Do the Old and New Testaments Contradict?

Question 1015.

Biblical contradictions get raised in nearly every conversation I have with sceptical friends, and honestly, they deserve a serious answer rather than a defensive one. The Old Testament prescribes animal sacrifices, and the New Testament says Jesus has rendered such offerings obsolete. The Old Testament records God commanding the destruction of entire peoples, and the New Testament commands love of enemies. The Old Testament permits divorce in certain circumstances, and the New Testament tightens the standard considerably. If the same God inspired both Testaments, why do they so often appear to be in tension?

I want to work through this carefully, because most claimed biblical contradictions fall into categories that dissolve once you know what kind of question you are actually asking, and a few genuinely require sustained theological engagement rather than a quick answer.

Not All Tensions Are the Same Kind

Before addressing specific examples, it matters to recognise what kind of question is actually being asked. Apparent biblical contradictions fall into distinct categories, differences in covenantal arrangement, differences in what has been disclosed at different points in redemptive history, differences in administrative application across different peoples and periods, and genuine theological tensions that require careful, sustained engagement. Treating all of these as one undifferentiated problem produces confusion rather than clarity, and I think much popular scepticism about biblical contradictions actually trades on this confusion rather than resolving it.

Each apparent tension deserves the right diagnostic before anyone can responsibly claim it has been resolved, or conversely, that it proves the Bible unreliable. Lumping the sacrificial system together with, say, the conquest narratives, as though both were the same kind of difficulty requiring the same kind of answer, does justice to neither.

Covenantal Differences Are Not Contradictions

A substantial proportion of apparent biblical contradictions dissolve once the covenantal framework is understood properly. The sacrificial system, the dietary laws, the temple worship, the civil legislation given to Israel, all of these belonged to the Mosaic covenant, a specific arrangement between God and the nation of Israel at a particular point in redemptive history, serving particular purposes within that history rather than functioning as timeless moral law binding on every people in every age.

When Hebrews describes the Levitical priesthood as having become “obsolete,” Hebrews 8:13, this is not a retraction of something previously presented as permanent. Jeremiah 31:31-34, written within the Old Testament period itself, already announced that a new covenant was coming that would supersede the old one. The old covenant, in other words, carried its own expiry notice built into it from the start. Jesus does not abolish the law in Matthew 5:17. He fulfils it, and fulfilment is a different category from contradiction.

Progressive Revelation and Moral Development

A second category of apparent tension involves progressive revelation, the recognition that God did not disclose the whole of his moral and theological purpose all at once but unfolded it across redemptive history in a way suited to each period. The Old Testament’s regulation of divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1-4, for instance, is not God’s ideal endorsed without qualification. Jesus himself explains the reasoning in Matthew 19:8, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” The Mosaic provision regulated an already-existing practice to limit its damage, rather than establishing divorce as God’s original design, which Jesus then reasserts by pointing back to Genesis 2:24.

This pattern, God working within a people’s moral condition to move them progressively toward his fuller intention, appears repeatedly. It is not evidence of contradiction but of a God who deals patiently and pedagogically with people across the long history of redemption, rather than imposing the fullness of New Testament ethics on a nation only recently rescued from slavery in Egypt.

The Conquest Narratives Require Honest Engagement

The most difficult category, and the one I will not pretend dissolves as easily as the others, concerns the conquest narratives, where God commands the destruction of Canaanite peoples in books such as Joshua and Deuteronomy. This tension between Old Testament warfare and New Testament love of enemies deserves honest engagement rather than a quick harmonising move.

Several factors matter here, though none removes the moral weight of the question entirely. The conquest is presented as an act of specific, historically bounded judgement on particular nations whose wickedness had reached a defined point, Genesis 15:16 speaks of the iniquity of the Amorites not yet being “complete” at the time of Abraham, implying a period of patience before judgement fell. The conquest is also bound to Israel’s unique role as the nation through whom the Messiah would come, protecting that redemptive line from corruption by surrounding idolatry, rather than establishing a general pattern for how God’s people should treat their enemies in every age. And the New Testament’s ethic of love for enemies belongs to the church age, a different dispensation with a different relationship between God’s people and surrounding nations than existed under the Mosaic covenant and the conquest of Canaan.

