Welcome to Think Biblically, conversations on faith and culture, a podcast from

Talbot School Theology here at viola University. I'm your host Scott Ray,

Dean of Faculty and Professor of Christian Ethics. I'm your co-host Sean McDowell, professor of Christian ethics. And I'm your co-host, Sean McDow, professor of Christian apologetics.

We're here today with one of our faculty colleagues in Old Testament, Dr. Charlie Trim,

who's done a lot of work in his background on the whole subject of divine violence and sort

tackling some of the issues, some of the hard issues that revolve around the use of violence in the Old Testament that portray God, to some people,

portray him in a very negative light.

His latest book is entitled, The Destruction the Canonites, God Genocide, and biblical interpretation.

And here Charlie tackles, I think, in my view, the most challenging ethical issue in the entire Old Testament. And these are the places where, depending

on how you read the text, God may be commanding genocide and our intuitions tell us that if genocide is

immoral and God's commanding it then we've got a really big theological problem

to deal with so Charlie's tackled this head on and given us a good

landscape of what the options are for trying to resolve this moral tension.

So Charlie, welcome, really glad to have you with us.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

So tell us, I mean, you spent a lot of your academic career

on some of these really difficult subjects related to divine violence.

But what originally sparked your interest in this subject?

Well, this is a story that will show how random things are sometimes behind the scenes in academia.

When I was working on dissertation at Wietin College

under Dan Block, my initial topic was intertextuality

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