To kill or not to kill.
General prohibitions on killing coexist with divine orders to execute people and destroy populations, including infants.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Foundational
- A central claim about origins, salvation, divine justice, or religious authority.
Protection of innocent people conflicts substantially with commands to kill infants, beyond the weaker ambiguity between killing and murder.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
God commands executions warfare and the killing of infants
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.