Does the Old Testament portray God as a bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser and a capriciously malevolent bully?

That's the charge leveled by atheist Richard Dawkins and other critics of the Bible.

But is God really a genocidal tyrant?

Dr. David K. Bernard answers this erroneous claim next, so don't go away.

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In the Old Testament, we have several examples of God

ordering his people, we could say, to commit what we might describe as mass

genocide. For example, in 1 Samuel 15, God speaks through the prophet Samuel,

who was clearly God's man, and he commanded King Saul to, and I'm reading a direct quote here, go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel, and donkey. Again, as I mentioned,

this is just one of several examples in the Old Testament of God commanding this type of behavior.

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