Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric?

Word Guild Award Shortlist — Biblical StudiesWord Guild Best Book Cover AwardAssociation of University Presses Design Show — Book, Jacket, and CoversChristians cannot ignore the intersection of religionand violence, whether contemporary or ancient. In our own Scriptures, war texts that appear to approve of genocidal killings and war rape—forcibly taking female captives for wives—raise hard questions about biblical ethics and the characterof God. Have we missed something in our traditional readings?In Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? William Webb and Gordon Oeste address the ethics of reading biblical war texts today. Theirs is a biblical-theological reading with an eyeto hermeneutical, ethical, canonical, and ancient cultural contexts. Identifying a spectrum of views on war texts ranging from "no ethical problems" to "utterly repulsive," the authors pursue a middle path using a hermeneutic of incremental, redemptive-movement ethics.Instead of trying to force traditional Christian answers