Am I the only one who feels this way about the Old Testament?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

No, you're not the only one. That's a very common take on the OT and has been for centuries.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

There's a religion that makes do with the OT as its entire written scripture, and does so without being markedly more martial compared to other religions. It's called Judaism.

Rabbis have been discussing these aspects of the OT for thousands of years and their perspectives are generally a lot fresher than the stale "muh Old Testament harsh and punishing God and muh New Testament gentle and forgiving God" takes in this thread. Much of God's behavior in the OT represents the earliest strata of the Jewish religion and of the covenant with God that Jews and some Christians believe the Jewish people still to have. God uses His power of life and death over His creatures, a power which was apodictic and unanswerable then and is still apodictic and unanswerable now, much more actively and obviously in the "heroic" (so to speak) period of the Patriarchs and Former Prophets than He does later on; the Jewish people's forebears are living in hard and violent times and the ways in which God manifests His providence towards them comport with that hardness and violence because the covenant is relational and affects God in addition to affecting the Jews.

I'd appreciate elaborations or (if need be) corrections from any Jewish posters who might read this; I'm writing it as a Christian with relatively remote Jewish ancestry and a primarily academic familiarity with Judaism as practiced.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Oh great, GIA is back.

I'm well aware that Jewish biblical interpretation is not literalistic, GIA (although the extent to which pre-Haskalah Jewish exegesis deviated from literal readings has been overstated by a lot of post-Haskalah theologians and historians, especially philosemitic Christian ones). The question that the rabbis are traditionally interested in answering is, that being the case, what are the storylines in (for example) Joshua and Judges trying to communicate, if they're not describing literal conquests and massacres? A worrying number of left- or liberal-inclined people like to assume that the answer is "nothing, except that everything's going to be So Much Better When Cool, Easygoing, Loving Jesus Comes"--a very old, historically very dangerous Christian-supremacist idea masquerading as theological and political progressivism.

At least you're consistent in thinking this is all immoral trash that you're too woke for. I'd respect that position, if you were capable of presenting it in a way that respected other posters.