Scriptural Inerrancy and the Hard Passages of the Old Testament

”Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation.” — Dei Verbum §11

No honest Catholic reader of the Old Testament gets very far before running into passages that seem impossible to reconcile with the God of Jesus Christ. Joshua marches into Canaan under a divine command to leave nothing that breathes alive (Deut 20:16–18). Abraham is ordered up Mount Moriah to plunge a knife into his only son. A psalmist cries out a blessing on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks (Ps 137:9). Elisha curses a crowd of jeering youths and forty-two of them are mauled by bears (2 Kgs 2:23–25). Jephthah sacrifices his daughter and Hebrews 11:32 lists him among the heroes of faith.

These are the “dark passages” of Scripture, as Benedict XVI called them in Verbum Domini, and they pose a genuine problem for anyone who holds the Catholic doctrine of biblical inerrancy. How can a book that is “without error” (Dei Verbum §11) simultaneously record commands that look, on the surface, like moral atrocities? How can the God who commands “love your enemies” in Matthew 5 be the same God who commands the ḥērem (חֵרֶם) in Deuteronomy 20?

This post works through the Catholic answer. It is not a single answer but a layered one, built up over twenty centuries of interpretation and ratified in a specific form by Vatican II, the 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, the 2014 PBC document The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, and Benedict XVI’s 2010 apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini.

The Catholic tradition reads these passages with five interlocking commitments: a doctrine of inerrancy anchored in Dei Verbum §11; attention to literary genre and the cultural horizon of the human author; a Thomistic metaphysics of divine sovereignty over life and death; a theology of progressive divine pedagogy culminating in Christ; and the patristic practice of spiritual reading recovered by the ressourcement movement. No single one of these pillars does all the work. Together, they constitute what Matthew Ramage has called “Method C”—a synthesis of historical-critical and patristic-theological exegesis rooted in Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic.¹

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1. What the Church actually teaches: the magisterial foundation

The doctrine of scriptural inerrancy is not a fundamentalist import. It is a conciliar teaching with a long magisterial pedigree running through Leo XIII, Benedict XV, Pius XII, and Vatican II.

The papal encyclicals: Leo XIII to Pius XII

Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (1893), written at the height of the nineteenth-century crisis over the documentary hypothesis and the Tübingen school, issued the first great modern papal statement on inerrancy. Leo rejected any attempt “to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals” and treated the rest as obiter dicta.⁹ Yet he also made a crucial concession that would shape everything to follow: the sacred writers, when describing the natural world, “did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time” (§18). This “appearance” principle allowed phenomenological descriptions—“the sun rose”—without requiring the sacred author to possess Copernican astronomy.

Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus (1920), issued for the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of Jerome’s death, restated unrestricted inerrancy against the Modernists with fresh force. It declared that it would be “wholly impious to limit inspiration to certain portions only of Scripture” (§21) and condemned those who held that the historical parts of Scripture rest merely on “relative truth” (§22).¹⁰

Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), is the document most responsible for the shape of modern Catholic exegesis. Pius reaffirmed unrestricted inerrancy in unambiguous terms—quoting Leo XIII, he declared: “This teaching, which Our Predecessor Leo XIII set forth with such solemnity, We also proclaim with Our authority”—but simultaneously opened the door to literary-genre analysis. The interpreter must determine “what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use.” Pius drew an incarnational analogy that would become the theological backbone of Dei Verbum §13: as the eternal Word took on human flesh in everything but sin, so the words of God, expressed in human language, are made like human speech in everything but error.³

Vatican II and Dei Verbum §11

Vatican II, Dei Verbum §11 (1965), gave the doctrine its current conciliar form. The Latin text reads: “Cum ergo omne id, quod auctores inspirati seu hagiographi asserunt, retineri debeat assertum a Spiritu Sancto, inde Scripturae libri veritatem, quam Deus nostrae salutis causa Litteris sacris consignari voluit, firmiter, fideliter et sine errore docere profitendi sunt.”¹¹ The three-word phrase nostrae salutis causa—“for the sake of our salvation”—has generated more scholarly controversy than any other clause in the Council’s documents, because on its reading hangs the scope of Catholic inerrancy.

The drafting history is decisive. An earlier draft had introduced the adjective salutarem directly modifying veritatem, yielding veritatem salutarem (“saving truth”). One hundred and eighty-four Council Fathers objected in writing: they recognized that this formulation would restrict inerrancy to salvific matters narrowly defined and silently overturn the teaching of Leo XIII, Benedict XV, and Pius XII. Paul VI personally intervened, directing the drafters to remove salutarem and to relocate the salvific qualifier into a purpose clause syntactically attached to the verb consignari voluit (“wished to be recorded”). The relocation was neither accidental nor cosmetic: it was a deliberate magisterial correction. As Cardinal Augustin Bea, the principal drafter, later put it: “The language explains God’s purpose in causing the scriptures to be written, and not the nature of the truth enshrined therein.”¹²

Two post-conciliar schools have contested this reading nonetheless. The “limited inerrancy” school (Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, and the mainstream post-Vatican II American Catholic biblical establishment) treats nostrae salutis causa as restricting inerrancy to truths directly pertaining to salvation.¹³ The “full inerrancy” school (Brian Harrison, Scott Hahn, William Most) reads the phrase grammatically as a purpose clause modifying consignari voluit, identifying God’s reason for inspiring Scripture rather than limiting the scope of its truthfulness.¹⁴¹⁵ Scott Hahn’s Latin-grammatical argument is the most developed recent statement of the full-inerrancy position.

