foreign it's no secret that the god of the Bible has a darker side throughout the Old Testament God is responsible for a whole slew of natural disasters from a racing life on Earth in a world-ending flood to unleashing devastating plagues of biblical proportions like it or not God has a death toll question is has anyone gone through the Bible and counted it armed with a calculator a spreadsheet and a King James version I have done just that I want to figure out how many people in the Bible can missed God as a cause of death
turns out there is a precise number and it's in the millions it's a horrifying statistic especially compared with Satan who has a measly 10 but what does this mean what's the explanation behind this figure all this and more as we unravel God's biblical kill count our search begins in the Old Testament the section of the Bible that covers the history of Israel Within These Pages you're never too far away from a Biblical disaster like when God engulfed an entire city in Flames this violent depiction of God has always fascinated me it's so different to the
peaceful god of the New Testament I want to find an explanation for this Behavior one that's rooted in the history of this book but to know what we're dealing with we need some numbers how many people does God actually kill in the Bible so I opened up a copy and began counting it felt like going through a celebrity's Twitter feed and finding some unsavory things from the past but instead of old tweets it was the Old Testament here are some examples of what I found and fire came out from the Lord and consumed 250 men
then the Lord sent poisonous serpent among the people and they bit the people so that many Israelites died at midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I collected them into a single spreadsheet this vast document records God's biblical death count each entry has a brief description and a corresponding biblical verse I'm not the first to attempt this by the way I've relied at times on the work of Steve Wells an author whose book and website contain a meticulously thorough list in the Bible deaths caused by God fall into two
categories one with exact numbers and one without numbers at all I'll start my search in the parts where the Bible gives precise figures some of these biblical outbursts incur a very high death toll indeed like when 50 070 men are pulverized for glimpsing inside the Ark of the Covenant but that's nothing compared to the time when God sends an angel to wipe out 185 000 soldiers in one night it's nice to see a Bible accurate angel in this natural habitat other incidents are plain strange in one story a group of boys teased the prophet Elisha
for being bald they say and I'm directly quoting here go away bald head go away bald head upset by these hurtful comments the prophet calls upon God to teach the boys some manners suddenly a pack of bears appear to eat 42 of them I'm still not sure what the moral to this tale is don't tease bald people the numbers keep adding up and the total gets larger and larger if you add up all deaths that the Bible attributes to God you arrive at two million five hundred and fifty nine thousand four hundred and forty nine
two and a half million compare that with the ten deaths attributed to Satan an overwhelming majority comes from the Old Testament there are only four god-related deaths from the New Testament it's a big statistic for sure but we're not even close to the real figure so far we've only counted deaths where the Bible gives an exact number we haven't added up the parts where no number is given for example how many people is a city or an army a thousand ten thousand the best we can do is use historical estimates and rely on educated guesswork
adding them all up the number now jumps to four million 681 116. ouch but there's one more event we haven't yet factored in the great flood in the Book of Genesis the cataclysmic event where God decides to drown everything under water sparing Noah and his Arc full of animals using the internal dating of the Bible the year of the flood would have been 2 348 BC all we need to do now is figure out what Earth's human population would have been historical estimates range from 14 million to 27 million I'm going to settle somewhere in
the middle and say 20 million adding this to the count we arrive at the final number ready for it God's biblical kill count including the flood and other estimate is 24 681 116. this is an eye-watering number to put that into context that's approximately 34 hotalagas maybe subscriber count is not a helpful metric Gods Define death toll is a statistic that some would rather not know but again it's using data gathered from the Bible itself even if we remove the flood and the various estimations adding up the exact numbers the Bible gives us is still
in the millions so why is God's biblical kill count so high and what does this say about God this is a really difficult conundrum in the field of biblical studies it's also an uncomfortable truth that's kept religious thinkers occupied in fact this debate goes back to the dawn of Christianity itself in 144 A.D a Christian thinker called marcian had an idea what if there are two Gods a vengeful god of the Old Testament and a loving God of the New Testament marcianism as it came to be known was a popular theory in its day having
two Gods explained why there's such a discrepancy between the two opposite depictions of him but marcian and his two Gods theory was swiftly denounced as one of the very first Christian heresies his critics accused him of cherry picking you can't just remove the bits you don't like plus isn't there supposed to be one God like it or not the Old Testament God is here to stay so how else have people attempted to explain his death toll there are plenty of religious and Theological explanations for God's biblical kill count but I think the one rooted in
history is the most satisfying to understand God in the Old Testament you have to understand the world the Old Testament came from to the ancient Hebrews living in 500 BC God was depicted as a great king ruling creation from his Celestial throne in the sky now an ancient King does two things the first is to uphold the law the Old Testament is full of sacred rules there are 613 of them like don't worship false idols and keep the Sabbath day holy a lot of deaths in the Old Testament are because people break God's rules worshiping
a golden calf zap collecting wood on the Sabbath day zap opening the Ark of the cup Covenant Mega zap in every instance people are told not to but they do it anyway the death penalty may seem harsh but those are the rules disobey a Divine Law and expect a Divine punishment an eye for an eye as the biblical saying goes a saying incidentally that's been borrowed from King Hammurabi's Code a collection of Babylonian laws that predate the Bible considerably like any good Mesopotamian King the god of the Old Testament was a Divine rule maker judge
jury and executioner too but maintaining Law and Order is only half of a king's duties what else does an ancient ruler do he goes to war a large proportion of God's biblical deaths are connected to Warfare whether that be granting Israelites victory in battle or using super-powered angels to demolish enemy armies similar to the deities of neighboring societies the biblical God was viewed as the protector of a nation and so was often described as a warrior in fact one of the oldest bits in the Bible the song of Moses is a poem praising God's military
might the Lord is a warrior the Lord is his name Pharaoh's Chariot and his army he cast into the ocean his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea it's the closest thing you get to biblical Heavy Metal the writers behind the Old Testament wanted to describe God as a powerful king a king who upholds the law and ensures success on the battlefield it's a gruesome Affair but hey who said Being a king was easy compared with other ancient deities the biblical God is a pretty nice guy take the flood story at least God is
described as regretting his decision in another version of this ancient myth the Epic of atrohasis the reason why the gods drown humankind is for partying too loud centuries later when the New Testament writings came along Christian writers no longer used words like judge and Warrior to describe their God instead they used words like father now fathers don't execute their subordinates they forgive them which is why forgiveness and grace are such big themes in Christianity that's why God's biblical kill count feels so jarring this gigantic statistic is a hang up from the Old Testament these ancient
Hebrew writers pictured God in a very different way than we do today to them death was simply part and parcel of being a god combing through the Bible and calculating God's death toll culminates with a frightening number it can be quite hard to make sense of I'm not religious myself so I find Historical explanations like these the most helpful it's one of those head scratching questions that have kept people busy and probably will do for San centuries to come hey thanks for watching I had a great time making this and I hope you enjoyed it
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