Commanded, Permitted, or Merely Recorded? Divine Judgment and the Difficult Wars of Scripture

“Thou shalt not kill.” — Exodus 20:13

The same Scripture that gives this commandment also recounts wars in which whole peoples perish. In certain passages God commands Israel to execute judgment. In others He permits a wicked nation to become the rod of His chastisement. In still others the sacred writer simply records what sinful men did—and the deed remains sinful even though it stands upon the page of the Bible.

These passages trouble many readers. They should. Death is terrible, the killing of children is especially terrible, and the Christian ought never to train his heart to pass lightly over human suffering. But horror is not an answer, and neither is evasion. A reader who has been told only that “the Old Testament was violent” has not yet been shown what the text actually says. A believer who answers every difficulty with one vague sentence has not yet helped the wounded or the doubtful.

We must read slowly enough to ask three questions:

1. Who acted? God, a lawful public authority, an army under command, an enemy moved by hatred, or a private man following passion?
2. What did God do? Did He command the act, permit it, foretell it, direct only part of it, or condemn it?
3. What does the passage give to us? A permanent moral law, a singular judgment in sacred history, an example to imitate spiritually, or a warning never to imitate literally?

Without these distinctions, men either accuse God of crimes committed by sinners or borrow God’s authority to excuse their own violence. Both errors profane Scripture.

The objection is often stated plainly: How can God be good if He commanded the death of great numbers of people, sometimes including women and children?

The Christian answer must be equally plain. There are passages in which the death of an entire population is included in a divine sentence. We do not answer honestly by pretending those verses are absent, nor by changing every literal judgment into a figure of speech. Yet we also do not answer honestly by lifting one terrible verse out of the long history of sin, warning, delayed punishment, authority, and redemption in which Scripture places it.

The difficulty requires several truths to be held together:

• God is the Creator and sovereign Lord of every human life.
• Human life is God’s possession, not ours.
• Murder is the unjust taking of human life by one who has no right to take it.
• God can never command moral evil, because His will is perfectly holy.
• God may sentence a creature to temporal death without injustice, since every instant of created life is His gift.
• No private man may seize that divine sovereignty for himself.
• A human act described in Scripture is not approved merely because Scripture describes it.
• God may use the freely chosen acts of wicked men within His providence without becoming the author of their wicked wills.

Remove any one of these truths and the account becomes distorted. Deny God’s sovereignty, and He is treated as one creature among others. Deny the sanctity of life, and judgment becomes an excuse for cruelty. Deny human freedom, and every crime becomes falsely attributed to Providence. Deny the distinction between narration and approval, and the sins of biblical men are turned into commandments.

The Fifth Commandment forbids murder. It does not declare that every causing of death has the same moral character. Scripture itself distinguishes murder from lawful public judgment, just defense, just war, accidental death, and a special sentence given by God.¹

This is not a loophole devised to protect a troublesome text. It belongs to the meaning of justice. A murderer and a lawful judge do not perform the same moral act merely because a man dies in both cases. The object, authority, intention, and circumstances matter. The man who attacks the innocent and the man who defends him cannot be placed under one name without destroying the very idea of justice.

St. Augustine therefore teaches that the law against killing admits acts authorized by a general just law and singular acts commissioned by God for a particular time. In the second case the human agent acts as a servant of the supreme authority, not as a private avenger. But St. Augustine’s distinction is also a wall against presumption: without public authority or an unmistakable divine commission, a man may not take judgment into his own hands.²

St. Thomas Aquinas states the ordinary rule without softness: “It is in no way lawful to slay the innocent.” He then distinguishes the Creator’s sovereign judgment from man’s limited authority. God is Lord of life and death; man is not. That exception magnifies the rule. It does not give a human being permission to decide that his anger, ideology, nation, private revelation, or interpretation of prophecy is the voice of God.³

The first conclusion is therefore firm: the difficult judgments of Scripture cannot be used to weaken the protection of innocent life. They can be understood only because life belongs absolutely to God and therefore belongs only ministerially and conditionally to human authority.

