Why does God advocate stoning and capital punishment in the old testament?

  • Thread starter Thread starter seeking3find
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
S

seeking3find

Guest
I have been searching for answers on many uncomfortable topics in Scared Scripture. In particular, I don’t understand why God condones slaughtering family members, and members of the Israelites in the OT.

In the NT, Jesus asks us not to judge. Why did God give authority to OT people, but change the teaching in the NT?

Examples: Deuteronomy 13: 1-6: “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, 2 and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” 3 you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. 4 It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him. 5 That prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. That prophet or dreamer tried to turn you from the way the Lord your God commanded you to follow. You must purge the evil from among you”

Help me to understand. Thanks
 
seeking3find said:
In the NT, Jesus asks us not to judge. Why did God give authority to OT people, but change the teaching in the NT?
Click to expand...
The ‘judgment’ that Jesus is talking about is all about judging whether a person is saved or damned. That’s not ours to determine. However, Jesus does allow for judgment of crime, which is what you’re pointing to in Deuteronomy.
 
OK. So, child sacrifice was one big cultural issue in that part of the world. Not just infanticide, but actually taking the time to rear up unwanted children for the purpose of sacrificing them in the future— you’d find that in some cultures in the ancient world, both in the Old and New Worlds.


So, you’ve got these people, and child sacrifice is part of their cultural makeup. You can either try and culturally absorb these people, and hope they abandon their religion, and hope they conform to yours, and hope all of “them” are indistinguishable from all of “you” in two or three generations… or you can eliminate them, because you don’t want to risk the corruption of having their society coexisting alongside with yours, and possibly tainting your own culture with their ideas of what’s okay or desirable.

So, I think that’s a big part of it. In the Old Testament, who gets wiped out? The people whose territory God is giving to the Israelites. Why are they being wiped out? Not just to eliminate them for the sake of their land, but to eliminate them from leading those around them into error. So rather than, “Do not judge…” it’s more like “Cut off your hand if it causes you to sin.” Except in this case, God is giving them permission to annihilate those cities before it causes the Israelites to sin, because God knows how weak they are…! 😛 Or perhaps it’s like, “The tree that bears bad fruit will be thrown into the fire.”

Life in that part of the world has been short, brutal, and nasty for the last 5,000 years as conquerors have risen and ruled and been subjugated by a new series of conquerors, rinse and repeat. You feel badly for them, but there’s nothing you can do, except entrust them to God, and pray that they have a better eternity than their life on earth.
 
But why was the punishment as severe as death? It seems inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings to me. Maybe I’m missing the context.
 
I can understand the War against other peoples, but I’m specifically asking about God’s law to the Israelite to enforce amongst themselves.

It says to kill a “prophet” (of other “faiths”) among you… Not exile, not imprison, but kill. That’s what I’m having trouble with. Why were these punishments so severe?

It seems so inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings to me, and thats why I’m having so much trouble.
 
seeking3find said:
It seems so inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings to me, and thats why I’m having so much trouble.
Click to expand...
AS to why God demanded such severity, one day you will have to ask HIM. Your last sentence though possibly shed some light. Does God allow such severity with the thought in mind that it will amplify the great mercy of the teachings of His Son?
And remember, the Israelites lived in a barbaric time. People in pagan cultures killed each other regularly. I remember one priest offering the explanation as to why Abraham didn’t strenuously object to the Angel telling him God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac. Why, because Abraham came from a culture where human sacrifice was a norm, not thought of in any other way than a means to please their (pagan) god. Something totally normal.

Peace.
 
Last edited:
That’s why I’m having so much trouble, it seems like no one has the answer. My roadblock is that the severity of punishment is so high in the OT, but the NT Jesus just tells us to “go and sin no more”
 
Because those are just punishments for heinous crimes.
 
The following isn’t Catholic but this is what I learned. Maybe Catholics here can evaluate it and see if there are overlaps:
Is God not Sovereign?
In the OT, God gave authority for people to enact his justice on Earth. In the NT, God will carry out justice Himself, which would be far worse for the guilty.
Jesus didn’t tell us not to judge. Read more than just ‘Judge not’. He told us to judge correctly. He told us if we judge someone, we will be held to the same standard that we judge others.
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgement you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.
“Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you. -Mt 7:16
Click to expand...
Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement. -Jn 7:24
Click to expand...
The problem is we feel capital punishment is harsh but God is just. But merciful too. What we feel is not good enough because we are guilty. Such a juxtaposition is required to highlight the severity of God’s wrath and the great mercy offered that we don’t deserve.
Sometimes easy answers aren’t available. But what we do know is that we need to have faith in God.
 
Last edited:
Who were the other faiths among them?

What did they teach/promote/encourage?

