What God Is Like

The biblical texts describe God extensively — in the names applied to him, in explicit self-reports, in recorded conduct, in the shape of the law he gives, and in the New Testament's account of Jesus. That description is internally consistent enough to read as a portrait. What follows examines each category in turn, notes where the categories are stronger or weaker as evidence, and asks what the whole picture yields — including where it does not resolve.

One prior note on method. A common reading sets a merciful Jesus against a wrathful Old Testament God. That contrast is a selection problem, not a finding — it depends entirely on which texts you choose and which you set aside. The corrective is not to argue for a conclusion but to apply consistent selection: read the complete evidence on both sides, including the hard material in both Testaments, before drawing any portrait. The data is genuinely mixed in both directions; the mixing is itself part of what the study observes.

What the names carry

Names in the Hebrew Bible are not neutral labels. They are frequently loaded with meaning — given to mark an event, a character, a relationship, or a divine act. The names applied to God are no different, and English flattens most of them into "God" or "the LORD," which hides what the Hebrew text is saying.

The root word for deity — God / a god (אֵל | ʾēl | Heb - H410) — appears in compound El-titles that each describe a specific attribute. El Shaddai ("God Almighty") is the name given to the patriarchs before the personal name is disclosed, emphasizing power (Exodus 6:3). El Olam ("Everlasting God") names permanence (Genesis 21:33). Two others are worth noting for what they reveal about where the attention lands. El Roi — "the God who sees" — is not coined by a king or a patriarch. It comes from Hagar, an Egyptian slave-girl who has fled her mistress into the desert: "She named the LORD who spoke to her, 'You are El-roi'" (Genesis 16:13). The name records a divine encounter with a person who had no standing to request one. El Elohe Yisrael — "God, the God of Israel" — appears first in Genesis 33:20, where Jacob erects an altar after surviving his encounter with God, naming the deity who met him specifically as his. These are personal, relational names, not titles of distant sovereignty.

The personal name is a different word entirely: the LORD (יהוה | YHWH | Heb - H3068), the Tetragrammaton, printed in small capitals in English Bibles because it is the Name, not the word "lord." At the burning bush it is glossed as ʾehyeh ʾăšer ʾehyeh — "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). The gloss is followed immediately by action: "I have observed the misery of my people… I have heard their cry… I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them" (Exodus 3:7–8). Whatever the metaphysical content of "I AM WHO I AM," the narrative introduces it at a moment of intervention on behalf of slaves.

The title the LORD of hosts (יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת | YHWH ṣəbāʾôt | Heb - H6635) sounds military in English. The Hebrew ṣāḇāʾ is wider — any organized body deployed for a task: armies, but also the stars marshaled in the sky (Isaiah 40:26), the Levites at their assigned service (Numbers 4:3), and the full assembly of heaven (1 Kings 22:19; Psalm 103:21). The Greek Old Testament frequently renders it not "of armies" but "Almighty" or "Lord of the powers." The title marks jurisdiction over every marshaled force, not specifically a war identity. That distinction matters when reading the deeds sections below.

What he says of himself

Self-description is the weakest of the available evidence. Any character can describe himself well, and a self-portrait assembled by a community to honor its God would naturally trend positive. What keeps these texts from being simply flattery is narrower: some of them run against the grain of what a flattering self-portrait would say, and the rest of the canon appears to take one passage in particular as genuinely binding — quoting it back under crisis conditions rather than only in devotional contexts.

That passage is Exodus 34:6–7, delivered as God passes before Moses in the aftermath of the golden calf:

"The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty…"

Exodus 34:6–7 · NRSVue

The internal structure is notable. Four mercy-weighted clauses precede one justice clause; the proportion is 4:1. The word anchoring the mercy side is steadfast love (חֶסֶד | ḥesed | Heb - H2617) — covenant faithfulness, loyalty that keeps faith with those it has bound itself to. The fact that this passage is later quoted under pressure — by Joel anticipating disaster, by Jonah justifying his reluctance to prophesy, by Nehemiah confessing national sin, by the Psalms in both praise and lament (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalms 86:15; 103:8) — means it was received as a functional summary, not as ceremonial language. The closing phrase, "yet by no means clearing the guilty," is worth noting precisely because it does not fit the flattery pattern; a self-portrait optimized for approval would have stopped before it.

