Last week I made reference to an article by Denis Prager in which he claimed that you could predict where someone would stand on certain political issues by knowing whether or not they accepted the authority of the Torah. One of the issues he mentioned was “the willingness to label certain actions, regimes, even people ‘evil’.”  This was the one issue from his list on which he and I agreed.

But it is always good to check yourself when quoting the Bible.  If you are going to claim that the Bible supports your position, you better make absolutely sure that you know what the Bible says on that issue.  And if you are going to use the Bible to attack others the way Prager did, your responsibility to do so is even higher.  So, I went to see what the Torah had to say about evil people and evil nations.1   I am limiting myself to the Pentateuch because Prager makes his claim based on the Torah.

The word “evil” appears 30 times in the NIV translation of the Pentateuch.  Of these, not a single one refers to a person as evil.  Only once is a group referenced as evil, and that group is the people of Israel (Deut. 1:35) .  Nor are any nations or regimes called evil.  Instead, what the Torah labels as evil are actions and intentions.

In the rest of the OT, the story is pretty much the same.  The only place that a nation is called evil is in Jeremiah 8:3, where the nation is Judah.  People are called evil in a number of verses, usually in Wisdom Literature and in the Psalms.   But the vast majority of instances of the word evil refer to actions and intentions.

The Torah, therefore, does not support calling any people or nation evil except your own, and even in that case I would recommend not doing so unless you have divine revelation.  I am more than willing to call actions evil, but calling people evil seems to move into the realm of judging people.  It is God, not we, who will judge.

Prager may or may not be correct that someone’s position on calling people evil can be predicted by knowing that person’s position on the authority of the Torah, but the willingness to call people evil is not something people get from the Torah.


  1. I am writing this while I am on lunch break at work, so I don’t have a Hebrew Bible handy.  I am relying on on-line copies of the NIV. [back]
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