Can God do anything?

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: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

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.

Genesis 18:14 poses the rhetorical question "Is any thing too hard for the LORD?", expecting the answer no, and Jeremiah 32:17 restates it as doctrine: "there is nothing too hard for thee." Judges 1:19 reports that "the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." Set side by side, the second verse appears to make iron chariots a limit on divine power.

The harmonization at the level of grammar is genuinely strong and largely succeeds. The Hebrew of Judges 1:19 is ambiguous about the subject of the verb "could not dispossess" (lo' lehoriš). The sentence's grammatical subject is Judah, not the LORD: "the LORD was with Judah, and he [Judah] took possession of the hill country, for he could not dispossess the inhabitants of the valley." On the most natural reading, it is Judah who failed, and the clause "the LORD was with Judah" describes accompaniment, not a guarantee that every engagement would succeed. Archer and the standard conservative commentators press this point, and it is well taken: nothing in the syntax requires that Yahweh be the agent who "could not" prevail. Moreover, Genesis 18:14 is a rhetorical question in a specific context (the promise of Isaac), and its assertion of unlimited power is a homiletical flourish, not necessarily a metaphysical premise the Judges author consciously shares. On these grounds the two verses do not formally contradict, and the harmonization deserves to be counted successful at the level of the clause.

What the grammatical solution does not address is the narrative and theological pattern in which the verse sits. Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 7:17-24 promise that the LORD will dispossess the Canaanite nations entirely and explicitly tells Israel not to fear their superior numbers because God fights for them. Joshua 17:16-18 has the Josephites complain that the lowland Canaanites have "chariots of iron," and Joshua answers that they will nonetheless drive them out — making iron chariots the very obstacle the conquest theology insists will be overcome. Against that backdrop, the outcome reported in Judges 1:19 — failure precisely where iron chariots are present — matches what one would expect of a militarily limited, terrain-bound deity rather than the universal conqueror of the Deuteronomic promises. The tension is therefore not in the wording of the single clause but in the divergent portraits of Yahweh's reach across the strata.

This is where critical scholarship locates the real interest. Mark Smith and Baruch Halpern read such passages as residue of an earlier stage in Israelite religion, in which Yahweh functioned as a regional storm- and warrior-god whose effective power was bound up with particular terrain and circumstance, before the fully universalized monotheism articulated in exilic texts like Deutero-Isaiah ("I am the LORD, and there is none else," Isaiah 45). The frank admission that iron chariots checked the advance reflects the older, more parochial conception; the "nothing is too hard" rhetoric reflects the developed theology. Both sit in the canon.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable at the level of the clause (Hebrew subject-ambiguity; Gen 18:14 as rhetoric), genuinely tense at the level of theology, where the iron-chariot failure conflicts with the universal-conquest promises of Deuteronomy 7 and Joshua 17.