Before considering particular nations, the reader should know the four principal kinds of account that often become mixed together.

1. A direct divine judgment

God may judge immediately, as in the Flood, Sodom, or the death of the firstborn of Egypt. No human being supplies the moral authority. The Lord of life renders judgment.

2. A judgment entrusted to a public minister

At particular moments in sacred history, God commands Israel or its ruler to execute a sentence. Amalec and the Madianites belong here. The command is not a private impulse and not a general permission for religious violence. It is a specified judgment within the history governed by divine revelation.

3. A wicked instrument permitted within Providence

God may permit an aggressor to become a scourge without approving the aggressor’s pride, hatred, or cruelty. Assyria and Babylon can serve as instruments of chastisement and afterward be judged for the very wicked intentions with which they acted. Job’s raiders freely commit robbery and murder even while Satan’s trial remains bounded by God’s permission.

4. A sinful deed merely recorded

Scripture often tells us what men did without commanding, praising, or excusing it. The massacre at Jabes-Galaad in Judges 21 belongs here. So do David’s adultery and arranged killing of Urias, Amnon’s violation of Thamar, and Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Inspiration guarantees the truth of the record; it does not convert every recorded act into a holy act.

The question must therefore never be merely, “Is it in the Bible?” The question is, “What does the inspired text say happened, who willed it, and how does the whole of Scripture judge it?”

The group whose name is sometimes half remembered as “the Mennonites” is probably the Madianites, more commonly called the Midianites today. Their judgment appears in Numbers 25 and 31.

Israel is approaching the promised land when the daughters of Moab draw Israelite men into fornication and the sacrifices of Beelphegor. The sin is not a private lapse alone. It joins impurity to apostasy and brings corruption into the camp of the people consecrated to God. A plague follows, and twenty-four thousand Israelites die.⁴

Numbers 31 then identifies the Madianite women as deliberate instruments in this assault:

“Are not these they, that deceived the children of Israel at the suggestion of Balaam, and made you transgress against our Lord upon the sin of Phogor, whereupon also the people was stricken?” — Numbers 31:16

The war is therefore not introduced as an attack upon an unknown people because they are foreign. It is presented as judgment after a calculated attempt to separate Israel from God through fornication and idolatry. Balaam, who could not curse the people by prophecy, had counseled their corruption by sin.⁵

This context explains why the passage treats the women who had known men differently from the virgins who had not participated in that corruption. It does not remove the terror of the command concerning the male children. That is the hardest point, and it must not be hidden. Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide reads it as a special sentence resting upon God’s sovereignty over life while explicitly denying that a human judge may kill innocent children for the sins of their parents.⁶

The passage therefore teaches two things at once. First, God judged a nation that had deliberately turned sexual sin into a weapon against true worship. Second, no human authority may generalize this singular judgment into a rule permitting the punishment of innocent children for parental guilt.

The inward lesson is equally severe. Balaam could not conquer Israel by an open curse, so he taught its enemies to tempt it into self-betrayal. The soul that resists open persecution but makes peace with impurity can be captured without a battle. The sword in Numbers 31 belongs to a unique historical judgment; the permanent war for the Christian is the merciless mortification of the sin that would drive Christ from his soul.

Amalec first attacks Israel after the departure from Egypt. Deuteronomy recalls the cruelty of that attack: Amalec struck those who lagged behind, the weary and weakest, without fear of God. The offense is remembered, but the final sentence is not executed at once. Generations pass before Saul receives the command in 1 Kings 15.⁷

The reason is given before the command:

“Thus saith the Lord of hosts: I have recounted whatsoever Amalec hath done to Israel: how he resisted them in the way when they came up out of Egypt.” — 1 Kings 15:2

The Cinites living among Amalec are warned to depart because they had shown mercy to Israel. They leave and are spared. This detail matters. The narrative itself distinguishes the people associated with the condemned nation but not implicated in its hostility. The judgment is not presented as irrational hatred of a bloodline.⁸