Two further self-descriptions pull in different directions and are both significant. "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe / calamity (רַע | raʿ | Heb - H7451); I the LORD do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). The Hebrew raʿ covers both moral evil and calamitous harm; here, paired opposite šālôm (well-being), it means disaster — flood, famine, military defeat — rather than wickedness. The claim is not that God is wicked but that he is sovereign over catastrophe, not a bystander to it. Against that, the stated preference: "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live" (Ezekiel 33:11). Unlimited sovereignty paired with an explicit preference against using it at its worst extreme.

There is also a set of self-imposed constraints: the covenant never to flood the world again, with the bow as a visible sign (Genesis 9:11–17); the stated patience with the Amorites while their "iniquity is not yet complete" (Genesis 15:16); the claim "I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6). Whether these constraints reflect genuine self-limitation or are narrative devices for other purposes is a question the text does not answer directly. What they describe, read at face value, is a powerful actor who voluntarily restricts the exercise of his power.

What he does

Conduct is stronger evidence than self-report, though this too comes from a corpus controlled by the same community. The question is whether the recorded behavior tracks the self-description, and whether the pattern holds across diverse materials and contexts rather than in selected showcase passages.

A recurring structure in the narrative is worth naming before moving to specifics. Before most major judgments in the text, a warning precedes them. More telling: the outcome consistently tracks the response to the warning. The cases where warning is heeded and judgment is averted are not exceptional; they are part of the established pattern. The table below draws on material from across the Old and New Testaments:

Recipient	Warning given	Response	Outcome
Nineveh (Jonah)	Prophet sent: "forty days more"	King and people repented	Spared (Jonah 3:10)
Abimelech	Warning in a dream	Heeded; returned Sarah	Spared and healed (Gen 20)
Nebuchadnezzar	Daniel's word + twelve months' grace	Ignored, then humbled himself	Judged, then restored (Dan 4)
Sodom	Angels warned Lot; Lot warned his sons-in-law	Sons-in-law laughed; Lot fled	Destroyed; Lot's household saved (Gen 19)
Belshazzar	Writing on the wall; Daniel's indictment	Ignored	Dead that same night (Dan 5)
Israel / Judah	Centuries of prophets, "sent persistently"	"Kept mocking… until there was no remedy"	Exiled — but a remnant preserved (2 Chron 36:15–16)
Rahab & the Gibeonites	YHWH's reputation; open door to turn	Heeded; sought shelter	Spared; brought into Israel (Josh 2; 6; 9)
Pharaoh / Egypt	Escalating plagues, each announced in advance	Hardened repeatedly; some Egyptians heeded (Exod 9:20)	Army struck; God-fearing Egyptians spared; Egypt persists; Isa 19:24–25 promises future blessing

The pattern the text asserts about itself is: "Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Whether that claim survives the ḥerem material is addressed below. Within the cases above, the discrimination is real — warning is given, response is tracked, outcome corresponds. That correspondence is the behavioral evidence that the warning is functional rather than decorative.

The intercession texts are related to the warning pattern and worth noting separately. Moses pleads and God changes course from the golden calf judgment (Exodus 32:14); the verb is to relent / be moved (נָחַם | nāḥam | Heb - H5162). Abraham negotiates with God over Sodom, and God accepts each reduction — from fifty righteous to ten — without resistance (Genesis 18:22–33). Jonah, of all people, is furious that God relented over Nineveh precisely because he knew the Exodus 34 character in advance and expected exactly this (Jonah 4:2). The book ends not with Jonah answering but with God's question still hanging over him:

"And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

Jonah 4:11 · NRSVue

Jonah does not answer. The book closes there.

The deeds include genuine judgment, and the record is not softened here: a world flooded, cities destroyed, Egypt struck, Israel exiled. The texts that frame those judgments are, however, worth reading carefully. The flood is introduced with grief — "it grieved him to his heart" (Genesis 6:6). Judgment is described elsewhere as God's "strange" and "alien" work (Isaiah 28:21) — a category reserved for acts that fall outside his characteristic mode. "He does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone" (Lamentations 3:33). These characterizations of judgment as reluctant and costly are themselves data, though they sit alongside the ḥerem texts, which do not carry that register.

