Yahweh originally was one God of many, "the God of the Jews", not the "God of the universe". He exists in time, he makes mistakes, has regrets, and changes his mind. For most of the Old Testament, Yahweh is not wise, moral, or omniscient. The Omni-God theology was developed a millenia or more later, and by then the texts were already fixed. So, from an Omni-God POV, there are a lot of passages of the OT that make no sense.

There ae a variety of ways that Christians can respond to this feature of OT writings. One of the things that philosophy of science has pointed out is that all claims are infinitely amendable. Biblical literalists can always find ways to explain away any apparent contradiction in this text. The Catholic Church tends to prefer to treat OT passages as containing "partial" truths, which reveal important aspects of our universe and God, and focus on those "truths" and accept that some aspects of those passages are "stories" not "truth". Some Christians considered the character of Yahweh, and of Jesus's God, to be different, and treated the two as two different beings. The holders of this last views were mostly murdered in a variety of religious pogroms by Catholics over the several millennia of Christianity. There are no doubt more ways for Christians to respond to the challenges of these passages than the three noted above.

Yahweh originally was one God of many, "the God of the Jews", not the "God of the universe". He exists in time, he makes mistakes, has regrets, and changes his mind. For most of the Old Testament, Yahweh is not wise, moral, or omniscient. The Omni-God theology was developed a millenia or more later, and by then the texts were already fixed. So, from an Omni-God POV, there are a lot of passages of the OT that make no sense.

Lucifer, in the OT, was also not the evil entity of the NT. Judaisim was strongly influenced by the Ditheism of Zoroastrianism in the period in between, and the NT Lucifer is a lot closer to a ditheism view of mortal moral combat, than the casual dialogs of the OT.

There ae a variety of ways that Christians can respond to this feature of OT writings. One of the things that philosophy of science has pointed out is that all claims are infinitely amendable. Biblical literalists can always find ways to explain away any apparent contradiction in this text. The Catholic Church tends to prefer to treat OT passages as containing "partial" truths, which reveal important aspects of our universe and God, and focus on those "truths" and accept that some aspects of those passages are "stories" not "truth". Some Christians considered the character of Yahweh, and of Jesus's God, to be different, and treated the two as two different beings. The holders of this last views were mostly murdered in a variety of religious pogroms by Catholics over the several millennia of Christianity. There are no doubt more ways for Christians to respond to the challenges of these passages than the three noted above.

The greater question of how Christianity can deal with the creation of morally flawed entities, is a lot easier with Lucifer than with humans, and life itself. Angels can be postulated to be given absolute free will, and a simple psychology with no moral predispositions, hence they could equally decide to be evil or good. The "free will" rationale about angels works, sort of. That demonics can tempt/influence us to be worse than we would in their absence -- which IS part of NT text -- is harder to justify with "free will".

HUMANS have complex psychology, and have predispositions, and our predispositions tend to make us selfish, and highly temptable. A creator God (assuming guided evolution) COULD have created us with much more moral predispositons, but did not. This is a problem for "free will" justifications for human evil in our world.

Even worse for the "free will" argument is the intrinsic nature of life, that life multiples to overpopulate any environment, creating scarcity, and resulting need to destruction of other life for any life to survive. Life is structured to suffer (scarcity) and be brutal and cruel. A creator God could have avoided scarcity, and brutality, with a better design of the world. Free will justifications don't help with this problem.

Yahweh originally was one God of many, "the God of the Jews", not the "God of the universe". He exists in time, he makes mistakes, has regrets, and changes his mind. For most of the Old Testament, Yahweh is not wise, moral, or omniscient. The Omni-God theology was developed a millenia or more later, and by then the texts were already fixed. So, from an Omni-God POV, there are a lot of passages of the OT that make no sense.

Yahweh originally was one God of many, "the God of the Jews", not the "God of the universe". He exists in time, he makes mistakes, has regrets, and changes his mind. For most of the Old Testament, Yahweh is not wise, moral, or omniscient. The Omni-God theology was developed a millenia or more later, and by then the texts were already fixed. So, from an Omni-God POV, there are a lot of passages of the OT that make no sense.

There ae a variety of ways that Christians can respond to this feature of OT writings. One of the things that philosophy of science has pointed out is that all claims are infinitely amendable. Biblical literalists can always find ways to explain away any apparent contradiction in this text. The Catholic Church tends to prefer to treat OT passages as containing "partial" truths, which reveal important aspects of our universe and God, and focus on those "truths" and accept that some aspects of those passages are "stories" not "truth". Some Christians considered the character of Yahweh, and of Jesus's God, to be different, and treated the two as two different beings. The holders of this last views were mostly murdered in a variety of religious pogroms by Catholics over the several millennia of Christianity. There are no doubt more ways for Christians to respond to the challenges of these passages than the three noted above.