The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence

“Do not leave alive anything that breathes.” – God

The violence in the Old Testament is one of the biggest obstacles facing Christianity today.

Believers regularly identify it as one of the most confounding and challenging aspects of the entire Bible.

Unbelievers often cite it as one reason why they don’t believe.

A few prominent atheists even use it to publicly demean God’s character. Richard Dawkins claims the God of the Old Testament is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

In The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence, Fleischer cuts through the rhetoric and popular misperceptions to provide a compelling, scripturally based, and highly readable case for a good, just, and loving God, one who is not only not bloodthirsty but who actually hates violence.

If you have ever struggled to understand or appreciate what God was doing in the Old Testament, you will love this book. You might even discover a deity who is more beautiful than you have ever imagined.

“In the first six pages of his new book, Matthew Curtis Fleischer describes the problem of divine violence in the Old Testament as well as anyone ever has. In the following 200-plus pages, he offers Christians committed to biblical authority an intelligent and humane way of interpreting those passages, leading humanity from violence to nonviolence in the way of Jesus. Fleischer is an attorney, and he makes his case with clarity that would win over any unbiased jury.” - Brian D. McLaren, author of The Great Spiritual Migration