Well, yes...(and I`m just rambling here, I don`t have a habit of defending Yahweh, ha ha, but): Well, it depends on what your view on the Bible is. I too used to think that everything in the Bible had to be true (down to the very smallest detail), if not, it couldn`t be the word of God. So when the OT-passages say that "at ..this and that place, the Israelites slaughtered down ...so and so many thousands of ...moabitts or whatever, and then they went to lunch, cause it waseth just another dayeth at work saith the Lord your god"...then I would take that with a grain of salt. The people that wrote that, wanted to portray their tribe in as a heroic light as possible...while in fact, they were just a small tribe of pussys, who spent more time running from their enemies than actually fighting them. Thats my personal view on this, anyway, but I realize of course the "theological implications" of such a view, that it makes it impossible to say for sure what is the word of God, and what is the word of men. It`s just that with everything I`ve learned about the Bible on this forum, that judaism originally wasn`t monotheistic, that yhwh wasn`t the only God, and that he certainly wasn`t the creator of the world (in earlu judaism)- but just another son of the supreme God, El, when I learned that the OT-texts weren`t written by the people whose names they bear, but that they were written later, and that this is why the prophecies seemed to have been fulfilled, etc, then I just can`t read the Bible as Gods "literal words" anymore. On the other hand, not many christians really do read it that way, it`s primarily fundamentalists and all those adventist-sects (including the JWS) that do.
But I can`t defend Yahweh in any other way than this. When the OT speaks favorably about ethnic cleansing (at least this is what it looks like to us, reading it now), I too find that sick. But I think it might be a little different when reading the OT in its original language, than when we read these translations, at least this is what I`ve heard. Ask Moshe or Z about that.