Saul then spares King Agag and the best of the spoil while destroying what he regards as worthless. His disobedience reveals another danger in reading these texts. Saul does not recoil from violence out of compassion. He kills widely and spares selectively where pride, prestige, and valuable possessions tempt him. He is willing to destroy what costs him nothing and preserve what flatters him. Samuel’s rebuke—“Obedience is better than sacrifices”—judges the divided will, not a man overcome by tenderness.⁹

The literal command belonged to Saul’s public office and to a revealed sentence against Amalec. Its permanent spiritual sense is not permission to identify modern enemies as Amalecites. It is the command to spare no ruling sin. Pride always asks to preserve one Agag. Self-will always keeps the best-looking spoil. The Christian must turn the severity inward: what God condemns in me may not be kept because I have found a pious use for it.

The wars against the nations of Chanaan form the broadest and most difficult group. Scripture does not conceal the corruption for which those nations are judged: idolatry, divination, impurity, and the burning of sons and daughters in sacrificial fire. Israel is warned that the land itself had been defiled by these abominations.¹⁰

But Scripture also refuses a self-righteous explanation. Moyses tells Israel explicitly that it does not receive the land because of its own justice. The nations are dispossessed for their wickedness and because God is faithful to His covenant. Israel is described as stiff-necked in the very speech that announces its victory.¹¹

Nor is the judgment hasty. When God speaks to Abraham, He says that the iniquity of the Amorrheans is “not yet at the full.” The promised possession waits across centuries. Wisdom 12 later gives an inspired interpretation of God’s manner of judging Chanaan: He punished “by little and little,” allowing time and place in which the wicked might turn from their malice.¹²

Mercy also appears within the conquest. Rahab believes, protects the messengers, and is spared with her household. The Gabaonites seek peace and are preserved, although their deception brings them into a subordinate condition. These episodes do not erase the judgments. They show that the line is not simply Israelite blood against foreign blood. Faith, repentance, separation from condemned wickedness, and mercy are real within the history.¹³

Most decisive of all, Israel is not exempt from the standard applied to the nations. Moyses warns that if Israel imitates their abominations, the land will cast Israel out also. That warning is fulfilled in the invasions, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile. Election increases responsibility; it does not make injustice holy.¹⁴

The conquest of Chanaan therefore belongs to a particular divine economy: a promised land, a people set apart for the coming of the Messias, long-matured corporate wickedness, repeated warning, and a judicial commission given through public revelation. It is not a universal map by which later men may declare a neighboring people accursed.

The closing chapters of Judges are essential because they prove that Scripture does not ask us to approve every slaughter committed by Israelites.

The account begins with an abomination at Gabaa. A woman is abused through the night and dies. The tribes of Israel assemble and demand that Benjamin surrender the guilty men. Benjamin refuses and instead goes to war in their defense. Israel consults God concerning the battle, suffers terrible losses, humbles itself with weeping, fasting, holocausts, and peace offerings, and is finally given victory over Benjamin.¹⁵

Even here, however, victory does not canonize every act of the victors. Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide says that the eleven tribes exceeded the measure of lawful vengeance when they killed innocent women and children. Divine Providence permitted that excess; permission did not make the excess just.¹⁶

Then the survivors face a crisis they helped to create. Israel had sworn a rash oath not to give daughters in marriage to Benjamin. Fearing that one tribe will disappear, the assembly asks which city failed to join it. When Jabes-Galaad is named, the congregation sends twelve thousand men to kill its inhabitants, sparing four hundred virgins for the surviving Benjamites. Still lacking wives, they permit the Benjamites to seize women who come to dance at Silo.¹⁷

God does not command the slaughter of Jabes-Galaad in the text. The congregation commands it. It grows out of a chain of human disorder: an atrocity protected by tribal loyalty, civil war, excessive vengeance, a rash oath, and then further violence devised to repair the ruin. The sacred writer closes the book with the sentence that interprets the age:

“In those days there was no king in Israel: but every one did that which seemed right to himself.” — Judges 21:24

The Benjamites, then, are probably the other group half remembered in connection with a great killing. But this is precisely the account that must not be called a divine command in all its parts. God directs the battle against Benjamin. He does not thereby approve every act committed after victory. The massacre at Jabes-Galaad is recorded as part of Israel’s disordered attempt to cure one sin by another.

