History remembers them as ruthless conquerors. Their campaigns left cities in ruins, and populations extinguished. The Mongol Empire, initiated by Genghis Khan, carved out the largest contiguous land empire in history, and they didn't do so by turning the other cheek.

They approached cities and offered a merciful ultimatum. Become our subjects, or be destroyed.

If the city accepted, they fell into slavery. If they refused, they fell to the sword.

This barbarism has always been recognised for what it is – evil. But what if I told you that commands bearing a striking resemblance to these conquests can be found in one of the world's most revered religious texts? Does the bible present us with a supposed all-loving god who issues commands comparable to the monstrosities of the Mongol hordes?

In the early 13th century, a man named Temujin united the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppes under his rule. History would come to know him as Genghis Khan, the founder of the

Mongol Empire. Under Genghis Khan's leadership, the Mongols launched a series of military campaigns that would reshape the regions of Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The Mongol war machine operated on a simple principle. When approaching a city or settlement, they would offer terms of surrender. Accept, and you might live as subjects of the empire. Refuse, and face annihilation. This wasn't mere intimidation – the Mongols were fully prepared to make good on their threats. Cities that resisted were often razed to the ground, their populations massacred without mercy. One such example is the Siege of Urgench in 1221. When the city finally fell after a six-month siege, the Mongols killed everyone except for the artisans, who were deported to

Mongolia. Historical estimates suggest an extremely high death toll for this single conquest, ranging from 100,000 to well over a million people. Or consider the Sack of Baghdad in 1258, where the Mongols under Hulagu Khan destroyed the city, effectively ending the Islamic Golden Age.

Reports claim that the waters of Tigris rang black with the ink of Baghdad's libraries, and red with the blood of its scholars. The Mongol conquests were not just about territorial expansion – they were a systematic dismantling of resistant cultures, a reshaping of the world through fear and violence. Cities that surrendered were often spared wholesale slaughter, but still faced enslavement, heavy taxation, and cultural suppression. Over a 200-year span, it's estimated that the Mongol conquests resulted in the death of 40 million people – that's 11% of the world's population at the time. Truly, the horrors of the Horde are staggering. But as we shift our focus to the God of Ancient Israel, we must consider, are we facing a divinely-sanctioned counterpart?

The fifth book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, contains a series of speeches by Moses to the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. Setting aside concerns of historicity, among these speeches are instructions for warfare that Moses is supposedly receiving from God, which bear a deeply unsettling resemblance to the Mongol strategies we've just explored.

Here's Deuteronomy 20, 10-15.

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labour, and shall work for you.

If they refuse to make peace, and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves, and you may use your plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.

The parallels between this peace-offering from an apparently loving God, and the peace-offering from the Mongols are obvious. Like the Horde, the ancient Israelites are instructed to approach cities with terms of surrender. Those who accept face subjugation – forced labour in this case, which, according to God's laws in Leviticus, meant a harsh and oppressive fate. Those who refuse face total destruction. But the comparison doesn't end here. Let's examine the following three verses. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you, and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites – as the

Lord your God has commanded you. Here, God's commands descend into a moral abyss. For certain specified groups, there is not even an offer of peace. The instruction is for complete annihilation, an act chillingly reminiscent of the Mongols' most brutal conquests.

Now, these verses present the believer with a profound moral quandary. How does one reconcile these commands, allegedly given by an all-loving God, with ethics, human rights, and all things good? How can one say that when the Mongols throw babies from rooftops, they are to be universally condemned, but when the ancient Israelites should do the same, they are to be revered? How can an act be simultaneously abhorrent when committed by one group, yet righteous when performed by another? Short form, what is it? Well, how many books are on your

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For most believers, the depravity of Deuteronomy is simply not an issue, since these troubling verses are rarely, if ever, read verbatim in religious services.

In fact, many religious leaders actively avoid addressing these passages altogether, preferring to focus on more palatable sections of scripture, such as Love Thy Neighbour.

But some believers certainly are aware of these verses, and for centuries, theologians and apologists have attempted to square them with a maximally loving father.