A decisive indicator of the current magisterium’s direction appears in the CDF’s 1998 Doctrinal Commentary on the Professio Fidei, which listed “the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts”—without qualification—as a divinely revealed truth to be held definitively.¹⁶ Another appears in the footnotes of Dei Verbum §11 itself: footnote 5 cites Augustine, Aquinas, Trent, Providentissimus Deus, and Divino Afflante Spiritu—every one of which teaches unrestricted inerrancy. A Council that intended to overturn the traditional teaching would not have cited sources that uniformly defend it.

Post-conciliar developments

The PBC and ITC documents. Catholic exegetical practice has since been shaped by two documents from the Pontifical Biblical Commission: The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1993), with a preface by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, which endorsed the historical-critical method as “indispensable” while insisting it is insufficient alone; and The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture (2014), commissioned by Benedict XVI in response to Verbum Domini §19.¹⁷⁵ The 2014 document’s Part 3 addresses the hard passages directly: it treats the conquest narratives as shaped by ancient literary conventions rather than as modern historical reportage, acknowledges the “ethical and social problems” raised by violent texts, and insists that they be read canonically and Christologically.

The Catechism summarizes the doctrinal state of play in §§101–141. The three criteria for interpreting Scripture given in §§112–114—the unity of the whole Scripture, the living Tradition of the Church, and the analogy of faith—are drawn directly from Dei Verbum §12 and form the non-negotiable framework within which any Catholic reading of a hard passage must take place.

2. The five Catholic approaches to the hard passages

There is no single “Catholic solution” to the hard passages. There are five, each with a long pedigree and each carrying part of the load. The mature Catholic reader holds them together.

2.1 The classical Augustinian–Thomistic approach: divine command and divine sovereignty

Aquinas’s treatment in Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 5, ad 2, and q. 100, a. 8, ad 3, remains the most rigorous framework for the sharpest cases. His logic runs in three steps. First, God is the author of life and holds absolute sovereignty over it: “The Lord killeth and maketh alive” (1 Sam 2:6). Second, every human dies “by the command of God” in the sense that natural death itself is a consequence of original sin permitted by divine providence; God may therefore, without any injustice, inflict death on any human being directly. Third—and this is the crucial move—the moral definitions of murder, theft, and adultery contain implicit reference to divine ownership. God cannot “steal” what already belongs to Him. When Abraham obeys the command at Mount Moriah, he does not consent to murder, because “his son was due to be slain by the command of God, Who is Lord of life and death” (ST I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3).⁶

Aquinas is careful to insist this is not voluntarism. He is not saying that God can arbitrarily make murder good or adultery licit. He is saying that the very definition of murder (unjust killing of an innocent by one without authority) includes the specification “without authority,” and that God cannot be without the authority to dispose of human life. The Thomistic solution upholds both the absolute wrongness of murder and the possibility of a divine command that, because of who commands it, is not murder. It is the strongest answer to the sharpest cases—the Aqedah, the ḥērem, 1 Samuel 15—but it buys its strength by treating those cases at the level of pure metaphysics. It tells you whether God could have commanded such things. It does not tell you whether, in a given case, God actually did.

2.2 The accommodation and pedagogical approach

The complementary answer, which has a longer patristic pedigree, is that God accommodates Himself (the Greek term is synkatabasis, “condescension”) to the cultural and moral level of the people He is forming. He does not impose on them an ethic they could not yet understand; He works with them where they are, tolerating and regulating practices that fall short of the fullness of truth, and progressively raising them toward Christ, who is the full and final revelation.

This is the approach formalized by Benedict XVI in Verbum Domini §42, which is now the magisterial anchor for any discussion of the hard passages.⁷ Matthew Ramage’s Dark Passages of the Bible (CUA Press, 2013) is the premier Catholic monograph developing this approach systematically. Ramage draws on Benedict’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” to propose “Method C”—a synthesis that transcends both the pre-critical “Method A” of the patristic and medieval tradition and the bracketed-faith “Method B” of modern historical criticism. Method C takes seriously both the culturally conditioned worldview of the human author (Method B’s gift) and the canonical, Christological unity of Scripture read within the faith of the Church (Method A’s gift).¹¹⁸

The strength of this approach is that it makes theological sense of a real observation: the God of Israel seems to speak differently in Deuteronomy 20 and Matthew 5. The weakness is that, pressed too far, it threatens to treat parts of the inspired text as “errant” in the ordinary sense. The magisterium has not ratified any reading that says the human author erred in writing what he wrote. What it has ratified is the distinction between the substance of what is asserted and the culturally conditioned form in which it is expressed, and between earlier and later stages of a single, progressively disclosed divine pedagogy.

2.3 The canonical-narrative approach

The third approach insists that no Old Testament passage can be read in isolation from the whole canon and its Christological fulfillment. Dei Verbum §12 articulates this explicitly in its three criteria: the content and unity of all of Scripture, the living Tradition of the Church, and the analogy of faith. A violent conquest narrative is not a stand-alone ethical text; it is one moment in a larger story whose own internal trajectory progressively critiques the violence it reports and whose final word is the cross.