I hold these explanations with genuine conviction, but I will not claim they remove every trace of moral difficulty a thoughtful reader feels. What I resist is the move from “this is morally difficult” to “this proves the Bible contradicts itself,” since difficulty and contradiction are not the same category, and Scripture nowhere pretends the conquest was easy or comfortable even for those who carried it out.

Administrative Differences Across Different Peoples

A further category concerns commands given to different peoples for different purposes. Old Testament dietary law applied specifically to Israel as a marker of covenant identity, distinguishing them from surrounding nations, Leviticus 20:24-26 states this purpose explicitly. When Acts 10 records Peter’s vision releasing these food laws, this is not God contradicting himself but God signalling, through Peter, that the Gentile mission had begun and the ceremonial markers distinguishing Israel from the nations were being set aside as the gospel went out to all peoples, exactly as the New Covenant anticipated in Jeremiah 31.

Similarly, civil penalties prescribed for Israel as a theocratic nation under the Mosaic covenant were never intended as universal moral law binding on every nation or applicable to the church, which operates under a different covenant altogether. Confusing Israel’s national law code with universal ethics produces apparent contradictions that a correct dispensational reading resolves without strain.

Why Lists of Biblical Contradictions Mislead

Sceptical websites and popular books often present long catalogues of alleged biblical contradictions, sometimes running to hundreds of entries, and the sheer volume can feel intimidating before you have examined a single one closely. It is worth knowing how these lists are typically constructed, because the method itself explains much of the apparent force. Many entries simply juxtapose two verses from entirely different covenantal periods without any acknowledgement that redemptive history has moved on between them, precisely the error the covenantal category above corrects. Others treat figures of speech, poetic hyperbole or rounded numbers as though they were claims to scientific or statistical precision, a category error the literal-grammatical-historical method guards against by asking what kind of language a passage is actually using before judging whether it errs.

I do not say this to wave away every difficult case with a rhetorical flourish. Some genuinely require patient, verse-by-verse work, and a few, as I have said about the conquest narratives, remain morally weighty even after that work is done. But the experience of working through such lists systematically, which I have done more than once with sceptical friends sitting across the table from me, is that the great majority collapse under fairly ordinary interpretive discipline, and the honest sceptic who works through them case by case usually comes away more impressed by the Bible’s coherence than when he started, even if he does not yet believe.

Textual and Manuscript Considerations

A further category, distinct from theological or covenantal explanation, involves textual transmission itself. A small number of claimed biblical contradictions arise not from what the original authors wrote but from copying variants across the manuscript tradition, a subject I have written about at greater length in a separate article on textual criticism. The discipline of textual criticism exists precisely to identify and correct these copying variations, and the overwhelming manuscript evidence, more than five thousand eight hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts alone, allows scholars to reconstruct the original wording with a very high degree of confidence, resolving many surface-level tensions that would otherwise look like genuine contradictions.

It is also worth distinguishing textual questions from the deeper, more corrosive assumptions of higher criticism, which I address in a companion piece on higher criticism. Where textual criticism serves the text by recovering its original wording, higher criticism in its classical form often approaches supposed biblical contradictions with an antisupernatural bias already built into its method, assuming in advance that any claim to predictive prophecy or supernatural coherence must be a later editorial fiction. That assumption, not the evidence itself, generates a great many of the contradictions such scholarship claims to find.

What Genuine Contradiction Would Require

It is worth being precise about what would actually constitute a genuine biblical contradiction, as opposed to development, covenantal difference, or moral difficulty. A true contradiction requires the same statement, about the same subject, in the same sense, at the same time, being simultaneously affirmed and denied. Most claimed biblical contradictions fail this test the moment the categories above are applied, because the apparent tension involves different covenants, different periods, or different audiences rather than a single claim contradicting itself, which is exactly why patient categorisation resolves so many supposed biblical contradictions without requiring a single forced or implausible explanation.

None of this is special pleading invented to rescue an otherwise indefensible text against a growing pile of biblical contradictions. It reflects ordinary standards of historical and literary interpretation applied to any ancient document that develops across time and addresses different audiences for different purposes. We do not accuse a nation’s legal code of contradiction simply because its laws changed as circumstances changed, and Scripture, unfolding across fifteen centuries and multiple covenants, deserves at least the same interpretive charity, grounded of course in genuine historical and textual evidence rather than mere assumption.

