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People say, well, you're condemning Hamas for what they did, but didn't God command the Israelites to slaughter women, children, babies?

It's time for the line of fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity.

Call 866-34 Truth to get on the line of fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown.

Welcome, friends, to the line of fire. We are going to do something a little bit different today on the broadcast.

Instead of opening the phone lines, I'm answering some questions that I've been receiving

from friends, from colleagues, from former students, from others, saying, Dr. Brown, how do we

address this subject? I mean, you've got a verse, the end of Psalm 137, that seems to pronounce a

divine blessing on those who smash babies' heads against rocks because it's the enemy's children.

And then you have the children of Israel called to exterminate the Canaanites. And in some cases,

it says, that kill everybody, women and children alike.

If God commanded the Israelites to do this, if there was some divine blessing and slaughtering babies in this most horrific way,

number one, how can we condemn Hamas or ISIS or the Nazis for that matter?

And then, more importantly, how could we worship a God like that, since we recognize how morally

abhorrent these things are when we see them happening today? How do we answer these questions? So I trust you understand the importance of these

subjects. And I want to do my best to be as fair, honest, clear as I can, facing up to whatever the

word does say, but looking at things accurately and with understanding.

I do want to start here, though. And in my book, Has God Failed You, I had a couple of chapters

asking about the Bible. Is it bigoted? Is it outdated? And of course, I tackle these questions about the God of the Old Testament.

So if we're going to quote the Bible, this is what biblical authors said about the God of the Old Testament,

and Israel was often called to emulate this behavior. So I'm just going to read a series of verses to you, and then we're going to deal with

what do we do with these other verses. But first, I just want to paint a picture. If you're going to quote

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