Is God a Moral Monster?

What Is God a Moral Monster? is

Is God a Moral Monster? is a general-audience apologetics and philosophy book by Paul Copan, published in 2011 by Baker Books. Its subtitle — Making Sense of the Old Testament God — names the task precisely: it is a response to the charge, popularized by the New Atheist authors of the 2000s, that the God depicted in the Old Testament is morally repugnant. Copan, a philosopher, organizes the book around the specific passages that fuel that charge and works through them in eighteen short, accessible chapters.

The method is consistent throughout. Copan’s recurring move is to set each disputed law or command against the background of the ancient Near East — the legal codes, the warfare conventions, the social structures of the surrounding cultures — and to read the biblical text as part of a larger trajectory rather than as a freestanding endorsement of everything it describes or permits. He argues that many of the laws regulated and limited practices that were brutal and unrestrained elsewhere, and that the Bible’s own arc moves toward something the New Atheist reading misses. That is his argument; this review reports it as such, and notes throughout where other scholars read the same texts differently.

Why readers reach for Copan on the hard texts

The single biggest practical difference between this book and a general apologetic like Mere Christianity or The Reason for God is focus. Copan is not making the broad case for God’s existence or for Christianity as a whole. He is answering one objection — the moral character of the Old Testament God — and he is answering it at the level of specific texts. When the reader’s real question is “but what about the command to destroy the Canaanites?” or “but doesn’t the Law permit slavery?”, this is the book that actually stops on that verse and works through it rather than gesturing past it.

The other distinctive is the use of ancient-Near-East context as the primary tool. Copan’s wager is that a modern reader hears these passages with modern assumptions — about warfare, about labor, about law — and that placing each text back in its own world changes the reading. A reader who finds that wager persuasive gets a coherent framework for the whole Old Testament. A reader who finds parts of it strained still comes away with the scholarly sources, the categories, and the competing considerations laid out clearly enough to think with. Either way, the book treats the reader as someone capable of sitting with a hard question rather than someone to be reassured and moved along.

The Canaanite conquest: the hardest chapter, handled at length

The passages where God appears to command the destruction of the Canaanite peoples are the sharpest edge of the whole objection, and Copan gives them the most sustained treatment in the book. He assembles several strands rather than resting on a single move: that the conquest was a bounded, one-time judgment on specific peoples for specific reasons rather than a general license for violence; that the language of total destruction in Joshua may follow the conventions of ancient Near Eastern war rhetoric, which routinely used sweeping, hyperbolic terms for victory; that the archaeological and textual picture suggests the targets were primarily military and governmental strongholds rather than civilian population centers; and that the larger biblical narrative consistently frames the episode as exceptional rather than normative.

This is the chapter where the reader most needs to know that they are reading an argument. The hyperbole reading and the “strongholds rather than cities” reading are defended by a number of Old Testament scholars and disputed by others, including some who share Copan’s faith and some who do not. There are Christian scholars who read the conquest texts more starkly and locate the difficulty elsewhere, and there are skeptics who find Copan’s contextual reading unconvincing. Copan makes his case carefully and points the reader to the deeper scholarship — he and Matthew Flannagan later wrote a whole academic volume on this single question — but the honest summary is that this is a genuinely contested matter on which thoughtful people, inside and outside the church, continue to disagree. The chapter is a strong entry into that debate, not a verdict that closes it.

Slavery, the Law, and the “regulate then transcend” frame

Several chapters take up the laws in the Pentateuch that a modern reader finds hardest — regulations governing servitude, penalties that strike a contemporary conscience as severe, and rules touching the treatment of women and of foreigners. Copan’s organizing claim across these chapters is that Israelite law has to be read against the far harsher legal codes of the surrounding cultures, and as a regulating framework rather than a moral ideal. On servitude, he argues that much of what English translations render as “slavery” functioned, in the Israelite case, closer to indentured or contract labor — debt-servitude with release provisions and legal protections — and was categorically different from the race-based chattel slavery of the modern Atlantic world. On the harsh penalties, he argues for reading them within their judicial and rhetorical context rather than as a flat endorsement.