The most common responses include divine command theory, allegorical interpretation, progressive revelation, and limited historical application – defences we'll now briefly examine. For those wanting a more detailed examination of each response, worry not, we'll produce dedicated episodes in the future, and if you'd like to help us do so quicker, then please consider becoming a patron. So let's begin with divine command theory.

This philosophical stance argues that whatever God commands is, by definition, morally right.

Proponents insist that God is the source of all morality, so if he commands something, it must be good. Interestingly, while this defence has significant sway among theologians, it has nearly none at all among philosophers. The reason for this is that it essentially boils down to might makes right – the idea that power alone determines morality, which carries extremely troubling implications. The most prominent of these is that it renders morality arbitrary. If God could command anything, and, by virtue of him commanding it, that act is definitionally good, then morality has no objective basis beyond God's whim. If, for instance, he commands a rape victim to marry her violator, as he does in Deuteronomy 22, 28, and 29, then this order is morally good. In fact, the distraught victim has an objective moral duty to marry the monster who so egregiously abused her. This might makes right position not only contradicts the laws God provides in other passages, it grossly violates our moral intuition that apparently God has given us – an intuition that, in other contexts, proponents steadfastly rely upon with the mantra, right and wrong is written on our heart. So let's take a closer look at the verses in question. The command, do not leave alive anything that breathes, evokes utter disgust, and yet, somehow, we're to believe that this carnage is maximally loving.

The sheer scale of this commanded violence – the systemic extermination of entire populations, including women, children, and even animals, is so fundamentally at odds with basic human empathy that it strains, and in many cases, shatters belief. How can anyone consider this not just moral, but ordained by the pinnacle of morality? Worse, let's not gloss over the arbitrary nature of these commands. The fate of entire populations hinges on nothing more than geographic proximity.

Distant cities are to be forced into labour, or have their men executed, and their women and children plundered. But as for the nearby cities, even this egregious offer isn't extended. No, they are to undergo total annihilation, no exceptions. Just think about the implications here, because really, that's the problem. Theists do not actually sit there and think about this.

Twin siblings, separated at birth and raised in different cities, could face drastically different fates based on purely which side of some invisible line they happen to grow up on.

One becomes a slave, the other is slaughtered without mercy. And we're supposed to nod along and say, yep, that's divine justice for you. Really? The cognitive dissonance required to accept these commands as the epitome of morality from a maximally loving god is staggering. It demands we suspend our most basic moral instincts. To believe this is to believe anything. It's to accept that morality itself is arbitrary. That the rightness or wrongness of an action isn't determined by its nature or consequences, but by the whim of a deity who apparently values geography over compassion. Put simply, divine command theory doesn't solve the depravity of Deuteronomy, it magnifies it. Now, of course, there's more to be said here, including a big tangent on the Euphrophro Dilemma, but for now, we'll move on to the allegorical defence.

Some believers, faced with the moral quandary presented in Deuteronomy's violent commands, resort to allegorical interpretation. They argue that these passages shouldn't be taken literally, but rather as metaphors for spiritual truths. In this view, god's command to enslave and annihilate cities represents the need to purge sin from our lives. While this might seem like an elegant solution on the surface, and for this reason it's quite popular, it crumbles under the slightest scepticism. The first issue is glaring. Allegorical interpretation is applied with comical inconsistency. Those who employ this defence to sanitise difficult passages still cling to literal interpretations of not-so-difficult parts of the bible, even within the same book. To give a few examples from Deuteronomy alone, let's turn a few pages. Theists are not running around saying that the command to protect foreign escaped slaves is just a metaphor, are they? Likewise, they're not insisting that the requirement for multiple witnesses in capital offences is not to be taken literally. This cafeteria Christianity, this cherry-picking approach, raises serious questions about the credibility of their interpretive method, exposing that the litmus test for literal interpretation is not the text itself, but rather how palatable the passages are to modern sensibilities. A further perplexing factor is how the allegorical approach struggles to make sense of the specific details in these passages. If we're to interpret Deuteronomy's commands metaphorically, how do we explain the distinction between distant cities and nearby ones? What spiritual truth is conveyed by the instruction to enslave one group, but to utterly annihilate another? The use of words like plunder and explicit mentions of forced labour don't align neatly with spiritual allegories about overcoming sin. These specific, practical instructions seem jarringly out of place if we're to view the text as purely metaphorical.

