Isaiah 45:7, Lamentations 3:38, Amos 3:6, and a stack of prophetic passages including Jeremiah 4:6, 18:11 and 2 Kings 6:33 explicitly attribute the creation or bringing of evil to Yahweh. Psalm 5:4 says God has no pleasure in wickedness and evil does not dwell with him; 1 John 4:8 says God is love. The Hebrew Bible's prophetic frame and the moral attributes ascribed to God in later texts pull in opposite directions.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
10therefore, behold, I will bring evil on the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam everyone who urinates on a wall, he who is shut up and he who is left at large in Israel, and will utterly sweep away the house of Jeroboam, as a man sweeps away dung, until it is all gone.
33While he was still talking with them, behold, the messenger came down to him. Then he said, “Behold, this evil is from Yahweh. Why should I wait for Yahweh any longer?”
11“Now therefore, speak to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Yahweh says: “Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a plan against you. Everyone return from his evil way now, and amend your ways and your doings.” ’
10But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job didn’t sin with his lips.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Isaiah 45:7 is the sharpest formulation: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil [Hebrew *ra'*]: I the LORD do all these things." Amos 3:6 presses the same logic in rhetorical form: "Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?" These are not stray verses but expressions of a coherent prophetic theology in which Yahweh is the unrivaled source of both weal and woe. Lamentations 3:38 ("Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?"), Jeremiah 4:6, 18:11, 2 Kings 6:33, and 1 Kings 14:10 all attribute disaster directly to Yahweh's agency. Against this stands Psalm 5:4 ("thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee") and 1 John 4:8 ("God is love").
The harmonization turns on Hebrew lexicography, and on this point it is genuinely strong. The noun *ra'* has a wide semantic range covering "calamity, disaster, misfortune" as well as "moral evil/wickedness." The decisive contextual clue is the antithetical structure of Isaiah 45:7: *shalom* ("peace, well-being, prosperity") is paired with *ra'*, and the pairing is parallel to light/darkness in the first colon. When *ra'* stands opposite *shalom* rather than opposite righteousness or goodness, the calamity sense is plainly in view — this is the language of providence over fortune and misfortune, not a divine confession of moral wickedness. Most modern translations register this: the RSV, NRSV, NIV, and ESV all render "woe," "disaster," or "calamity" rather than "evil." The KJV "evil" is an archaism that has misled English readers. The verse's setting reinforces the point: Isaiah 45 addresses Cyrus the Persian, and verse 7 functions as a polemic against Persian dualism (the cosmic Ahura Mazda / Angra Mainyu opposition of light and dark), insisting that one God controls both halves of every dichotomy. Goldingay and Payne in the ICC read it precisely as a monotheizing assertion against dualistic cosmology, not a statement about moral character. John Oswalt (NICOT) and Walter Kaiser (*Hard Sayings*) are therefore correct that Isaiah 45:7 concerns divinely ordained calamity, while Psalm 5:4 and 1 John 4:8 concern God's moral disposition. At the level of word-study, the apologetic case lands: the two statements need not collide.
The residual tension is real but lies a layer deeper, and it is theological rather than lexical. The prophetic texts do not merely assign Yahweh impersonal calamity; they assign him morally weighted actions — exterminating dynasties (1 Kings 14:10), commanding the destruction of cities and children, and, most pointedly, sending a "lying spirit" into the mouths of prophets to entice Ahab to his death (1 Kings 22:23). These behaviors sit uneasily with the moral framework that Psalm 5:4 and 1 John 4:8 articulate. The harmonization protects God from authoring *moral evil* by definition, but it does so partly by classifying whatever Yahweh does as non-evil by stipulation — a move that risks emptying the moral predicates of independent content.
Critical scholarship situates the data diachronically. Jon Levenson's *Creation and the Persistence of Evil* shows that the older Hebrew strata are untroubled attributing calamity to Yahweh because the later distinction between created (natural) evil and moral evil had not yet been theologically hardened. As Second Temple theology developed, responsibility for moral evil was increasingly displaced onto Satan, the *mastema* figure, demons, or human free will — a shift visible when one compares 2 Samuel 24:1 (Yahweh incites David to census) with the parallel 1 Chronicles 21:1 (Satan incites). The Johannine "God is love" belongs to the far end of that trajectory. So the texts cohere lexically but reflect different stages of theodicy: the prophets do not yet need to insulate Yahweh from disaster, while the later framework increasingly does.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated as a flat verbal contradiction (the *ra'* word-study dissolves the surface clash), but the underlying theological tension across canonical strata is genuine.
