Difficult Passages

Correct as a description of the idiom. Ancient Hebrew has no developed vocabulary for secondary causation, and statements that God does something often mean that it occurred within his sovereignty rather than by his direct action.

This is the best explanation for the causation passages, and it applies to Amos 3:6 and Lamentations 3:38 straightforwardly.

Two consequences follow. The same verses cannot then be cited as strong statements of divine sovereignty while being read weakly here. And Exodus 4:11 still contradicts the common pastoral position that disability results from a fallen world rather than from God — the verse asks who makes people blind and answers directly.

Correct. Ra has a wide semantic range, and the parallel with shalom — well-being — favors "calamity" in the sense of catastrophe. Most modern translations render it that way, and the older "I create evil" of the King James is misleading.

The translation removes one difficulty and leaves another. The verse still claims authorship of catastrophe as deliberately as it claims authorship of light, and the point of the sentence is that both come from the same source.

This reading fits the text. 2 Thessalonians 2:10 places the refusal to love the truth before the delusion is sent, matching the pattern in Romans 1:24-28 where God "gave them up" to what they had already chosen.

Read this way the passages are coherent, and the same reading is the best available for Ezekiel 20.

The stated purpose remains a difficulty. The text does not say God withdrew and error followed; it says he sent the delusion in order that they be condemned. Where unbelief is partly caused, the justice of punishing it is not obvious. This connects to Election & Free Will.

A serious reading with real scholarly support. Paul's subject through chapters 9–11 is the standing of Israel and the inclusion of the Gentiles, not a doctrine of who is individually saved.

The difficulty is the answer Paul gives. He raises the objection himself — "why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" — and does not reply that the objector has misunderstood the scope. He replies that the clay has no standing to question the potter.

Whatever the subject, the principle invoked is authority rather than justice.

The most substantial defense, argued at length by Paul Copan in Is God a Moral Monster? (2011). Conquest accounts in the period routinely claimed total annihilation as a formulaic boast — the Moabite Mesha Stele uses the same herem vocabulary — and the biblical books themselves describe the supposedly destroyed peoples as still present shortly afterward.

The evidence for this is genuine, and it is reinforced by the archaeology in Conquest of Canaan, which indicates the campaigns did not occur as described.

It resolves the historical question by concluding that the text does not report events accurately. The moral question is unaffected: the text presents God as issuing the command, and readers have understood it as issued for most of its history.

The text does offer this justification — Leviticus 18:24-25 and Deuteronomy 9:4-5 describe the inhabitants as being driven out for their practices, including child sacrifice.

The argument addresses adults. It does not address the explicit inclusion of infants in 1 Samuel 15:3 or the instruction in Numbers 31 to keep virgin girls after killing the rest.

The charge of child sacrifice also sits awkwardly beside Ezekiel 20:25-26.

Historically accurate — famine cannibalism during siege is attested outside the Bible, including by Josephus during the siege of Jerusalem.

The grammar is the difficulty. Leviticus 26:29 predicts the outcome; Jeremiah 19:9 has God in the first person: "I will make them." Children's suffering is presented as the instrument of punishment for their parents' conduct.

A reasonable caution. Moral judgments across three thousand years of cultural distance can go wrong, and reading ancient law codes as though they were written yesterday produces errors.

It has more force against some passages than others. It works reasonably for the war provisions, which reflect universal ancient practice.

It works less well against the specific claim being examined, which is not that these texts are unusual for their time but that they are presented as the timeless revelation of a perfectly good God. Cultural distance explains a human document well and a timeless one less well.