The Bible underneath it
The Chosen and Everyone Else
No treaty, no mercy, no intermarriage, not even the tenth generation. Then Ruth broke the rule and became royalty.
The point in one sentence
The Torah’s treatment of outsiders runs from exclusion to extermination in God’s own voice, the New Testament pivots toward inclusion, and the honest reading has to hold both facts without letting either erase the other.
The laws of the border
The seven nations. Deuteronomy 7: "destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them." Deuteronomy 20 writes the two tiers into the rules of war: distant cities may surrender into forced labor; the nearby nations get "do not leave alive anything that breathes."
The assembly ban. Deuteronomy 23:3: "No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, not even in the tenth generation." Then the book of Ruth makes a Moabite the great-grandmother of David, the ancestor of the entire royal line and, through it, of Jesus. Either the ban meant less than it says, or the Bible’s greatest king was barred from his own assembly.
The purge of the wives. After the exile, Ezra 10 records a covenant "to send away all these women and their children," and the book closes on the list of men who did it. Nehemiah 13:25, in the reformer’s own proud first person: "I rebuked them and called curses down on them. I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair." Even conservative commentators decline to defend the beatings; note that fairly.
The exchange with the Canaanite woman. Matthew 15: Jesus first ignores her, says he was sent only to Israel, and answers her plea with "It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs." He then heals her daughter and praises her faith as great. The readings, that he was testing her, that the Greek diminutive softens "dogs," are genuinely argued and genuinely uncertain. Quote the whole exchange or none of it.
Concede the arc, because it is real
The believing answer is trajectory: Acts 10 ("God does not show favoritism") and Galatians 3:28 ("neither Jew nor Gentile") really do move where the Torah did not, and the conquest commands are tied by the text to Canaanite practices, not ancestry. Grant all of it. The remainder is the same one as everywhere else on this site: a moral trajectory that improves over centuries is what moral learning looks like. The question was whether the earliest layer, extermination orders included, came from a perfect being, and "it got better later" is not an answer to that question. It is an admission.
Genesis 9 curses Canaan, names no skin color, and says nothing about Africa. The racial reading was built centuries later to justify slavery, and it is the same misreading LDS leaders used for the priesthood ban. The racism in that verse belongs to its interpreters, and saying so is both true and more damning: see the Race and the Priesthood page.
Why this should make you question
Strip the theology and describe the content plainly: a tribal deity who assigns land by ancestry, bans exogamy, grades foreigners by distance, and orders the annihilation of the peoples next door is indistinguishable from the national gods of every neighboring kingdom, whose texts said the same things about their own enemies. The Bible’s later, better voices are the strongest evidence that its people outgrew that god. The claim that he never changed is the one the record will not support.