Do you remember King Josiah and the episode in 2 Kings 23?

He got rid of the male and female temple prostitutes. He got rid of the places where children were sacrificed. (That’s what the Valley of Topheth was, btw. Tophet/Topheth is a generic word indicating a place of child sacrifice.) He got rid of the places where children were burned alive. (That’s what the Molech thing refers to.) He got rid of the pagan altars that were inside the Temple. He got rid of a lot of stuff.

Those “prophets of other faiths” weren’t kindly scholars who just had differing opinions on how the world was set up. The competing religions in that area were brutal-- with the child sacrifice-- and immoral-- with temple prostitution as an ordinary, everyday thing-- and served to separate God from his people.

Here’s an example of God discussing it with Jeremiah.
“See, you are trusting in lies which cannot help you. 9 Will you steal, kill, do sex sins, make false promises, give gifts to the false god Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before Me in this house which is called by My name, and say, ‘We are safe and free!’ and still do all these hated sins? 11 Has this house which is called by My name become a place of robbers in your eyes? See, I Myself have seen it,” says the Lord.
Click to expand...
Here’s an example of the Cartheginian Tophet.
 
From my understanding, God was trying to reveal his nature. That he is just and merciful.

Adam & Eve lost everything because of one ‘small’ sin. That’s how serious sin is to God.

Jesus came by later to show God’s merciful side. While the OT is trying to show his just side.

Another perspective is that God was trying to establish his people. Aka nothing he doesn’t want to be common/the norm. He doesn’t want them to be like the pagans outside and hence the very controlling law they had. But I’m not so sure.
 
seeking3find said:
But why was the punishment as severe as death? It seems inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings to me. Maybe I’m missing the context.
Click to expand...
My usual response is to point to the “spiritual maturity” of the people at the time of the prohibition. You know the story: if you tell a child “if you do this, it will eventually catch up to you”, then they’re not able to see the consequences, and they’ll do the wrong thing. But, if you tell them, “if you do this, then there’s that immediate consequence”, then they’ll avoid it (and learn to do good and avoid evil!).

I want to say that, as the People of God have come to know Him more and more, there’s been a process of spiritual maturation that’s happened. So, it’s not God who changed… it’s humanity who changed… 😉
 
seeking3find said:
It says to kill a “prophet” (of other “faiths”) among you… Not exile, not imprison, but kill. That’s what I’m having trouble with. Why were these punishments so severe?
Click to expand...
Let’s ask another question: where?

Exile where? To another village, so that they would exile the same man to the third one etc.? That’s not much of a solution. Exiling further away takes a highly organised government.

Imprison where? Having a prison is not free. It takes a highly organised government to build a prison, hire guards etc.
 
During the Incarnation, God experienced what being a human being was like.

This led Him to re-think some of his previous assumptions and - quite frankly - to become a little more mellow and understanding about stuff…
 
seeking3find said:
It says to kill a “prophet” (of other “faiths”) among you… Not exile, not imprison, but kill. That’s what I’m having trouble with. Why were these punishments so severe?
Click to expand...
Let’s look at it in context, shall we?

Deuteronomy 18 says:
When you come into the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abominations of the nations there. … Although these nations whom you are about to dispossess listen to their soothsayers and diviners, the LORD, your God, will not permit you to do so. A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from among your own kindred; that is the one to whom you shall listen. … But if a prophet presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.
Click to expand...
So, what’s going on in Deuteronomy is that the people of God are preparing to enter into the promised land. But, Moses isn’t going with them. So, like a good Dad whose children are preparing for a long trip, he sits down and gives them advice on how to act and what to do (and what not to do).

Part of that advice, which we see here, deals with what they’ll run into with their (pagan) neighbors in the promised land. Moses tells them that those folks will do all sorts of things that Jews are forbidden to do: attempts at magic, and fortune-telling and all sorts of practices that attempt to “use” God in order to obtain personal gain. Rather, Moses tells them, God Himself will make some of His people to be His prophets. And, those people will speak words from God Himself.

But, Moses warns, there will be Jews who actually do attempt these kinds of acts. They will lie, and will tell people that God has said things to them that God never said. This will be a big problem: it will mislead the people into thinking untrue things and believing false thoughts about God. In a word, this is called ‘sedition’. And, as recently as a couple hundred years ago, sedition was considered a crime directly against the king. That crime, since it targeted the king himself, was considered to merit death.

So, this isn’t about a “prophet of another faith” – it’s about a Jew who bears false witness against God. So, what do you do with a fellow Jew who is so corrupt that he lies about God to the people? Again, as recently as a couple centuries ago, you put him to death.

(We could get into a discussion here about the people of that day and their lack of knowledge of heaven and hell, but I’m running out of room…)

Hope that helps…!
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top