The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence

"Fleischer is an attorney, and he makes his case with clarity that would win over any unbiased jury." -Brian D. McLaren

The God of the Old Testament drowned nearly every living thing on earth, ordered whole cities put to the sword, and told Israel to kill "both man and woman, child and infant." Richard Dawkins called him "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction." If you have ever quietly wondered whether Dawkins had a point, this book was written for you.

The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence takes the hard passages seriously-all of them-and argues that, read in context, they are not an embarrassment the New Testament has to clean up. They are the opening chapters of the Bible's own case against violence.

Matthew Curtis Fleischer shows that God revealed his ethics the way a good teacher does: incrementally, inside a story, not all at once in a rulebook. Set beside the law codes of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, the Mosaic Law was a sharp turn toward restraint-fewer capital offenses, limits on retaliation, and protections for foreigners, widows, orphans, and slaves that existed nowhere else in the ancient world. Jesus did not reverse that trajectory. He finished it, carrying "an eye for an eye" to "turn the other cheek" and "love your neighbor" to "love your enemies."

Fleischer does not skip the ugly parts. The conquest of Canaan gets its own chapter, taken at face value-assuming God commanded exactly what the text says. Only then does he weigh the evidence that the Old Testament's portrait of God, like its ethics, was still a work in progress, and that the God fully seen in Jesus may never have been the warrior the ancient writers took him to be.

Written for Christians who hold a high view of Scripture and are tired of choosing between the Bible and their conscience, this book answers the three questions that will not go away: Can the Old Testament's violence be squared with Jesus? Whose example are we supposed to follow? And what is God actually like?

No proof-texting. No dismissing the troubling texts as myth. Just the whole story, read the way it was written to be read.

Praise for The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence

"In the first six pages of his new book, Matthew Curtis Fleischer describes the problem of divine violence in the Old Testament as well as anyone ever has. In the following 200-plus pages, he offers Christians committed to biblical authority an intelligent and humane way of interpreting those passages, leading humanity from violence to nonviolence in the way of Jesus. Fleischer is an attorney, and he makes his case with clarity that would win over any unbiased jury."
-Brian D. McLaren, author of The Great Spiritual Migration