What he requires

The law is an indirect source — it describes what God values as read off what he requires of others, not what he himself does. Its evidential weight lies in the difficulty of faking it: a lawgiver can compose flattering self-descriptions, but a codified legal system that consistently disadvantages the powerful and protects the vulnerable is harder to fake as a reputation exercise. What a legal order protects, when it could protect anything, is a relatively unguarded statement of values.

The Ten Commandments do not begin with obligation. They begin with a declaration: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exodus 20:2). The rescue precedes the requirement. The law is framed throughout as response to an already-given deliverance, not as its condition.

What the law then requires, with a repetition that accumulates across the corpus, is a consistent set of protected parties: the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the labourer, the debtor, the slave. The harvest margin left unharvested for the poor and the alien (Leviticus 19:9–10). The pledged cloak returned by nightfall because it may be the neighbor's only covering (Exodus 22:26). Wages paid the same day (Deuteronomy 24:14–15). No interest on loans to the poor (Exodus 22:25). Sabbath rest extended deliberately to those with the least power to claim it — sons, daughters, male and female slaves, livestock, and the resident alien (Exodus 20:10). A seventh year of debt cancellation; a fiftieth-year Jubilee returning sold land and freeing the indentured (Deuteronomy 15; Leviticus 25).

"You shall not oppress a resident alien… for you were aliens in the land of Egypt… you shall love the alien as yourself."

Leviticus 19:33–34 · NRSVue

The stated rationale matters. The reason given repeatedly for these protections is not utility but memory: you were slaves in Egypt. And the character grounding: "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). The law is not presented as an arbitrary code; it is explicitly grounded in the lawgiver's own character and in the community's experience of being on the receiving end of that character. The mercy experienced becomes the mercy required.

The New Testament data — complete, not sampled

The popular contrast between a wrathful Old Testament God and a gentle Jesus is one of the most common readings of the Bible, and it depends on incomplete selection from both sides. The formal version of this contrast — that the Hebrew Scriptures describe a different, lesser God than the one Jesus reveals — was proposed in the second century by Marcion of Sinope and rejected by the early church. The evidentiary reason for rejecting it is not primarily theological; it is that the contrast collapses when both sides are read in full.

What the complete New Testament data on Jesus actually shows is a character with the same profile as the Old Testament portrait — mercy-dominant, but with a genuine and consistent judgment register. He touches lepers (Mark 1:41), eats with tax collectors and sinners (Luke 15:1–2), stops for the hemorrhaging woman in a crowd (Mark 5:34), weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35), washes his disciples' feet (John 13:5), and says from the cross, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). The mercy material is extensive and consistent.

But the complete record also includes: a whip driven through the temple courts (John 2:15); a fig tree cursed and withered (Mark 11:14); the woes of Matthew 23 — "brood of vipers," "whitewashed tombs," "how can you escape being sentenced to Gehenna (γέεννα | geenna | Gk - G1067)?" (Matthew 23:33); judgment pronounced on entire cities (Matthew 11:20–24); the unforgivable sin (Matthew 12:31); judgment parables with "weeping and gnashing of teeth," "outer darkness," and "depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41). And after the resurrection, acting by the Spirit: Ananias and Sapphira struck dead (Acts 5), Saul blinded on the road (Acts 9), Herod struck down for accepting worship (Acts 12:23).

The symmetry is significant. From the same Gospels one could construct a wrathful Jesus. From the same Hebrew Scriptures one could construct a merciful God. The selection problem runs identically in both directions, which means neither the "gentle Jesus" nor the "harsh Old Testament God" is a finding from the data; both are artifacts of what was included. When the complete material is placed side by side, both figures show the same ratio: mercy-dominant, with a consistent and serious judgment register. Neither that ratio nor the specific shape of each figure's mercy and judgment is identical — Jesus's mercy and judgment have their own features — but the overall profile is the same.

The New Testament claims identity explicitly: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9); "the exact imprint of God's very being" (Hebrews 1:3); "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). These are strong claims, and they belong to the data rather than to the argument. Whether they are true is the larger question this study does not adjudicate. What they say, taken at face value, is that the New Testament understands itself to be describing the same character as the Old — focused now in a person, not diffused across a tradition.