The acrobatic apologetics required is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's pathetic, even. The cracks in this defence become even more apparent when we examine how allegorical interpretation has been selectively applied throughout history. To scratch the surface, consider the bible's stance on slavery, the subordination of women, and the death penalty for homosexual practice.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have historically viewed slavery as not just acceptable, but necessary. They've regarded women as second-class citizens, and they've ensured that all things LGBT were DEAD. Yet today, as secular and humanist values progress, we suddenly see theists, especially Christians, reinterpreting these transparent commands as mere allegories and metaphors. How convenient. This pattern of reinterpretation, always lagging behind societal progress, exposes a fundamental weakness in the allegorical defence. It's clear that theists are creating God in their own image, sculpting scripture to appease their apprehensions.

Now, before moving on, let's land with a quick two additional objections to the allegorical defence. First, even if we accept these passages as metaphorical, this wouldn't sufficiently address the core moral issue. It raises the question, why would an all-loving God choose genocide as a metaphor? An all-knowing deity would surely anticipate that such passages would be interpreted literally, leading to doubt about God's loving nature, which in turn, potentially results in eternal anguish. Couldn't an all-wise being have selected a less morally repugnant allegory to convey spiritual truths? Second, let's face the elephant in the room.

These passages in Deuteronomy are clearly presented as historical accounts, not as obvious parables or allegories. Treating them as pure metaphors requires us to disregard their apparent intent, and the way that they've been understood for millennia. Now, sure, most scholars today doubt these events ever occurred, with Moses himself likely being mythical, but for the vast majority of Abrahamic history, these accounts were taken as factual as the Exodus narrative.

The notion they are allegories is a recent development, motivated almost entirely by moral-cognitive dissonance.

Another common defence employed by believers to reconcile the moral monstrosities in Deuteronomy is the concept of progressive revelation. This theological idea proposes that God unveils his nature, will, and moral standards gradually over time, adapting his message to humanity's evolving capacity for understanding and the societal constraints of the time. An analogy that's often given is that just as we teach children basic arithmetic before calculus, God reveals more complex theological and moral concepts as humanity grows up – spiritually, ethically, and socially. In this view, God's revelation is seen as a continuum, with each new insight building upon, and sometimes even superseding, earlier ones. So, applied to the passages in question, proponents argue that the violent commands were appropriate for the time, reflecting the harsh realities of the ancient Near East. The reason we today find these commands so wretched is because, as human civilisation progressed, so too did God's revelations. Are you convinced?

Yeah, me neither. First, progressive revelation contradicts the notion of an unchanging, omnibenevolent God. If God is the source of all morality, and is perfectly good, how can his moral standards shift? The idea that the supreme being of the universe would condone genocide at one point in history, only to condemn it later, isn't just logically bankrupt, it's a moral catastrophe of cosmic proportions. Consider two individuals born thousands of years apart – one commanded by God to be enslaved, the other to live free and to prosper. How can we reconcile this stark difference in divine decree? There's no evidence that human cognition has undergone such drastic evolutionary changes in just a few millennia to justify this moral disparity. And that's just the empirical front. As for the moral front, are we to believe that the enslaved individual was somehow less deserving of freedom and dignity simply due to the era of their birth? And what of the nearby cities, huh? The cities that God commanded to be utterly annihilated? What sin did those children commit? What gifts? Are we not all created in God's image?