Sources for this reading
John Goldingay and David Payne, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40-55, Volume II (ICC; T&T Clark, 2007) pp. 21-25on the monotheizing reading of Isaiah 45:7Isaiah 45:7
John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-66 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1998) pp. 203-205on the calamity sense of ra'
Walter C. Kaiser et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (InterVarsity Press, 1996) pp. 304-306on Isaiah 45:7Isaiah 45:7
Shalom M. Paul, Amos: A Commentary on the Book of Amos (Hermeneia; Fortress Press, 1991) pp. 109-110on Amos 3:6Amos 3:6
Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. xvii-xxv, 47-77on canonical theodicy development
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Isaiah 45:7 is the sharpest formulation: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil [Hebrew *ra'*]: I the LORD do all these things." Amos 3:6 presses the same logic in rhetorical form: "Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?" These are not stray verses but expressions of a coherent prophetic theology in which Yahweh is the unrivaled source of both weal and woe. Lamentations 3:38 ("Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?"), Jeremiah 4:6, 18:11, 2 Kings 6:33, and 1 Kings 14:10 all attribute disaster directly to Yahweh's agency. Against this stands Psalm 5:4 ("thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee") and 1 John 4:8 ("God is love").
The harmonization turns on Hebrew lexicography, and on this point it is genuinely strong. The noun *ra'* has a wide semantic range covering "calamity, disaster, misfortune" as well as "moral evil/wickedness." The decisive contextual clue is the antithetical structure of Isaiah 45:7: *shalom* ("peace, well-being, prosperity") is paired with *ra'*, and the pairing is parallel to light/darkness in the first colon. When *ra'* stands opposite *shalom* rather than opposite righteousness or goodness, the calamity sense is plainly in view — this is the language of providence over fortune and misfortune, not a divine confession of moral wickedness. Most modern translations register this: the RSV, NRSV, NIV, and ESV all render "woe," "disaster," or "calamity" rather than "evil." The KJV "evil" is an archaism that has misled English readers. The verse's setting reinforces the point: Isaiah 45 addresses Cyrus the Persian, and verse 7 functions as a polemic against Persian dualism (the cosmic Ahura Mazda / Angra Mainyu opposition of light and dark), insisting that one God controls both halves of every dichotomy. Goldingay and Payne in the ICC read it precisely as a monotheizing assertion against dualistic cosmology, not a statement about moral character. John Oswalt (NICOT) and Walter Kaiser (*Hard Sayings*) are therefore correct that Isaiah 45:7 concerns divinely ordained calamity, while Psalm 5:4 and 1 John 4:8 concern God's moral disposition. At the level of word-study, the apologetic case lands: the two statements need not collide.
The residual tension is real but lies a layer deeper, and it is theological rather than lexical. The prophetic texts do not merely assign Yahweh impersonal calamity; they assign him morally weighted actions — exterminating dynasties (1 Kings 14:10), commanding the destruction of cities and children, and, most pointedly, sending a "lying spirit" into the mouths of prophets to entice Ahab to his death (1 Kings 22:23). These behaviors sit uneasily with the moral framework that Psalm 5:4 and 1 John 4:8 articulate. The harmonization protects God from authoring *moral evil* by definition, but it does so partly by classifying whatever Yahweh does as non-evil by stipulation — a move that risks emptying the moral predicates of independent content.
Critical scholarship situates the data diachronically. Jon Levenson's *Creation and the Persistence of Evil* shows that the older Hebrew strata are untroubled attributing calamity to Yahweh because the later distinction between created (natural) evil and moral evil had not yet been theologically hardened. As Second Temple theology developed, responsibility for moral evil was increasingly displaced onto Satan, the *mastema* figure, demons, or human free will — a shift visible when one compares 2 Samuel 24:1 (Yahweh incites David to census) with the parallel 1 Chronicles 21:1 (Satan incites). The Johannine "God is love" belongs to the far end of that trajectory. So the texts cohere lexically but reflect different stages of theodicy: the prophets do not yet need to insulate Yahweh from disaster, while the later framework increasingly does.
Where the critical reading lands: overstated as a flat verbal contradiction (the *ra'* word-study dissolves the surface clash), but the underlying theological tension across canonical strata is genuine.
Sources for this reading