Taking it in light of the commandments for peace, mercy, and justice

Read straight through, the Torah seems to speak in two voices. On one page there are battle lines, bans, bloodguilt, and capital crimes; on the next there is a call to love the stranger, to leave the corners of a field for the poor, to rest the land and the laborer, to rescue even an enemy’s animal. Many readers feel the whiplash. If the Torah commands mercy, why does it narrate—and sometimes legislate—violence? The tension is real, and it deserves an honest answer that neither sanitizes the hard passages nor ignores the ethical heart of the text.

The first step is to recognize the world Torah speaks into. Israel does not live in a vacuum; it is a tiny people pressed between empires in the ancient Near East. War is not an idea in that world; it is weather. The Torah addresses this reality rather than inventing it, and much of what appears to be endorsement is better read as regulation. Stories that report violence are not automatically moral approvals of it, and laws that touch violence often aim to limit, channel, and de-escalate it. The principle of “life for life, eye for eye” is a classic example: taken woodenly it sounds harsh, but in context it functions as a brake on spiraling clan vengeance. It demands proportion, not mutilation; it curbs the primal urge to repay injury with escalation.

Deuteronomy’s treatment of warfare reveals this limiting instinct in detail. Mobilization itself is narrowed: officers release the newly betrothed, the man who has just built a house or planted a vineyard, and even the one who is simply afraid. Fear is not shamed; it is acknowledged, and the fearful are sent home. Before attacking a distant city, Israel must offer terms of peace. Even the filth and fury of a campaign are hemmed by holiness—latrines are regulated, the camp’s boundaries guarded—because war does not suspend the presence of God. Siege conduct is constrained with a law so striking it feels modern: fruit trees are spared. The reason is theological as much as practical—“the tree of the field is man’s life”—and it smuggles reverence for creation into the very grammar of conflict. Even in one of the most troubling passages, the law concerning a captive woman refuses the brutal norm of rape. It imposes delay, mourning, marriage, and, if the union fails, forbids selling her. None of this is an ideal; all of it is a curb on a brutal world.

The hardest texts, of course, are the commands to place certain peoples under the ḥerem—the “ban”—and the call to blot out Amalek. These are not free-floating permissions for violence. They are framed as time-bound responses to existential threats and to cultures portrayed as predatory, devouring, and given to atrocities like child sacrifice. Ancient war writing also uses stylized hyperbole—“left no survivor,” “struck all”—as a way of claiming decisive victory; neighboring inscriptions do the same. Acknowledging that rhetoric does not dissolve the moral sting, but it does situate the language. Netzarim Judaism reads these passages as anchored in their moment, never as blank checks for later ages. They do not authorize conquest-as-policy. Whatever they meant then, they cannot be stretched into justification for cruelty now.

If these passages are the outer frame, the center of the canvas is unmistakably ethical. “You shall not murder.” “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” “Choose life.” “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” These are not marginal sentiments; they are the pulse. Their reach is practical and continuous. Fields are sown with generosity in mind, because gleanings belong to the poor. Scales must be honest, because commerce is a place where violence often hides behind contracts. Animals are protected from needless suffering; even an enemy’s donkey stumbling under a load is a summons to help. The Sabbath itself is a weekly renunciation of domination—over bodies, over time, over land. Every seventh year, debts are released and fields lie fallow, a slow, stubborn pedagogy that teaches communities to prefer sufficiency to grasping.

The narrative arc of the Tanakh pushes the same direction. The prophets do not romanticize the sword; they are its most relentless critics when it becomes an idol for kings and a revenue stream for elites. They thunder against militarism tied to injustice, because nothing makes war inevitable like a society that devours the poor. Their alternative is not naïveté; it is a hard-headed vision in which righteousness in courts and marketplaces becomes the groundwork for beating swords into plowshares. In this sense, the Torah’s “violent” material and its “merciful” commands are not equal partners. The former recognize the world as it is and set limits; the latter reveal where the covenant intends to take a people.

The legal architecture around bloodshed makes this trajectory more concrete. Bloodguilt is real and must be addressed, but the solution is not endless reciprocal killing. Cities of refuge interrupt the vengeance cycle by forcing due process when someone dies by another’s hand. Judges are warned about bribes and partiality because corrupted courts are themselves engines of violence. Witnesses must meet strict standards, and false testimony is punished as an assault on the community’s life. The figure of the king is ringed with limits: he must not multiply horses—read: chariots and military might—nor wives nor vast treasuries; he must keep a copy of the Torah and read it. The antidote to imperial swagger is not a heavier sword but a humbled ruler who remembers he is under law.

How then do we hold the tension without cheating either side? We begin by refusing two shortcuts. One shortcut baptizes ancient wars as timeless models and treats the exceptional as the norm; the other erases the difficult passages as if they were the unfortunate products of a less enlightened age. Both moves betray the text. The more faithful reading keeps context close. Many commands are situational; their thrust is to preserve a fragile people from annihilation and assimilation long enough to become a society where justice and compassion are possible. The same faithful reading takes the moral center seriously. When the Torah repeats a theme—from the treatment of the stranger to the sanctity of life—it is inviting a people to be formed by it.

A Netzarim approach adds a clear contemporary commitment. We will not weaponize conquest narratives for present-day aggression. We affirm the duty of self-defense and the protection of innocents, but we submit even that duty to principles drawn straight from the text: necessity, proportionality, discrimination between combatants and non-combatants, and a preference for peace when peace is genuinely possible. We treat “seek peace and pursue it” as more than poetry; it becomes policy, from how we speak about enemies to how we spend our money. If justice dries up in our courts and our markets, it will not matter what we say about peace; the seeds of conflict will already be in the ground.

This also means recovering the Torah’s everyday disciplines that disarm violence at its roots. Sabbath is not only personal rest; it is resistance to the economy’s demand that we squeeze every ounce from every field and every worker. The sabbatical and jubilee cycles do not ask whether extreme inequality might lead to unrest; they assume it and intervene. Honest weights and measures are not bookkeeping trivia; they are the way a society refuses to rob the poor by decimals. Care for animals and trees is not sentimentalism; it is a refusal to treat living things as mere fuel for human appetites, even—especially—when the drums of necessity are beating.

Finally, we tell the truth about idolatry and the image of God. The Torah’s sharpest violence is consistently tied to the worship of power, blood, and false gods that devour children. Mercy, by contrast, flows from the recognition that every human being bears tzelem Elohim, the image of God. This is not a metaphor for self-esteem; it is a claim that sets a ceiling on what we may do to one another, even in anger, even in fear, even in war. When violence breaks out, it is usually because someone has forgotten the image or because a community has become addicted to idols that promise security by sacrificing someone else.

So why is there so much war and violence in the Torah? Because there was so much war and violence in the world it addresses—and because the covenant refuses to pretend otherwise. The Torah answers with limits and law, with due process and restraint, with a thousand small commands that teach a people to prefer life: to feed the poor, to return the cloak by night, to stop the ox’s muzzle, to leave the tree standing. It also answers with a long horizon, a vision of shalom in which justice and mercy are not occasional graces but the ordinary air a society breathes. Our job is to live into that horizon—reading the hard texts honestly, obeying the merciful ones rigorously, and letting the whole of it train us to choose life, again and again, until swords become tools and enemies become neighbors.