Why is it that God seemed to treat the Gentiles so harshly in the Old Testament? That seems unlike the loving God we know. Atheists use that against us a lot.
Why is it that God seemed to treat the Gentiles so harshly in the Old Testament? That seems unlike the loving God we know. Atheists use that against us a lot.
The first problem is that many of the things that are thought to be “harsh” are merely misunderstandings of the Jewish scriptures
some examples:
A Christian reads Judges and believes that a man turned his daughter into a human sacrifice
Of course, she could not be sacrificed, but she also could not work in any capacity, or marry, or be “used for breeding”, for the rest of her life. She lived the rest of her life in seclusion, devoted herself to prayer, never married or had children and never knew a man.
Similarly, an “eye for an eye” in Judaism is not mutilation of a person who has blinded another (nor impunity to the offender if he happens to be blind) but monetary compensation
The Christian reads of a “death penalty” for a particular sin, but has no knowledge of the almost impossible conditions (committing the act in front of at least two witnesses, being warned and continuing to commit the act despite the warning) which made a conviction in a Jewish court virtually impossible. Nor do they have knowledge of the Jewish Sages attitudes against the death penalty (quite rightly you have never heard of a convicted terrorist, no matter how many people he killed, ever being sentenced to death and executed by the Jewish State of Israel). Often they do not differentiate between a “Divine punishment” from God and one to be carried out here on earth.
However the main problem,the basis for these and similar threads concerning God in the Jewish scriptures as opposed to the god of the Christian scriptures, has to do both with the different concept of God in the two religions as well as the differences in the perceived relationship between God and man.
God in Judaism has no limitations. The same God who has absolute powers of forgiveness, mercy and justice, also has the absolute power to decide not to forgive, that justice and the benefit of mankind and creation, demand that there will be no forgiveness. This is something that is very difficult, if not impossible for the Christian to accept.
Judaism is an intellectual religion for adults. It demands the conscience choice of obligations and responsibilities, it demands the understanding of consequences.
Christianity is a dogmatic religion The relationship of the Christian to his god is similar to that of a small child to a loving father No matter what the child does, he/she knows that if they are truly sorry, the father will always forgive them, will always love them. (Hitler can murder six million Jews, but in the moment before his death if he was truly repentant, if he accepted the Christian god into his heart, then he can go to Christian heaven.).
So when God decides not to forgive in the Jewish scriptures, it is something that Christians see as contrary to their perception of their god in the Christian scriptures.
) What I think is problematic is people on both sides acting as if ostensive ambiguity, difficulty and discrepancy in the Scriptures is bad, with many detractors and the faithful thinking that is a crack in the wall of faith - detractors using them as an arsenal against faith and the faithful attempting to explain them away at each and every turn as if to cover their existence up. It seems that both sides wish and expect that the Scriptures would speak with only one voice - when it is actually polyvocal, speaking through manifold, different voices - as the Jewish legend puts it like a mirror of the universe. (IMHO not for nothing did the Holy Spirit inspire different people instead of choosing a single person.)
) This is the reason why the Japanese word for “no” gets rarely used in conversation, and also the reason why the Japanese “yes” does not automatically mean “yes.”
), there’s nothing wrong with trying to make sense of things which are unclear by itself - what I’m troubled about is how some of the faithful seem to present their explanation or harmonization as “what the Bible says,” when the Scriptures are in reality very vague to allow for different readings and layers of interpretations. This is one of the things which stifles the polyvocality of Scripture.
) The Bible itself does not explain the discrepancy between the OT and NT view of God clearly and leaves things vague enough that you can pretty much give different viewpoints to this open-ended question: so in a sense, every answer (or in my case, non-answer) to your question you see here (and which you probably will see on other areas) is ‘correct’.