This distinction protects both Scripture and conscience. The Bible is more morally exact than a flattened reading. It can show God answering prayer at one moment and the same people acting rashly at the next. Grace given yesterday does not make today’s self-will infallible.

No nation is ordered to be killed in the Book of Job. The book instead gives one of Scripture’s clearest lessons about divine permission.

Satan is allowed to test Job within limits established by God. Sabeans seize the oxen and asses and kill the servants. Fire consumes the sheep and shepherds. Chaldeans raid the camels and kill more servants. A great wind strikes the house in which Job’s children are gathered, and they die.¹⁸

The robbers act wickedly. Their greed and violence belong to them. Satan’s malice belongs to Satan. Yet none of these powers escapes Providence or passes beyond the boundary God permits. St. Gregory the Great explains the “fire of God” in the account as owing its coming not to God’s making of evil, but to His permission.¹⁹

That is the Catholic distinction. God does not place murder into the heart of the Sabean. He does not become the author of Satan’s hatred. He permits created wills to act, limits them, and orders even the suffering they cause toward ends they neither know nor intend. The sinner remains responsible for choosing evil; God remains sovereign over the history through which He draws good.

The Cross is the supreme revelation of this truth. Judas betrays freely. The chief priests accuse wickedly. Pilate condemns unjustly. The soldiers crucify the Innocent. Yet Christ offers Himself willingly, and Providence turns the worst crime committed by men into the sacrifice of the world’s redemption. The Father does not become the author of betrayal because the Passion fulfills His saving counsel.²⁰

No group is ordered by God to be killed by Jeremias. The prophet announces judgment upon Juda, Jerusalem, surrounding nations, and the men of Anathoth who seek his life. He is a witness and intercessor, not a private executioner.²¹

Babylon becomes an instrument of chastisement because Juda has persisted in idolatry, injustice, and refusal of the prophets. Yet the Chaldeans are not made innocent by serving an end of Providence. Jeremias later prophesies judgment against Babylon itself. The empire that was permitted to chastise becomes answerable for its pride and cruelty.²²

Isaias gives the same principle with particular clarity. Assyria is called the rod of God’s anger against a hypocritical people, but the Assyrian king does not intend to serve God. He intends destruction and boasts in his own strength. When the chastisement has done its work, God punishes the proud heart of the king.²³

Thus one event can be described truly at two levels. In Providence, a nation may be a rod of judgment. In its own will, it may act from ambition, hatred, robbery, or cruelty and deserve judgment. God’s use of an evil act does not baptize the evil intention that produced it.

This is the point at which many answers become cold. We must not become cold.

Children are not personally guilty of the sins chosen by their parents. The law itself forbids ordinary judges to put children to death for the fathers, and Ezechiel teaches personal moral responsibility: the son does not bear the father’s iniquity as personal guilt.²⁴ Any explanation that speaks as though an infant had committed idolatry, warfare, or seduction is false.

Yet temporal death and personal guilt are not identical. Every child and every adult lives by a life continually received from God. No creature possesses a claim that obliges the Creator to give another earthly day. God may end a temporal life through illness, age, disaster, the ordinary mortality inherited from Adam, or a special judgment without committing murder, because He does not seize what belongs to another. He is the giver and Lord of life.²⁵

That truth explains divine sovereignty; it does not make the pain small. The death of a child remains a grievous natural evil for those who suffer it. Our Lord wept at a tomb though He was about to raise the dead. The mothers of Bethlehem wept though their children are honored by the Church as the Holy Innocents. Faith does not require a parent to call bereavement pleasant.