Brevard Childs, a Protestant theologian of Yale whose work shaped Catholic biblical theology profoundly, made this method his life’s work. Benedict XVI credited Childs by name in the methodological preface to Jesus of Nazareth, volume 1.¹⁹²⁰ Francis Martin’s Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word (Sapientia, 2006) provided the most comprehensive Catholic ressourcement statement of a canonical-narrative reading.²¹ Scott Hahn’s covenant-theology approach, worked out across Letter & Spirit volume 6 and Catholic Bible Dictionary, reads the violence of the Old Testament within a covenantal framework that culminates in the New Covenant in Christ’s blood.²²²³

2.4 The patristic allegorical and spiritual approach

The Fathers, particularly Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, handled the hard passages by insisting on the spiritual sense. Origen’s principle, stated in De Principiis IV.2.9, was that the Holy Spirit deliberately placed “stumbling-blocks” in the text—passages whose literal absurdity or cruelty forced the reader to seek a spiritual meaning.²⁴ His Homilies on Joshua systematically read the conquest as the soul’s spiritual warfare against vice and demonic powers: Joshua (whose Greek name is Ἰησοῦς, Jesus) prefigures Christ leading the Christian through baptism (the Jordan) into possession of the promised land (the kingdom of heaven), and the Canaanite peoples represent the vices that must be slain in the soul.²⁵

Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses II.91 addresses the plague of the firstborn with striking moral urgency: how could a just God kill Egyptian infants? Gregory’s answer is that read spiritually, the death of the firstborn means the killing of sin at its inception, before it has had the chance to mature. Read literally, he argues, the text would contradict reason; read spiritually, it teaches the Christian to slay nascent evil impulses in the soul before they can grow.²⁶

Henri de Lubac’s massive four-volume Exégèse médiévale (English: Medieval Exegesis, 3 vols., Eerdmans, 1998–2009) recovered the fourfold sense of Scripture from modernist dismissal and demonstrated that the patristic-medieval spiritual reading was not naïve but a sophisticated theological method grounded in the conviction that Scripture’s divine author intends multiple layers of meaning.²⁷ Dei Verbum §12 and the Catechism §§115–119 ratified this recovery at the conciliar level. The ressourcement movement’s great gift to modern Catholic exegesis is the insistence that the literal sense is never the only sense, and that the spiritual senses—allegorical, moral, anagogical—are part of the inspired meaning of the text.

2.5 The genre-based and historically conditioned approach

The final approach is the one that does the most concrete work on the conquest narratives specifically. It argues that ḥērem rhetoric and conquest accounts in the ancient Near East were conventionally hyperbolic, and that reading Joshua 10–11 as flat historical reportage is a modern mistake, not the traditional Catholic reading.

K. Lawson Younger’s Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (JSOTSup 98; Sheffield Academic Press, 1990) remains the foundational comparative study. Younger compared Joshua 9–12 with Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian conquest accounts and identified a common “transmission code”—a stylized, stereotyped, and hyperbolic way of recording conquest. Expressions like “all the land,” “all Israel,” “no survivors,” and “put to the edge of the sword” belong to this shared literary convention. The biblical text, like its ANE neighbors, uses totalizing rhetoric to communicate the theological point that divine judgment fell decisively, not to provide a body count.⁴

John H. and J. Harvey Walton’s The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (IVP Academic, 2017) sharpened the point by arguing that the Hebrew verb ḥāram means “to remove from common use,” not “to annihilate.” The ḥērem was fundamentally about destroying Canaanite identity—religious, cultural, political—not about exterminating every individual. Paul Copan’s Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker, 2011) and Copan and Flannagan’s Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker, 2014) assemble the textual evidence that the conquest was not a literal extermination: Joshua 13:1 admits that “very large areas of land” remain unconquered at the end of the book; Judges 1–2 repeatedly documents the survival of the very peoples Joshua supposedly wiped out; and the Amalekites, supposedly annihilated in 1 Samuel 15, continue to appear as late as Esther.²⁸²⁹³⁰ These internal contradictions are not embarrassments; they are genre signals.

The PBC’s 2014 document ratifies this reading at the Catholic scholarly level: “city walls don’t fall from trumpet blasts” (Josh 6:20), it observes, and this is a genre signal that the narrative is not modern history.⁵ The conquest is real history told in the literary conventions of its time—conventions that Catholic interpretation, following Divino Afflante Spiritu, must now be equipped to recognize.

3. The specific hard passages

The framework above can now do the work on specific cases. What follows is not a full commentary on each passage but a brief sketch of how Catholic scholarship currently handles the sharpest ones.