What the portrait does not carry

The portrait described across the preceding sections is real — the evidence for it is substantial and comes from multiple categories. But it is not complete, and naming what it does not carry is part of honest work.

The commanded destruction of the Canaanites does not fit the pattern. "Now go and attack Amalek… do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" (1 Samuel 15:3). The same command, structurally, across Deuteronomy 20:16–18. No prophet is sent to the Canaanites as Jonah was sent to Nineveh. The children of Jericho received no warning addressed to them, no individual opportunity to respond, no door timed to their personal decision. They are ḥerem — devoted to destruction — by explicit divine command. The word covers a wide range of consecration practices in the ancient Near East, but at its most extreme it means total destruction, and that is the explicit content of these commands.

Some context is real and should be stated. The 400-year patience before the conquest is genuine: "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" (Genesis 15:16). YHWH's reputation reached Canaan before the armies did: Rahab testifies that "our hearts melted" at the report of what was done in Egypt (Joshua 2:9–11); the Gibeonites acted on the same news (Joshua 9:9–10). Those who turned — Rahab and her household, the Gibeonites — were spared (Joshua 6:25; 9). The Jericho seven-day march is interpretable as a drawn-out final notice. These are not nothing.

But they do not reach the children. The honest position is that the warning-and-response pattern, which holds across the rest of the evidence, is either absent or structurally insufficient in the ḥerem texts. That gap is not a minor textual wrinkle; it is the hardest single datum in the corpus for the portrait this study otherwise draws.

What the evidence establishes and doesn't

Across five categories — names, self-descriptions, conduct, law, and Jesus — a consistent character emerges. The names lean toward the relational and the attentive to the powerless. The self-descriptions claim mercy as the dominant mode and justice as the limiting condition, and the canon treats the Exodus 34 summary as genuinely binding rather than ceremonial. The behavioral record shows warning preceding judgment and outcome tracking response, along with genuine responsiveness to intercession and explicit grief at destruction. The law's weight falls consistently on protecting those with the least recourse. Jesus, read in full rather than sampled, shows the same profile — mercy-dominant, seriously demanding, carrying both grace and judgment.

That convergence across categories of different evidential weight is real. It is worth stating plainly, because it is not obvious — the biblical portrait of God is not uniformly flattering, does not suppress the accusations against him, and does not project a simple deity of either pure mercy or pure severity. The character that emerges from the complete evidence is specific and consistent.

What the convergence does not establish is equally worth stating.

The witnesses are one library. All five categories come from a single tradition. Their agreement is internal coherence, not independent corroboration. A skeptic is right to weigh that differently from convergence across independent sources. What can be said is that the tradition is not monolithic — it spans centuries, represents contested communities, and preserves protest and accusation alongside praise. Internal consistency across a contentious multi-author tradition is not the same as convergence from outside, but it is not nothing either.

The mercy-weight is partly a development within the canon. Hard deeds move off God's ledger over time: what 2 Samuel 24:1 attributes to the anger of the LORD, 1 Chronicles 21:1 reassigns to Satan. What was once "a harmful spirit from the LORD" becomes, in the New Testament, an unclean spirit that Jesus and the apostles cast out. The mercy-dominant portrait is partly the result of the tradition progressively reassigning its dark material to other agents. A portrait built on the earliest and most candid texts — which do not perform that reassignment — is on firmer ground than one built on the later, tidier versions, but the development is real and should not be concealed.

The ḥerem residue is not dissolved by the portrait. The evidence for the mercy-dominant character is substantial. The evidence that the commanded killing of children fits that character is not. Both facts stand, and the portrait carries the second one forward unresolved.

What the study yields, then, is a specific and consistent character drawn from a wide evidentiary base, with two honest limitations attached: the base is one tradition rather than independent sources, and the tradition contains at least one hard datum the portrait cannot absorb. The portrait is real and well-grounded. It is not complete.

Companion reading: Good, and Evil (the Hebrew range of raʿ — for the Isaiah 45:7 reading) · The LORD, the Gods, and the Satan (names and the divine council) · When God Relented (the nāḥam study) · Mercy That Overflows (Abraham's intercession and the overflow pattern).

Published June 2026  ·  Scripture: NRSVue