Nor should we make declarations Scripture has not made about the eternal destiny of every child in every ancient judgment. Temporal death is not itself a declaration of eternal damnation. We may say that God judges every soul justly and that no creature will find cruelty in Him. We should not invent individual revelations where none have been given.

Most importantly, man may not imitate God’s sovereignty. A father gives life ministerially; he is not its absolute lord. A ruler holds public authority beneath divine and natural law; he is not the Creator. A soldier remains bound by justice. A private man has no power to kill the innocent. The singular judgments of sacred history make no hole in the Fifth Commandment through which modern cruelty may pass.

Some critics solve the difficulty by setting the “God of the Old Testament” against Jesus Christ. The Church cannot do this. The Father of Israel is the Father revealed by the Son. Christ is the eternal Word through whom the Law, Prophets, and histories were given.

The Gospel reveals divine mercy with a brightness prepared across the Old Testament, but it does not abolish judgment. Our Lord foretells Jerusalem’s destruction, speaks repeatedly of Hell, and declares that He will sit as Judge of all nations. In Acts, Ananias and Saphira fall dead after lying to the Holy Ghost, and Herod is struck after accepting divine honors.²⁶

At the same time, Christ forbids His disciples to turn prophetic zeal into private vengeance. When James and John wish to call fire upon a Samaritan village, He rebukes them. In Gethsemani He commands Peter to put up the sword. His kingdom is not defended by His servants as an earthly faction is defended.²⁷

The Church therefore receives no mission to exterminate unbelieving nations. She is sent to teach, baptize, offer the true Sacrifice, forgive sins through Christ’s appointed ministry, condemn error, and call every people into the one fold. Civil authority retains grave duties of justice and defense under natural and divine law; no private believer may manufacture a holy war from an Old Testament sentence.

The Cross holds justice and mercy together. The Judge does not pretend that sin is harmless. The Judge Himself bears the price of redemption. God’s hatred of iniquity is so holy that Calvary is necessary; His love for sinners is so great that the Son freely mounts the Cross. The answer to judgment is not to deny justice, but to flee through repentance into the mercy purchased by Christ.

These chapters of Scripture authorize no terrorism, racial hatred, lynching, revenge, or self-appointed execution. They do not permit a man to name his enemies “Amalec” and then assume Saul’s commission. They do not permit a faction to announce that Providence has made it a sword. They do not permit parents, priests, rulers, or citizens to command what is contrary to divine and natural law.

St. Augustine’s warning is decisive: the agent, the act, and the authority must all be considered. Abraham acting from private impulse would be monstrous; Abraham obeying a manifest divine command is tested in faith—and God does not permit Isaac to be slain. Moyses acting from personal appetite would be guilty; Moyses executing a revealed public commission occupies an entirely different moral order.²⁸

No inward voice can overturn God’s revealed commandment. No alleged apparition can grant a private man power over innocent life. No confidence, fervor, dream, calculation of future benefit, or hatred of heresy supplies missing authority. Heresy must be hated because it is false and kills souls; the heretic must never be hated as a person. The weapons proper to the Church’s saving mission are truth, prayer, penance, sacramental grace, lawful discipline, patient suffering, and the unbroken confession of the Faith.

Even lawful war can become sinful through a wicked intention. St. Augustine names the love of violence, revengeful cruelty, implacable enmity, and lust of power among the evils that corrupt war. A just cause does not sanctify hatred. Public office does not make excess innocent. Victory does not make every deed of the victor good.²⁹

Judges 20–21 proves this from within Israel’s own history. Men may begin by punishing a real atrocity and then exceed justice. They may make a rash oath, preserve it through worse crimes, and call their disorder necessity. Scripture exposes the chain so that authority will fear self-will even when its first cause was just.

When an unbeliever or wounded Christian raises these passages, the answer should not begin with accusation. Many have received only fragments, and some were taught that faith requires them to suppress every moral question. It does not.