3.1 The conquest of Canaan

The ḥērem command in Deuteronomy 20:16–18 and its execution in Joshua 6–11 is the canonical hard case. Catholic scholarship handles it with all five tools at once. At the metaphysical level, Aquinas’s argument that God holds sovereignty over life is in place: God could command such a thing without injustice. At the genre level, Younger and the Waltons have shown that the totalizing rhetoric is literary convention, not body count. At the canonical level, Judges 1 shows that the Canaanites survived, which means the biblical text itself undercuts a maximalist reading. At the accommodation level, Verbum Domini §42 places the conquest within a progressive divine pedagogy that culminates in Christ’s command to love enemies. And at the spiritual level, Origen’s reading of Joshua as the soul’s warfare against sin remains an ecclesially commended way of reading the text.⁷²⁵

3.2 The Aqedah (Genesis 22)

The binding of Isaac is the hardest test case because God actually commands the sacrifice—and then stops it. Jon Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (Yale, 1993) traces how the Aqedah became, in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, the central Old Testament prefiguration of Christ’s passion.³¹ The Catholic reading is typological and has been from Origen onward: Abraham is the figure of God the Father; Isaac is the figure of Christ; Isaac carrying the wood up Moriah prefigures Jesus carrying the cross; the ram caught in the thicket prefigures the Lamb of God; the mountain itself will become Jerusalem. Jean Daniélou’s From Shadows to Reality (Burns & Oates, 1960) remains the classic Catholic study of this typological tradition.³² Origen’s Homily 8 on Genesis is read in the Catholic Liturgia Horarum in the Office of Readings during the Lenten cycle. And the theological point is not “God wanted Isaac dead.” It is that God provides the lamb, and that, as Hebrews 11:17–19 explicitly says, Abraham “considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead.”

3.3 The imprecatory psalms

Psalms 58, 83, 109, 137, and others contain explicit curses on the psalmist’s enemies—including, in Psalm 137:9, a beatitude on whoever dashes Babylonian infants against the rocks. The Catholic reception history is instructive. The 1971 Institutio Generalis Liturgiae Horarum §131 records a decision by Paul VI, over the objections of both the study group (Coetus XI) and the Synod of Bishops, to omit Psalms 58, 83, and 109 from the four-week psalter cycle of the post-conciliar Liturgy of the Hours, along with selected verses from nineteen other psalms—a total of 122 verses excised.³³ The Old Latin Divine Office prayed them all.

The decision is defensible on pastoral grounds—these psalms are hard to pray without interior formation—but it has also been criticized as a quiet concession to Marcionism. The German Catholic Old Testament scholar Erich Zenger’s A God of Vengeance? Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath (Westminster John Knox, 1996) argued forcefully that removing them reasserts the Marcionite impulse: the psalms of wrath do not curse, Zenger insists; they present “passionate lament, petition, and desires before God,” surrendering the last word to God and thereby refusing to take vengeance into human hands.³⁴ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (1940) had made the thoroughly Christological point earlier: only the innocent can rightly pray the imprecatory psalms, and the only truly innocent one is Christ crucified—who prays them in and for the whole Church.³⁵ C. S. Lewis, in Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt, 1958), made the complementary point that the bitterness of the cursings is itself testimony to Israel’s moral seriousness: the psalmist curses because he cares about justice and the violation of the innocent.³⁶

3.4 Child sacrifice texts

The hardest of these is Ezekiel 20:25–26, where God says: “I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live; and I defiled them through their very gifts in making them offer by fire all their first-born.” Three Catholic readings are on the table. The traditional reading treats it as a case of God “giving them up” to their own perverse desires, parallel to Romans 1:24–28. A more recent and provocative reading, developed by Scott Hahn and John Bergsma in a 2004 Journal of Biblical Literature article, argues that Ezekiel (writing from a Priestly perspective) is critiquing certain Deuteronomic laws that, from his higher Holiness Code standpoint, represented a divine concession to Israel’s moral hardness and therefore “were not good” in the full sense.³⁷ This is a technical argument about the relationship between D and P source traditions, and it matters because it offers a Catholic framework for reading hard passages as products of divine pedagogy without compromising inerrancy: God did give those statutes, but they were provisional, and Scripture itself marks their provisional character.

Heath Dewrell’s Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel (Eisenbrauns, 2017) is the most comprehensive recent scholarly treatment of the textual, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence.³⁸ Jon Levenson’s Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son remains the most important theological treatment: the normative Israelite and Christian traditions substituted symbolic for literal sacrifice (Passover, the redemption of the firstborn, ultimately the Eucharist) while preserving the underlying theological logic that the firstborn belongs to God.³¹

3.5 Apparent historical and scientific errors

Catholic interpretation handles these under the genre clause of Divino Afflante Spiritu. Joshua’s “long day” (Josh 10:12–14) is introduced as a quotation from the Book of Jashar, an ancient poetic source, and is read phenomenologically rather than astronomically. The mustard seed as “the smallest of all seeds” (Mark 4:31) is proverbial language, not botanical taxonomy—and Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu explicitly addresses this kind of case. The census numbers in Numbers are likely to involve the Hebrew ʾelep functioning as a technical term for a clan or military unit rather than a literal “thousand,” dramatically reducing the figures. The patriarchal ages in Genesis 5 are mathematically patterned (Abraham’s 175 = 7×5²; Isaac’s 180 = 5×6²; Jacob’s 147 = 3×7²), which is a strong genre signal that they are conventional rather than biological numbers, consistent with the much longer reigns of the Sumerian King List’s pre-flood rulers.³⁹ None of these are embarrassments to Catholic inerrancy. They are the kinds of things Dei Verbum §12 tells the interpreter to watch for.