A second, equally damning objection to progressive revelation is that it reduces God's morality to mere cultural relativism. That is, it insists that God's laws are constrained by cultural limitations. But an all-powerful, all-knowing deity would be capable of revealing a consistent moral code that transcends temporal cultural norms, right? I mean, he had no issue saying don't eat pig. To put it bluntly, the suggestion that God had to meet people where they are doesn't paint a picture of divine love. It portrays a deity hamstrung by human comprehension, a far cry from the omnibenevolent being most believers claim to worship. Compounding this, progressive revelation fails to explain why God wouldn't simply start with the highest moral standards from the beginning. If the teachings of, say, Jesus represent the pinnacle of divine morality, why not begin there? The idea that countless generations had to suffer under inferior moral guidance simply because they weren't ready for the full truth doesn't depict

God as a loving father. It casts him as a cosmic tyrant, callously experimenting with human lives and souls. Another hurdle that this defence struggles to overcome is accounting for moral regressions in scripture. If divine revelation is truly progressive, how do we explain instances where later bible passages appear less ethically advanced than earlier ones? For instance, the book of Genesis, which precedes Deuteronomy, has Abraham boldly negotiating with God to spare the righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah. Fast forward to Deuteronomy, we find God commanding the utter destruction of entire civilisations. This isn't progress. But perhaps most damningly, this defence implicitly admits that our modern moral sensibilities are superior to those presented in parts of the bible. By suggesting that we've progressed beyond the brutality of Deuteronomy, believers inadvertently confess a truth they dare not speak out loud. The good book isn't, in fact, good. Progressive revelation is, at base, the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, to force ancient atrocious texts into alignment with contemporary ethical standards. It's a tacit admission that significant portions of scripture are ethically indefensible. This theological contortion not only fails to resolve the core issues, but introduces new logical inconsistencies and theological conundrums, further eroding the credibility of the very texts it aims to defend.

Apologists sometimes turn to the argument of limited historical application. This approach posits that the command for conquest, slavery, and genocide in Deuteronomy were specific directives given to the ancient Israelites for a particular time and place. To support this view, proponents cite factors such as 1. The perceived wickedness of the Canaanite cultures, who God warns will teach the Israelites to sin against him if they are not utterly destroyed. 2. The need to establish a pure monotheistic society, and 3. The fulfilment of divine promises regarding the land. To especially laypeople, this defence can seem more palatable than the previous ones – after all, it doesn't require us to accept that genocide is morally good, nor does it suggest that God's objective moral standards have changed. Instead, it attempts to quarantine these troubling commands to a specific historical context. However, the most glaring objection to the limited historical application defence is that it simply fails to address the core ethical issue at hand.

Even if we accept that these commands were only meant for a specific time and place, it doesn't change the fact that God allegedly ordered the slaughter of innocent children, and the enslavement of entire populations. Indeed, the specificity doesn't resolve the contradiction between God's supposed loving nature, and his commands for atrocity.

We're left where we started, clutching the same question. How can a perfectly loving God order the murder of innocent children, based merely on the proximity to his chosen people?

Secondly, if these commands were truly limited in application, why doesn't the text clearly state this? Why doesn't God say that the Israelites are not to enslave people beyond a certain mile radius, or after a certain date? The absence of such clarification is striking, especially for a book purportedly meant to guide believers for all time. When it suits him,

God specifies his targets, such as in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, where specific cities are named, or in the command to utterly destroy the Amalekites, where a particular group is singled out. Even within Deuteronomy itself, we see specificity, like the command to destroy the cities of Sion. So, why are the conquest commands in Deuteronomy not similarly specified? Why is the criterion for destruction merely proximity to Israel, rather than specific peoples or places? This omission has led to millennia of misuse and abuse of these passages to justify colonialism, slavery, and genocide – entailments that an all-loving God would have anticipated. Lastly, proponents of this defence don't apply it consistently. When's the last time you heard a theist argue for a limited application of passages that they favour, such as love your neighbour as yourself? This selective application exposes the argument as a convenient escape hatch for difficult verses, rather than a consistent interpretive principle.

Mark Twain once quipped, "'It ain't the parts of the Bible I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand." This sardonic observation perfectly encapsulates our dilemma with Deuteronomy. It's not that these passages are difficult to comprehend, it's that their plain meaning is so morally repugnant that it defies reconciliation with a revered all-loving God. The apologetic acrobatics we've encountered, the insistence that whatever God commands is definitionally good, the attempt to recast genocide as a spiritual metaphor, the suggestion that divine morality evolves with human culture, and the claim that these atrocities were somehow justified in their historical context, all crumble under scrutiny.