The God of the Old Testament a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, and a homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

This is a moral objection, and it deserves a moral answer rather than a flinch. Behind the adjectives stand real texts — the conquest of Canaan, the flood, laws that carry capital penalties — and they are genuinely hard.

1. The shock is the right reaction. Anyone who reads Joshua without discomfort is reading it badly. The command to devote cities to destruction is jarring, and it should be. Christians have wrestled with these chapters for centuries, and a defense that begins by pretending they are pleasant has already lost the reader.

2. Ancient war reports inflate. Phrases like “utterly destroyed” and “left no survivors” match the conventional, hyperbolic style of ancient Near Eastern victory accounts. Paul Copan and Richard Hess note that Egyptian Pharaohs boasted of annihilating enemies who plainly survived for generations, and that the Hebrew word herem can mean “devoted, removed from use” as much as “exterminated.” This reading is contested, and honest scholars disagree about how far it goes.

3. The text itself resists literalism. Joshua says the Anakim were wiped out (Joshua 11:21–22), yet Caleb later drives them from Hebron (Joshua 15:13–14), and Judges describes Canaanites still living in the land. That internal tension suggests the language is not a body count. The book is not as flat as the slogan makes it.

4. Judgment came after long patience. God tells Abraham his descendants will return only “in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). That is centuries of forbearance before any judgment falls. Whatever else this is, it is not a deity losing his temper on first provocation.

5. The practices in view were grave. The nations of Canaan are described as burning their own sons and daughters in fire to their gods (Deuteronomy 12:31). You may still reject the conquest accounts, but the moral stakes as the text describes them are not a dispute about property lines. A God indifferent to child sacrifice would be the one worth objecting to.

6. The objection borrows its own standard. To call God a bully is to appeal to a real standard of justice that even the critic expects others to recognize. Paul says the work of the law is written on human hearts (Romans 2:14–15), which is why the charge lands. But that standard has to come from somewhere, and the Bible locates it in God's own character (Psalm 145:17). The objection is using borrowed capital.

7. The God of the Bible suffers with his creatures. This is not a distant deity dispensing verdicts from safety. “Though he was in the form of God... he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7), and the judge takes the penalty on himself at the cross. Whatever the conquest texts mean, they are not the whole portrait, and the center of the portrait is self-giving.

8. Read it as a movement, not a snapshot. Israel's laws were a marked improvement on surrounding codes — slaves had protections, foreigners had rights, and debt was periodically released. The story moves toward love of enemies (Matthew 5:44) and the equality of all people in Christ (Galatians 3:28). Judging the whole by its earliest chapters is like reading page one of a biography and closing the book.

9. Some of this remains genuinely hard. Christians differ: some read the conquest as hyperbolic rhetoric, some as divine judgment on specific cultures, some as later editorial shaping of earlier traditions. None of these explanations makes every verse easy. An honest answer concedes that the difficulty is reduced rather than dissolved.

The strongest version of the objection is not the list of adjectives; it is the specific question of why God would command the destruction of a people. That question has real answers, none of them costless, and the God they point to is one who ends up bearing the judgment himself rather than watching it from a distance.

Sources: Paul Copan; Richard Hess; Clay Jones; Gregory Koukl; Is God a Moral Monster?.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!