3.6 Jephthah’s vow, Elisha’s bears, and the Amalekite ḥērem

Jephthah sacrificing his daughter (Judges 11) is a case in which the biblical text itself, read canonically, condemns the vow even as it records it; the Catholic interpretive tradition has read the passage this way nearly unanimously from the Fathers forward.⁴⁰ Elisha and the bears (2 Kings 2:23–25) is mitigated by the Hebrew (nĕʿārîm qĕṭannîm likely designates youths or adolescents rather than small children), by the context (the youths are mocking prophetic authority as they mock Elijah’s ascension), and by the covenant framework (the bear attack enacts the covenant curse of Leviticus 26:22). Saul’s punishment for sparing Agag in 1 Samuel 15 is not for insufficient violence but for insufficient obedience and for his self-aggrandizement (15:12); Walton’s “identity removal” thesis applies here too, and the Amalekites continue to appear in the biblical record long after their supposed total destruction (1 Sam 27:8; 30:1; Esther).⁴¹

4. The limited-inerrancy debate and Ratzinger’s mediating position

It would be dishonest to pretend the Catholic exegetical community speaks with one voice on how all this hangs together with inerrancy. Two schools have contested Dei Verbum §11’s meaning for sixty years, and the magisterium has not resolved the debate.

The two schools

The limited-inerrancy school—Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, and the mainstream American post-conciliar Catholic biblical establishment—reads nostrae salutis causa as restricting inerrancy to truths directly pertaining to salvation. Brown wrote in 1981 that Vatican II had “turned the corner” and that Catholics had moved from total to limited inerrancy.⁴² Fitzmyer, in Scripture: The Soul of Theology and The Interpretation of Scripture, made restricted inerrancy the default assumption of the New Jerome Biblical Commentary and the NAB commentary notes.⁴³ This is still the dominant view in American Catholic graduate biblical programs.

The full-inerrancy school—Brian Harrison, Scott Hahn, William Most, Brant Pitre—reads the phrase grammatically and historically: nostrae salutis causa is a purpose clause modifying consignari voluit, explaining why God inspired the Scriptures without limiting the scope of their truthfulness.¹⁴²²⁴⁴ The drafting history, the objections of the 184 Fathers, Paul VI’s personal intervention, Cardinal Bea’s clarification, and the footnote 5 citations all point in this direction.

Where the magisterium currently stands

Where does the current magisterium land? Indicators point in both directions. In 2008, the Synod on the Word of God’s Instrumentum Laboris §15c stated that inerrancy “applies only” to salvific truth. Cardinal Peter Turkson and others objected that the word “only” “turns the text of DV 11 on its head.” The Synod Fathers refused to endorse this formulation and asked the CDF to clarify Dei Verbum §11. In Proposition 12 they “propose[d] that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith clarify the concepts of ‘inspiration’ and ‘truth’ in the Bible.” Benedict XVI’s Verbum Domini (2010) acknowledged “the need today for a fuller and more adequate study of these realities.”⁴⁵ The requested CDF clarification has, to date, never been issued.

Joseph Ratzinger’s own position does not map neatly onto either camp. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” Ratzinger diagnosed the real problem as philosophical rather than exegetical: historical criticism as practiced in the twentieth century had absorbed Kantian epistemological assumptions that excluded God from historical analysis and then, unsurprisingly, found no God in the text.⁴⁶ The solution was not to reject the historical-critical method but to subject it to a “criticism of criticism” that surfaced its hidden philosophical presuppositions. In the methodological preface to Jesus of Nazareth, volume 1, Ratzinger insisted: “The historical-critical method remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work”—because “it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events”—but it must be supplemented by “canonical exegesis,” reading individual texts within the unity of Scripture and the living faith of the Church.²⁰ That methodological stance, more than any verdict on the limited-versus-full-inerrancy dispute, is the distinctive Catholic framework of the present moment.

5. The Marcionite temptation and why it is always closed

The perennial temptation, in the face of a hard passage, is simply to reject the Old Testament. Marcion of Sinope (c. 85–c. 159) was the first to give this impulse a theological program: he taught that the God of the Old Testament was an inferior, merely “just” demiurge, and that Jesus had come to reveal a different and higher God. He compiled the first Christian biblical canon—a truncated Luke and ten Pauline epistles—and jettisoned the entire Hebrew Bible. The Church condemned him.

Modern forms of Marcionism keep appearing. Adolf von Harnack’s 1921 monograph on Marcion was openly sympathetic to the old heretic, claiming that he had “exposed a real and unresolved tension at the heart of Christianity.”⁴⁷ Today, a functional Marcionism lives in popular Catholic preaching that quietly ignores the Old Testament or treats it as superseded rather than fulfilled.

The magisterium has closed this exit decisively. John Paul II’s 1997 address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission warned: “Since the second century, the Church has been faced with the temptation to separate the New Testament completely from the Old… The Marcionite temptation is making its appearance again in our time.”⁸ Verbum Domini §42 devoted a full paragraph to the same warning. The solution to a hard passage is never to cut it out of the canon.

6. The genuine development in Catholic reading

The reader who has followed this post carefully will notice that the way Catholic interpretation handles the conquest narratives has changed considerably since Augustine. Augustine read them as literal divine warfare and used them to ground the just-war tradition. Origen read them allegorically as the soul’s battle with sin. Modern Catholic scholarship, drawing on comparative ANE studies, reads them as genre-conventioned rhetoric whose theological point is divine judgment rather than a literal body count. These are not the same reading.