A useful answer may proceed in this order:

1. Acknowledge the actual text. Some passages truly contain divinely commanded temporal judgments, including the death of children. Do not deny it.
2. Name the particular account. Ask whether the speaker means Madian in Numbers 31, Amalec in 1 Kings 15, the nations of Chanaan, Benjamin in Judges 20, or Jabes-Galaad in Judges 21. These accounts are not morally identical.
3. Read what precedes and follows. Idolatry, child sacrifice, sexual seduction, attacks upon the weak, centuries of patience, rash oaths, and human excess often disappear from hostile summaries.
4. Distinguish command, permission, and record. Job is principally about permission; Jeremias often foretells judgment; Jabes-Galaad is a human decision recorded amid chaos; Amalec receives a specified command of judgment.
5. Distinguish God from man. The Creator’s authority over life cannot be assumed by a creature. Ordinary human law forbids killing the innocent.
6. Refuse racial and private applications. These judgments do not authorize modern hatred or violence.
7. Lead to Christ. The God who judges sin is the God who calls the sinner to penance and gives His own Son for redemption.

This answer will not make death emotionally easy. Christianity does not promise that every mystery will become emotionally easy. It does show that the charge “God commanded murder” hides the decisive question. Murder is unjust killing by one without authority. The entire dispute concerns whether the Creator is truly Lord and Judge, whether His judgments are just, and whether the biblical text is being read according to the kind of act it records.

There is a danger in studying these passages only to win an argument. A man may defend God’s judgment upon Amalec while sparing the Agag of his own ruling attachment. He may condemn Chanaan’s idols while allowing entertainment, ambition, impurity, or human respect to receive sacrifice in his home. He may denounce Benjamin for protecting the guilty men of Gabaa while protecting sin because it belongs to his family, party, nation, or religious faction. He may recognize the rash oath of Judges 21 while keeping promises that should be repented of because pride will not admit they were wrong.

The literal wars are not ours to repeat. The spiritual warfare is.

Kill no innocent person. Hate no person. But show no mercy to the lie that would kill the life of grace within you. Do not bargain with the sin God has condemned. Do not call permission approval. Do not interpret delay as indifference. Do not imagine that election, orthodoxy, office, or past obedience exempts you from judgment. Israel itself was chastised when it imitated the nations it had displaced.

Father Frederick William Faber’s maxim belongs here in its full Catholic meaning: “Where there is no hatred of heresy, there is no holiness.” The hatred is directed toward poisonous falsehood, first wherever it has entered one’s own mind and life. It is never permission for contempt or cruelty toward the person deceived by it. The man who uses zeal as a cloak for hatred has not learned the wars of Scripture; he has joined the disorder they condemn.³⁰

The difficult pages do not reveal two gods. They reveal one holy God acting across one history of creation, sin, judgment, patience, covenant, and redemption.

He waits while the iniquity of the Amorrheans is not yet full.

He warns Israel not to become like the nations it will dispossess.

He preserves Rahab when she believes.

He spares the Cinites who depart from Amalec.

He exposes Israel’s excess when every man does what seems right to himself.

He permits Job to be tried but sets a boundary Satan cannot cross.

He uses Assyria and judges Assyria’s pride.

He sends Jeremias to warn before Babylon comes, and He judges Babylon in its turn.

He rebukes the Apostles when they would call down fire in private zeal.

And at Calvary He permits wicked hands to raise the Cross while the spotless Victim freely offers the Sacrifice that saves the wicked.

The final word is neither cruelty nor indulgence. It is holy justice opening the door of mercy before the day of sentence. God says through Ezechiel that He wills not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. That call is addressed not only to the ancient nations, but to us.

Do not read the judgments of Scripture merely to ask why they died. Read them also to hear why God warns before judgment, why sin cannot be made harmless by time, why no people may presume upon election, and why repentance must not be delayed.

The sword is not placed in your private hand.

The warning is placed in your heart.

