Drunk with Blood
Related
- Steve Wells (2010; second edition 2013)
Overview
Subtitled God's Killings in the Bible, by the author of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Wells goes through the Bible in order and lists every occasion on which God kills someone, or orders or approves a killing, with the passage quoted, a short commentary and a running tally. Where the text gives a number he uses it, and where it does not he offers a conservative estimate. The explicitly numbered deaths come to around two and a half million; the estimated total, including the Flood and the destruction of cities, is many times that. The title is from Deuteronomy 32:42.
Notes
A reference book more than a reading book, and a blunt instrument, which is the point. When the argument is made that morality comes from scripture, or that the God of the Bible is the standard of goodness, this is the list of what that God is recorded as having done, in his own book, with citations. It is the primary-source companion to Hitchens' God Is Not Great and the reason I do not find the moral argument for God persuasive on its own terms: whatever the source of our moral sense, it is the thing we use to judge these passages, not the thing we got from them. Wells is scrupulous about quoting in full, and a believer who disputes his count can check it.