The Language of Cherem

One further piece of vocabulary helps with the conquest narratives specifically. The Hebrew term often translated “devoted to destruction,” cherem, describes a specific, formal act of consecrating something entirely to God, whether for destruction or for exclusive use, rather than an ordinary word for warfare or ethnic hostility. Understanding cherem as a category of consecrated judgement, bound to the specific and unrepeated situation of Canaan’s occupation by peoples under divine sentence, rather than a general biblical endorsement of holy war, removes a good deal of the apparent tension between conquest texts and New Testament love of enemies. The term never becomes a standing command for the church, which operates under an entirely different covenant and a New Testament ethic that explicitly forbids exactly this kind of violence, Romans 12:19-21 and Matthew 5:44 could not be plainer on that point.

Readers wanting to trace the wider theological argument for why these commands were bound to Israel’s unique, unrepeated place in redemptive history, rather than functioning as general moral instruction, will find Ariel Ministries‘ dispensational material on Israel’s covenantal role a useful starting point, alongside the translation notes available through the NET Bible’s study notes on Joshua, which address the historical and covenantal context of the conquest narratives directly.

A Word About Honest Uncertainty

I want to close this section by saying something that may surprise readers expecting a tidy resolution to every difficulty. Not every uncomfortable feeling produced by reading the Old Testament’s harder passages, or by encountering fresh biblical contradictions in a sceptic’s list, needs to be argued away immediately. Scripture itself models lament and honest wrestling, the Psalms are full of it, and a faith that can only survive by explaining every difficulty into comfortable submission is more fragile than one that can sit with genuine tension while still trusting the character of the God who has proved himself faithful and good across the whole of redemptive history. Biblical contradictions, in the end, are far fewer and far less devastating than sceptical lists suggest, but the honesty with which Scripture itself records hard things, including Israel’s own failures and doubts, is part of what makes it trustworthy rather than a curated, sanitised text with something to hide.

Approaching a Specific Claimed Contradiction

It might help to walk through one further worked example, since abstract categories only carry a reader so far. Take the frequently cited tension between 2 Samuel 24:1, where “the anger of the LORD” incites David to take a census of Israel, and 1 Chronicles 21:1, where it is Satan who incites David to the same act. Sceptical lists routinely present this as one of the clearest biblical contradictions available, on the reasoning that God and Satan cannot both be the one who incites the same event. Read within its proper context, however, the tension reflects a genuinely biblical pattern found elsewhere in Scripture, where God’s own permission stands behind an evil agent’s direct instigation, Job 1:12 and 2:6 present exactly this structure, Satan acting, but only within bounds God permits for his own purposes. Chronicles supplies the proximate agent, Samuel supplies the ultimate context of divine judgement already provoked by Israel’s sin mentioned in the same chapter, 2 Samuel 24:1. Both statements can be true without either contradicting the other, once the distinction between primary and secondary causation is kept in view, a distinction ancient Hebrew narrative assumes far more comfortably than modern Western readers often do.

So, now what?

If a claimed biblical contradiction is troubling you, or a friend has raised one you cannot immediately answer, resist the temptation to either dismiss it too quickly or conclude too quickly that Scripture has failed. Ask what covenant is in view, what period of redemptive history the text addresses, and to whom the command was originally given. Most apparent biblical contradictions yield to careful reading along these lines, and the small number that remain genuinely difficult, the conquest narratives above all, deserve honest wrestling rather than either glib defence or hasty surrender. Scripture has stood up to this kind of scrutiny for a very long time, and it will bear yours as well.

For Further Study

Readers wanting a fuller treatment of covenantal reasoning and progressive revelation will find Charles Ryrie’s dispensational writing especially clarifying, alongside J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on the relationship between Old and New Testament ethics. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s treatment of Israel’s unique covenantal role addresses the conquest narratives directly, John Walvoord’s writing on dispensational distinctions clarifies the administrative differences discussed above, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s systematic theology situates these questions within the broader unity of Scripture. Millard Erickson offers a careful, evangelical engagement with the moral difficulties of the conquest that neither minimises nor abandons confidence in the text.

“Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Matthew 19:8, ESV