there" — this is the offense and the glory of the gospel simultaneously.

Fourth, Christians have held a range of views on the exact nature of hell (eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality/annihilationism, a more purgative view). The core biblical claim is that the universe has moral seriousness, that choices have eternal significance, and that the God of infinite love does not override free will. The details are debated; the moral weight of the doctrine is not.

The Bible's hard texts are the places where it confronts rather than flatters its readers. A book that only told us what we wanted to hear would have nothing to teach us. — N. T. Wright (paraphrased)