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Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?: Wrestling with Troubling War Texts is unavailable, but you can change that!

Christians cannot ignore the intersection of religion and violence, whether contemporary or ancient. In our own Scriptures, war texts that appear to approve of genocidal killings and war rape—forcibly taking female captives for wives—raise hard questions about biblical ethics and the character of God. Have we missed something in our traditional readings? In Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? William...

On the other hand, Eugene Merrill, Daniel Gard, and Tremper Longman III represent the traditional view (again, see figure 0.1 in the introduction).3 These three authors each contend that the holy war commands are from God and thus represent perfect/pristine (no ethical imperfections) righteousness and justice, albeit within a particular time period and circumstance. While Christians may struggle with the holy war texts, any ethical difficulty is really a matter of our own inability to understand
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