Stephen Young, “Donald Trump’s Violent Mentality is Quite Literally Biblical” (2.23.26), religiondispatches.org. Accessed 2.24.26.
The Bible gets even darker in its norms for warfare. Deuteronomy’s law code tolerates one exception to the genocide of the conquered: if the vanquished are from a city outside of the promised land, then the women and children can be spared … for enslaving! Several paragraphs later Deuteronomy even clarifies that these surviving young foreign women get to become the “wives” of their conquerors. In other words, as the biblical scholar Mónica Rey explains, they’re subjected to genocidal rape. A later text further normalizes the fantasy of sexually assaulting vanquished young virgins by putting it into Moses’s mouth as a command from God.
Decades ago the womanist Hebrew Bible scholar Renita Weems showed in sophisticated detail that prophetic texts in the Bible imagine God punishing via sexual violence. For example, in Ezekiel God punishes Israel by arranging for her to be gang-raped. God himself is even the violent and degrading sexual assailant in passages from Jeremiah, Nahum, and Hosea.
The earliest writers about Jesus did not “upend,” to use Leighton Woodhouse’s term, these sexually violent values. The culminating book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, personifies God’s final enemy as a “whore” for whom he arranges a vicious sexual-assault. She is then devoured and burned. In an earlier passage of Revelation, as numerous scholars have argued, the Son of God even punishes “Jezebel” by raping her (see Sarah Emanuel’s powerful reading).
The Amateur Exegete 
An interesting (and brutally honest) take on disturbing biblical passages.
While some people have tried to downplay the sexual violence in the Bible or insisted that the practices of the surroundings nations had little impact on the ancient Hebrews (other than as encouraging deviation from the “pure” righteous laws given to their forefathers), a thorough look at the actual verses tells a very different story.
(On a side note, there was also a recent comment by someone on Paul’s NIV mistranslations page regarding the possibility that the “Song of Deborah” in Judges contains a reference to gang-rape by the victorious soldiers.)
That being said, I tend to subscribe to the idea that the original conception of “Yahweh”/”El” (at least among the earliest Israelites) was similar to that of male Near-Eastern deities in general: capricious, needing appeasement, and prone to wrath: so their understanding of him fits right in with the whole cultural milieu rather than being a uniquely violent aberration. You could even find similarities to how the ancient Greeks thought of Zeus (i.e. capricious storm deity demanding justice).
When you get to the New Testament, it’s hard to say whether the relative scarcity of violent passages is really due to the fact that the majority of early Christians were neither soldiers nor in positions of political authority.
The one significant fault (pertaining sexual violence) that I note in the teachings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels has to do with the implications of his command not to divorce one’s spouse.
Even if Mark’s version were original, he denies what would probably be the best way for a woman to get away from an abusive husband: leaving him or demanding that he leave her.
There’s also the problem that the whole “turn the other cheek” command seems to encourage victims to suffer “for the sake of righteousness,” no matter how threatening the assailant.
He could’ve at least allowed them to escape or get away from the situation. But he seems to have let his apocalyptic worldview get the best of him….
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