How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Investigation into a Surprisingly High Body Count

Whether or not we believe in any god, most of us here in the twenty-first century have the impression of divine rulers overlooking humanity with at least theoretical love and benevolence. They forgive us, they have plans for us, they never close a door without opening a window, and so on. But in the particular case of the Christian God, we’ve all heard that he both giveth and taketh away, even if we’ve never so much as opened the Bible, Old Testament or New. That line comes from the Book of Job, which belongs to the Old, a text whose depiction of God may surprise first-time readers — especially in his willingness to cause death, the subject of the Hochelaga video above on “God’s Biblical Kill Count.”

It turns out that, if you go through the King James Version and tally up every single person God kills on a spreadsheet (a task to which Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny is surely among the best-suited YouTubers), you end up with a high number at the bottom indeed. “Throughout the Old Testament, God is responsible for a whole slew of natural disasters,” he says, “from erasing life on Earth in a world-ending flood to unleashing devastating plagues of” — yes — “Biblical proportions.”

Concerned as it is with laying out God’s law, the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, spends a great deal of time explaining what happens to the violators of those laws. In one passage, 50,070 men are “pulverized for glimpsing inside the Ark of the Covenant,” and, in another, God sends an angel to “wipe out 185,000 soldiers in one night,” to name just two incidents.

Trelawny’s initial count of the deaths the Bible attributes to God comes to a precise-sounding 2,559,449. But that figure only includes instances in which the text specifies how many people died. Sometimes it doesn’t, which requires the conscientious biblical body-counter to rely on the best historical estimates of, for example, how many people an army or a city — entities the Old Testament God could annihilate with a flick of the wrist — comprised at the time, to say nothing of the Earth’s total population at the presumptive time of the Flood. Trelawny goes with 20 million, bringing the final count to 24,681,116, about the same as the entire population of Shanghai. It may seem ironic to draw a comparison with a city outside what we could call the Judeo-Christian world, but Chinese civilization has strict deities of its own. Run afoul of Leigong, for instance, and you could find yourself struck down by a bolt of lightning. But he’d surely have to get busy throwing a whole lot more of them before even hoping to approach the Lord’s record.

Related content:

A Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

Christianity Through Its Scriptures: A Free Course from Harvard University

74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

Alfred Hitchcock’s 50 Ways to Kill a Character

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.