Unscrolled Eikev: Why God Isn’t Nice

Growing up, I always heard the so-called “Old Testament God” (characterized as wrathful, vengeful and mean) contrasted with the so-called “New Testament God” (characterized as loving, forgiving and nice).

When I was older, I clocked this trope as antisemitic, but I never questioned the central premise of the idea, which is that God ought to be nice.

And yet it comes up again and again as we read the Torah week from week. My father, taken aback by God’s fiery temperament, shakes his head and says, “So this is what they mean when they talk about an Old Testament God.”

Indeed, throughout the Torah, God smites, condemns, knocks down buildings, floods the earth, and destroys entire cities. Considering all that, my father’s concerns aren’t so terribly hard to understand.

And yet I wonder, is niceness really what we’re looking for from our holy scriptures?

In Parashat Eikev, as the Israelites stand poised to inherit the promised land, God reiterates his love for them again and again.

“It was to your fathers that the LORD was drawn in His love for them, so that He chose you” (Deuteronomy 10:15).

Reading these beautiful passages, I could see the relief on my father’s face, wondering if perhaps the “angry Old Testament God” had given way to something softer in the book of Deuteronomy.

But these chapters also contain words of dire warning. Moses scolds the Israelites harshly for their past sins and stresses to them that if they stray from God in the promised land, they will be utterly destroyed—cast out and scattered or even obliterated by the anger of God as it blazes forth against them.

My father’s face fell—because no, it isn’t nice. And Moses doesn’t mince words.

If the Torah were merely a bedtime story, perhaps a nicer God would be more fitting—one more serene and simple, docile and domesticated. But it isn’t just a story. There’s a message being sent and the stakes of mishearing it are perilously high.

This isn’t a time or a place for niceness. What’s happening is real and it’s serious and the Israelites need to wake up to the profundity of the moment. God is giving them an opportunity to build a society of Torah, of holiness, of equality, of justice, of accord with nature, of accord between citizen and stranger.

And yes, there are consequences to failing in this mission. Those consequences sound harsh, but they are not the fanciful invention of Moses or the Biblical author. We can see what those consequences are when we look out our windows and when we read the paper: war and death, injustice and disease, a planet on fire.

So, no, the “Old Testament God” is not nice. But nor is He the violent banshee conjured up by problematic antisemitic comparisons with the so-called “New Testament God.”

So, no, the “Old Testament God” is not nice. But nor is He the violent banshee conjured up by problematic antisemitic comparisons with the so-called “New Testament God.” Indeed, the great revelation of Deuteronomy is that everything God does, God does in love. Even the actions for which the “Old Testament God” has received His reputation are acts of love.

We are told that God disciplines the Israelites “as a man disciplines his son” (Ibid 8:5). We learn that the hardships of the years in the wilderness were not harsh diktats from a cruel deity, but rather sober expressions of love from the living God in order to “learn what was in [the Israelites’] hearts” and ultimately to “benefit them in the end.”

So yes, God is loving, but He is not nice. I doubt we would want Him to be.

Nice is cheap. It is the smile of a salesman. It is the polite nod of someone who long ago stopped listening. It is the gracious gesture of one who doesn’t care.

By this point in the Torah, we should surely expect more of God than that.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.