As with the conquest, this is contested ground. The “regulate then transcend” reading is a real and defended position in Old Testament scholarship, and Copan supports it with comparative legal material. It is also true that the biblical texts contain provisions — distinctions in how different classes of servants could be treated, for instance — that many readers, including many Christians, still find difficult on any reading, and that some scholars argue Copan understates. The careful way to take this section is as Copan intends it: an argument that these laws are better than a hostile reading allows and point beyond themselves, offered alongside the candid recognition that the texts remain hard and that the matter is debated. The book is most valuable here when read as one well-made case among several rather than as the end of the conversation.

Reading Scripture as a trajectory, not a snapshot

Underneath the individual chapters is a single interpretive instinct that gives the book its shape: the idea that the Old Testament should be read as a trajectory rather than a snapshot. Copan repeatedly argues that the Law meets a brutal ancient world where it is and constrains it, while pointing forward to something fuller — that a given regulation is a step within a larger story rather than the destination, and that reading any single command in isolation from that arc misreads it. This is what lets him hold the Testaments together: the same God, a developing revelation, an unfolding direction.

It is a genuinely useful frame, and it is also one of the places where the book is making an interpretive choice that a reader should see clearly. Reading Scripture as a moral trajectory is a long-standing and widely shared approach, but how far it can carry the hardest texts — and whether it resolves the difficulty or relocates it — is exactly what scholars argue about. For many readers the trajectory frame is the most clarifying thing in the book; for others it raises its own questions about what it means for a text to permit something on the way to transcending it. Copan presents it persuasively. Whether it fully answers the objection is, fairly, left for the reader to weigh.

Pricing

Where Is God a Moral Monster? falls behind

Not the last word. The questions Copan takes on — the conquest, the slavery laws, the harsh penalties — are among the most actively debated in Old Testament studies, and his contextual reading is one position among several. Some Christian scholars read these texts more starkly; some skeptics find the contextual case unpersuasive. The book is a strong entry point into that debate, not a settlement of it, and it reads best when held that way.

Tied to its moment. The book is framed as a reply to the New Atheist authors who were dominating the bestseller lists when it was written. The underlying texts and arguments are timeless, but the specific opponents — and the cultural temperature of the mid-2000s religion debates — date the framing. A reader coming to it fresh in 2026 will notice it is answering a particular argument from a particular decade.

Persuasiveness varies by chapter. Even sympathetic readers tend to find some chapters more convincing than others — the “these were strongholds, not civilian cities” reading of the conquest and the “debt-servitude, not chattel slavery” reading of the Law are the two most likely to divide an audience. That is not a flaw in the writing so much as a reflection of how genuinely hard the source material is.

Narrow by design. This is a focused apologetic on one cluster of objections. It is not a doctrine of God, not a survey of Old Testament theology, and not a devotional. Copan stays on the moral-objection question on purpose, which is the right call for the book he set out to write — but it means a reader wanting a fuller picture of the Old Testament will need other books alongside it.

Light on the New Testament. A reader whose hardest questions are about the New Testament — final judgment, certain household codes, the relationship of the Testaments on violence — will find those largely outside the book’s scope. The title is about the Old Testament God, and the book keeps that promise narrowly.

Is God a Moral Monster? vs. The Reason for God vs. The Case for Faith

These three are all answers to objections, but they aim at different objections. Is God a Moral Monster? (Copan, 2011) is the specialist — it does one thing, the moral character of the Old Testament God, and does it at the level of specific texts. The Reason for God (Tim Keller, 2008) is the generalist — it takes the seven broad objections a modern secular reader raises, including suffering and the church’s record, and the moral-character question is one chapter among many rather than the whole book. The Case for Faith (Lee Strobel, 2000) is the journalist’s tour — Strobel interviews scholars across a spread of “tough questions,” and the Old Testament violence question is one stop on a wider itinerary.

Different strengths. Keller is better for the reader whose doubts are broad and conversational — he covers the most surface area. Strobel is better for the reader who likes the interview format and wants a survey of several hard questions at once. Copan is better — by a wide margin — for the reader whose specific, sharp, unavoidable question is the violence and the laws of the Old Testament. If that text-level question is the wall someone has hit, the generalist books will gesture at it; Copan stops and works through it.

A practical note on scope: none of the three is a neutral referee. Each argues a case, and on the Old Testament texts in particular, careful readers — Christian and otherwise — land in different places. Copan goes deepest on these passages and is the most useful starting point for them, but the responsible way to read any of the three is alongside the awareness that thoughtful people continue to disagree about exactly how the hardest texts should be read.

Alternatives to Is God a Moral Monster?