Sources and Translation Note

Sacred Scripture quotations follow The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English (Rheims, 1582) and The Holie Bible Faithfully Translated into English out of the Authentical Latin (Douay, 1609–1610), with spelling and punctuation quietly modernized while retaining the original wording and sentence structure. Catholic book names and the traditional Psalm numbering are preserved.

The distinctions in this chapter follow the received Catholic treatment of divine sovereignty, public authority, just war, murder, and providential permission. No singular command in Israel’s sacred history is presented as a standing authorization for private violence. Where the inspired text merely records a human command or sinful excess, the chapter does not attribute that act to God.

Footnotes

1. Exodus 20:13; 21:12–14; 22:2; Numbers 35:9–34; Deuteronomy 19:1–13; Catechism of the Council of Trent, part III, “The Fifth Commandment,” translated by Rev. J. Donovan (Dublin: W. Folds and Son for the translator, 1829). ↩

2. St. Augustine, The City of God, book I, chapters 20–21, translated by Marcus Dods, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. II, edited by Philip Schaff (Buffalo, New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). ↩

3. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 64, aa. 2–6, especially a. 6. ↩

4. Numbers 25:1–18. ↩

5. Numbers 31:1–18; Apocalypse 2:14; Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, commentary on Numbers 31:2, 16–18. ↩

6. Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide, commentary on Numbers 31:17–18. Lapide explicitly distinguishes God’s sovereign authority from the authority of a human judge. ↩

7. Exodus 17:8–16; Deuteronomy 25:17–19; 1 Kings 15:1–3. ↩

8. 1 Kings 15:6; Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide, commentary on 1 Kings 15:6. ↩

9. 1 Kings 15:7–23. For the fuller treatment of Saul’s selective obedience, see 1 Kings 15:22: Obedience Better Than Sacrifice, and the Judgment on Selective Fidelity. ↩

10. Leviticus 18:3–30; Deuteronomy 12:29–31; 18:9–14; Wisdom 12:3–7. ↩

11. Deuteronomy 9:1–29. ↩

12. Genesis 15:13–16; Wisdom 12:8–22, especially verses 10 and 20. ↩

13. Josue 2:1–24; 6:17–25; 9:1–27. ↩

14. Leviticus 18:24–30; Deuteronomy 8:19–20; 28:15–68; 4 Kings 17:5–23; 25:1–21. ↩

15. Judges 19:1–30; 20:1–48. ↩

16. Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide, commentary on Judges 20:48. Lapide distinguishes the divinely authorized war from the Israelites’ excess against innocent women and children. ↩

17. Judges 21:1–24. ↩

18. Job 1:6–22. ↩

19. St. Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, book II, section 24, on Job 1:16–17, translated in A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844). ↩

20. Luke 22:22; Acts 2:22–24; 4:27–28; St. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Charity, chapters 100–101, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. III (Buffalo, New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). ↩

21. Jeremias 11:18–23; 18:18–23; 20:1–18; 25:1–38. ↩

22. Jeremias 25:8–14; 27:1–22; 50:1–51:64. ↩

23. Isaias 10:5–19. ↩

24. Deuteronomy 24:16; 4 Kings 14:5–6; Ezechiel 18:4, 19–23. ↩

25. Deuteronomy 32:39; Job 1:21; Wisdom 16:13; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q. 64, a. 5 and a. 6, reply to objection 1. ↩

26. Matthew 10:28; 25:31–46; Luke 19:41–44; 21:20–24; Acts 5:1–11; 12:20–23. ↩

27. Luke 9:51–56; Matthew 26:51–54; John 18:10–11, 36. ↩

28. St. Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichaean, book XXII, chapters 73–75, translated by Richard Stothert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. IV (Buffalo, New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). ↩

29. St. Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichaean, book XXII, chapter 74; Catechism of the Council of Trent, part III, “The Fifth Commandment” (1829 Donovan translation). ↩

30. Rev. Fr. Frederick William Faber, C.O., The Precious Blood; or, The Price of Our Salvation (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860), chapter VI, p. 316. ↩