Is this a problem for Catholic doctrine? No—and Newman’s criteria for legitimate development explain why. A real development is one that preserves the substance of the earlier teaching while unfolding its implications under new light. Augustine never denied that Scripture uses literary genres; he did not have the ANE comparative material available to recognize the conventions of conquest rhetoric. Aquinas distinguished permanent from temporary precepts in the Old Testament (ST I-II, qq. 99–105); the modern recognition that certain rhetorical conventions belong to the temporary envelope rather than the permanent content is a natural extension of Aquinas’s framework, not a contradiction of it. Christian Hofreiter’s Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages (Oxford, 2018) surveys the full history of Christian interpretation and shows that every age has wrestled with these texts with the tools available to it.⁴⁸ The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have new tools—comparative Semitics, form criticism, narrative criticism, canonical reading—and the Catholic interpreter is obliged to use them, as Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum explicitly command.

Dei Verbum §8 settles the matter: “The tradition which comes from the Apostles develops in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down.” Understanding how Scripture communicates—including the recognition of ancient literary genres and rhetorical conventions—is precisely the kind of growth §8 envisions.

7. Reading the hard passages today

None of this makes the hard passages easy. It is never going to be easy to read Deuteronomy 20 in Lent and hear the voice of the same God who on Good Friday commands us to love our enemies. But the Catholic tradition has equipped the reader with real tools, not rhetorical evasions.

The first tool is the doctrine of inerrancy held in its full conciliar form: Dei Verbum §11 teaches that Scripture teaches without error that truth which God wanted confided to the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. The salvific purpose clause specifies God’s reason for inspiring the text, not a limitation on its truthfulness.

The second is the recognition that inerrancy operates at the level of what the text asserts, which must be determined by attention to genre, culture, and literary convention. A hyperbolic conquest narrative asserts divine judgment; it does not assert a literal body count. A poetic imprecation asserts outrage at injustice and trust in God’s ultimate vindication; it does not assert a program of infanticide.

The third is the Thomistic metaphysics of divine sovereignty. God is lord of life and death. He can dispose of what is His. The question of whether a particular act described in Scripture is morally possible for God to have commanded is always answered in the affirmative at the metaphysical level. The question of whether He did command it in this specific case is always answered through genre, canon, and the whole of the tradition.

The fourth is the theology of progressive divine pedagogy. God works with Israel at the cultural and moral level they occupy and draws them progressively toward the fullness of revelation in Christ. Earlier stages of the pedagogy contain provisions and even commands that are superseded by later stages, not because the earlier stages were false but because they were incomplete (Dei Verbum §15).

The fifth is the patristic practice of spiritual reading. The fourfold sense—literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical—is not a pre-modern naïveté but a sophisticated hermeneutical practice commended by Dei Verbum §12, the Catechism §§115–119, and Verbum Domini §§37–38. Origen’s reading of Joshua as the soul’s warfare against sin is still a Catholic reading of Joshua.

And the sixth, which holds all the others together, is the cross. Verbum Domini §42 insists that the hard passages must be read “in the light of the Gospel and the new commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the paschal mystery.” The God who appears silent at Mount Moriah is the God who, on another mountain, did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all. The God who commanded the ḥērem is the God who on the cross absorbed into Himself all the violence the world could muster, and forgave it. The hard passages are not solved by being explained away. They are resolved by being read within the story that ends at Golgotha and continues in the Eucharist.

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Footnotes

1. 1. Matthew J. Ramage, Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). Ramage develops “Method C” as a synthesis of patristic-medieval and historical-critical exegesis, drawing on Benedict XVI’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture. It remains the single most important Catholic monograph on the hard passages of the Old Testament.

2. 2. On the drafting history of Dei Verbum §11, see Alois Grillmeier, “The Divine Inspiration and the Interpretation of Sacred Scripture,” in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3 (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 199–246, at 234–36. Grillmeier, who served as a peritus at the Council, documents the 184 written objections to the earlier veritatem salutarem formulation and Paul VI’s personal intervention to replace it with the adverbial purpose clause nostrae salutis causa. See also Brian W. Harrison, “The Truth and Salvific Purpose of Sacred Scripture According to Dei Verbum, Article 11,” Living Tradition 59 (July 1995).

3. 3. Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu (encyclical, 30 September 1943), §§3–4 (reaffirmation of unrestricted inerrancy), §§35–36 (literary genres), §37 (incarnational analogy). Acta Apostolicae Sedis 35 (1943): 297–325. English translation on the Vatican website.

4. 4. K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing, JSOT Supplement Series 98 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990). Younger’s semiotic analysis of Joshua 9–12 alongside Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian conquest accounts establishes the common “transmission code” of ancient Near Eastern conquest rhetoric.

5. 5. Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture: The Word That Comes from God and Speaks of God for the Salvation of the World (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014). Commissioned by Benedict XVI in response to Verbum Domini §19. Part 3 addresses problematic Old Testament texts directly.

