Is it wrong to lie?

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.

The biblical prohibition of lying is broad and emphatic. The Decalogue forbids false witness (Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 5:20); the Covenant Code bans the false report (Exodus 23:1) and commands distance from "a false matter" (Exodus 23:7); the Holiness Code forbids deceiving one another (Leviticus 19:11); Proverbs calls lying lips "an abomination to the LORD" (12:22); and Revelation twice consigns liars to exclusion and the lake of fire (21:8, 27). Against this stands Exodus 1:18-20, where the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah deceive Pharaoh about why the male infants survive — a fabricated claim that the Hebrew women deliver before the midwives arrive — and the narrator states that "God dealt well with the midwives" and "made them houses" (1:21). The deception is not merely tolerated; it is rewarded.

The pattern recurs and intensifies. Rahab lies to the king of Jericho's men about the Israelite spies (Joshua 2:4-6) and is rewarded with the survival of her household, incorporation into Israel, and — in the New Testament's reckoning — a place in Jesus' genealogy (Matthew 1:5). James 2:25 explicitly cites Rahab as "justified by works" for receiving the messengers and sending them out another way, treating her deceptive protection of the spies as exemplary righteousness. Hebrews 11:31 likewise commends her by faith. So the canon both anathematizes lying in its legal/wisdom/apocalyptic registers and praises particular lies as faithful and rewarded in its narrative registers.

The most serious harmonization is the ethical framework of "graded absolutism," developed by Norman Geisler and echoed by Paul Copan and Walter Kaiser. On this model, moral obligations are genuinely absolute but hierarchically ordered; when two collide irresolvably — here, the duty not to deceive versus the higher duty to protect innocent life — one is not culpable for the unavoidable breach of the lesser duty while obeying the greater. The midwives and Rahab thus do no wrong, because preserving life outranks truthful speech to a murderer. As a philosophical account of tragic moral conflict, this is coherent and has a long pedigree.

The trouble is the fit between framework and text. Exodus 1:20-21 does not say God *excused* the midwives' lie or *forgave* it as a regrettable necessity; it says God *blessed* them and built them households — language of positive reward attached to the conduct as a whole. James 2:25 does not praise Rahab *despite* her deception but folds the deception into her commended "works." The texts thus appear to treat these falsehoods as outright good, not as forgiven lesser-evils. Meanwhile Proverbs and Revelation pronounce on lying categorically, with no built-in hierarchy of exceptions. Dale Allison's study of early Jewish and Christian moral imagination shows that the corpus never internally articulates the graded hierarchy that would reconcile these stances; John Collins's survey of the Hebrew Bible similarly notes that its ethics are plural, arising from distinct traditions with distinct concerns. The absolutist strand (Holiness Code, prophetic and wisdom literature, Revelation) and the situational/consequentialist strand (the deliverance narratives) coexist without a unifying meta-rule supplied by the texts themselves.

Graded absolutism, then, is a later philosophical scaffold imposed *onto* the corpus to reconcile what the corpus presents without reconciliation. It may well be the most defensible ethic; it is not the ethic the biblical writers state. The honest description is that different biblical traditions answer "is it wrong to lie?" differently — categorically yes in law and wisdom, situationally no in the rescue narratives — and that the framework which harmonizes them is extra-biblical.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine inner-canonical ethical tension; graded absolutism reconciles it only by importing a hierarchy the texts never state.