6. 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 5, ad 2 (whether natural law can be changed); I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3 (whether the precepts of the Decalogue are dispensable). Aquinas argues that God, as author and lord of life, cannot “murder” what is already His, and that when Abraham consents to slay Isaac at God’s command, “he did not consent to murder, because his son was due to be slain by the command of God, Who is Lord of life and death.”

7. 7. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini (post-synodal apostolic exhortation, 30 September 2010), §§42–44. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 102 (2010): 681–787. §42 addresses the “dark passages” of the Old Testament directly, teaching that biblical revelation is “deeply rooted in history” and that God’s plan “is manifested progressively and accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance.”

8. 8. John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission (11 April 1997), §2. The Pope explicitly warned that “since the second century a.d., the Church has been faced with the temptation to separate the New Testament completely from the Old…. The Marcionite temptation is making its appearance again in our time.”

9. 9. Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (encyclical, 18 November 1893), §§18–21. Acta Sanctae Sedis 26 (1893–94): 269–292. The encyclical is the foundational modern papal statement on inerrancy. §20 is the most forceful statement: inspiration “is essentially incompatible with error”; §18 introduces the “appearance” principle for phenomenological descriptions of nature.

10. 10. Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus (encyclical, 15 September 1920), §§19–22. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 12 (1920): 385–422. Issued for the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of Jerome’s death and directed against Modernist attempts to restrict inerrancy to “religious” matters.

11. 11. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum (18 November 1965), §11. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 58 (1966): 817–836. English translation: Austin Flannery, O.P., ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, new rev. ed. (Northport, NY: Costello, 1998). Footnote 5 of the paragraph cites Augustine, Aquinas, Trent, Providentissimus Deus, and Divino Afflante Spiritu.

12. 12. Augustin Bea, The Word of God and Mankind (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1967). Bea, the principal drafter of Dei Verbum, explicitly clarified that the phrase nostrae salutis causa “explains God’s purpose in causing the scriptures to be written, and not the nature of the truth enshrined therein.”

13. 13. Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), 8–9. Brown states the limited-inerrancy position with characteristic clarity: “In the last hundred years we have moved from an understanding wherein inspiration guaranteed that the Bible was totally inerrant to an understanding wherein inerrancy is limited.” See also idem, The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), esp. 18–22.

14. 14. Brian W. Harrison, “The Truth and Salvific Purpose of Sacred Scripture According to Dei Verbum, Article 11,” Living Tradition 59 (July 1995). Harrison’s article is the most detailed defense of the full-inerrancy reading, drawing particular attention to footnote 5 of Dei Verbum §11 and to the CDF’s 1998 Doctrinal Commentary on the Professio Fidei.

15. 15. Scott W. Hahn, “For the Sake of Our Salvation: The Truth and Humility of God’s Word,” in Scott W. Hahn, ed., Letter & Spirit, vol. 6: For the Sake of Our Salvation (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2010), 21–45. Hahn’s Latin-grammatical argument that nostrae salutis causa is an adverbial purpose clause modifying consignari voluit (and thus identifying God’s purpose in inspiring Scripture rather than restricting the scope of its truthfulness) is the most developed recent statement of the full-inerrancy position.

16. 16. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei (29 June 1998), §11. The CDF lists “the absence of error in the inspired sacred texts”—without qualification—as an example of a divinely revealed truth to be held with the assent of faith.

17. 17. Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (15 April 1993), with a preface by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The document endorses the historical-critical method as “indispensable” while insisting it is insufficient alone; it commends a plurality of complementary approaches including rhetorical, narrative, and canonical analysis. Section I.F contains the famous warning against fundamentalism.

18. 18. Matthew J. Ramage, “Violence Is Incompatible with the Nature of God: Benedict, Aquinas, and Method C Exegesis of the ‘Dark’ Passages of the Bible,” Nova et Vetera (English edition) 13.1 (2015): 273–300.

19. 19. Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979); and idem, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). Childs’s “canonical approach” reads the final form of the biblical text as theologically normative, a method that has deeply influenced Catholic ressourcement exegesis.

20. 20. Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), foreword, xi–xxiv. Ratzinger credits Childs by name for developing canonical exegesis and insists that “the historical-critical method remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work” because “it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events.”

21. 21. Francis Martin, Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2006).

22. 22. Scott W. Hahn, ed., Letter & Spirit, vol. 6: For the Sake of Our Salvation: The Truth and Humility of God’s Word (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2010). The volume collects essays by Hahn, Brant Pitre, Benedict Thomas Viviano, and others developing the full-inerrancy reading and the canonical-covenantal approach.

23. 23. Scott W. Hahn, ed., Catholic Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 2009), s.v. “Inerrancy,” 389–92.

24. 24. Origen, De Principiis IV.2.9 (Koetschau numbering; = IV.1.15 in Rufinus/ANF). Critical Greek text: Paul Koetschau, ed., Origenes Werke, Fünfter Band: De Principiis, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller 22 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913). Recent critical edition with English translation: John Behr, Origen: On First Principles, 2 vols., Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

25. 25. Origen, Homilies on Joshua. Critical Latin text and French translation: Annie Jaubert, ed., Origène: Homélies sur Josué, Sources Chrétiennes 71 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960). English translation: Barbara J. Bruce, trans., Origen: Homilies on Joshua, Fathers of the Church 105 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002). In Homily 15.7, Origen writes that “our Lord Jesus truly took possession of all the earth”—identifying Joshua typologically with Christ and reading the conquest as the spiritual warfare of the soul against sin.

26. 26. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses II.89–95, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). Critical Greek text: Herbert Musurillo, ed., Gregorii Nysseni Opera VII/1 (Leiden: Brill, 1964).

27. 27. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, 3 vols., trans. Mark Sebanc (vol. 1) and E. M. Macierowski (vols. 2–3) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, 2000, 2009). Originally published as Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964). See also idem, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).

28. 28. John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).

29. 29. Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011).

30. 30. Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2014). Copan and Flannagan develop the thesis of “hagiographic hyperbole” (a term borrowed from Nicholas Wolterstorff) and marshal internal biblical evidence (Joshua 13:1; Judges 1–2; 1 Sam 27:8; 30:1; Esther) to show that the conquest was not a literal extermination.

31. 31. Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Levenson’s thesis that the ideology of child sacrifice was structurally embedded in Israelite religion, with the normative tradition substituting symbolic for literal sacrifice (Passover, redemption of the firstborn, ultimately the Eucharist), remains indispensable for any serious engagement with the child-sacrifice texts.

32. 32. Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, trans. Wulstan Hibberd (London: Burns & Oates, 1960). Originally published as Sacramentum Futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1950). The classic Catholic study of patristic typological reading of the Old Testament, with extensive treatment of the Aqedah.

33. 33. Institutio Generalis de Liturgia Horarum (General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours), promulgated 2 February 1971, §131. The Instruction records that “three psalms (58, 83, and 109) have been omitted from the psalter cycle because of their curses; in the same way, some verses have been omitted from certain psalms.” In total 122 verses were excised. The decision was taken by Paul VI over the objections of the Study Group and the Synod of Bishops.

34. 34. Erich Zenger, A God of Vengeance? Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996). Originally published as Ein Gott der Rache? Feindpsalmen verstehen (Freiburg: Herder, 1994).

35. 35. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, trans. James H. Burtness (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1970). Originally published as Das Gebetbuch der Bibel: Eine Einführung in die Psalmen (Bad Salzuflen: MBK-Verlag, 1940). Bonhoeffer’s thesis is that only Christ crucified can rightly pray the imprecatory psalms, and that the Christian prays them in and through Him.

36. 36. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), ch. 3, “The Cursings.”

37. 37. Scott W. Hahn and John Sietze Bergsma, “What Laws Were ‘Not Good’? A Canonical Approach to the Theological Problem of Ezekiel 20:25–26,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123.2 (2004): 201–218. Hahn and Bergsma argue on linguistic grounds (Ezekiel’s use of masculine plural חקים, “statutes,” characteristic of Deuteronomic usage) that Ezekiel is critiquing specific Deuteronomic legislation that, from his Priestly/Holiness Code standpoint, represented a divine concession to Israel’s moral hardness.

38. 38. Heath D. Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel, Explorations in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations 5 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017).

39. 39. Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis: The Heritage of Biblical Israel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 82–85. Sarna documents the numerological patterning in the patriarchal ages and places it within the broader ancient Near Eastern convention of stylized chronological numbers, comparing it with the Sumerian King List.

40. 40. For a full treatment of Judges 11 as a test case, see the companion post: Jephthah’s Vow: A Catholic Reading of Judges 11:29–40. The Catholic interpretive tradition, from Ambrose and Augustine through Aquinas and Cornelius a Lapide to the New American Bible and Roland de Vaux, reads the passage as describing an actual human sacrifice—and condemns the act as sinful. The text itself, read canonically, condemns what it reports.

41. 41. Paul Copan, Is God a Vindictive Bully? Reconciling Portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022); and William J. Webb and Gordon K. Oeste, Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? Wrestling with Troubling War Texts (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019). Both treatments handle 1 Samuel 15 and the Amalekite ḥērem within the broader framework of hyperbolic conquest rhetoric and progressive divine pedagogy.

42. 42. Raymond E. Brown, S.S., The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).

43. 43. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., Scripture: The Soul of Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994); and idem, The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method (New York: Paulist Press, 2008), 8.

44. 44. William G. Most, Free From All Error: Authorship, Inerrancy, Historicity of Scripture, Church Teaching, and Modern Scripture Scholars (Libertyville, IL: Franciscan Marytown Press, 1985), ch. 7. See also Brant Pitre, “The Mystery of God’s Word,” in Hahn, ed., Letter & Spirit 6 (2010): 47–66.

45. 45. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini §19. Benedict acknowledges “the need today for a fuller and more adequate study of these realities” of inspiration and truth. The 2008 Synod on the Word of God’s Proposition 12 had asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to “clarify the concepts of ‘inspiration’ and ‘truth’ in the Bible.” The requested clarification has not, as of this writing, been issued.

46. 46. Joseph Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” the 1988 Erasmus Lecture, in Richard J. Neuhaus, ed., Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 1–23. Reprinted in Joseph Ratzinger, God’s Word: Scripture–Tradition–Office, ed. Peter Hünermann and Thomas Söding, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 91–126. Ratzinger’s central thesis: “At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.”

47. 47. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924). English translation: Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1990).

48. 48. Christian Hofreiter, Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The most comprehensive recent survey of the full history of Christian interpretation of ḥērem from the Fathers through the present.