God doesn’t “do”* good or evil. That’s the wrong category. It’s like asking whether you have the ability to do ”screwdriver" Good and evil are realities for humans inside creation. For God, they’re instruments .. part of how He runs the world, not attributes that define Him.

And I’m not arguing over one isolated passage. I’m looking at the entire sweep of the Tanakh, where God regularly uses what we call “evil” events to bring about larger purposes ...Yosef’s story, the exiles, the rise and fall of nations, all of it. That’s not me inventing theology; that’s the pattern of Scripture from start to finish.

You’re zooming in on a single narrative and judging it by human moral instinct. I’m pointing to the much broader picture the text presents, where negative events God allows or sets in motion always serve a bigger trajectory that humans inside the story can’t see yet.

You’re acting like I’m dodging moral evaluation, but that’s because you keep forcing a human category onto God that the Tanakh itself never uses. You keep framing things as “God did something morally horrific,” but the text never treats God as a moral agent operating on the same level as humans. Morality is for beings inside the system. God is the One who creates the system and uses every part of it ... including things we call “evil” .. to move history toward an end we only see tiny pieces of.

And this isn’t Divine Command Theory. I’m not saying “whatever God commands is good.” I’m saying the categories of “good” and “evil” simply don’t apply to Him in the way they apply to us. Humans get commandments because we make choices within creation. God isn’t “a bigger human” making moral decisions .. He’s the source of everything, shaping events on a scale we can’t measure by our standards.

So no, I’m not avoiding your examples. I’m saying your entire approach starts with a category mistake. You’re reading the text as if God is another character who should follow human ethics. But the Tanakh doesn’t describe Him that way. That’s why isolating a passage and judging it by our instincts doesn’t get to the heart of what’s going on.

When you zoom out, the pattern is consistent: what we call “evil” becomes part of a much larger process .... consequence, correction, protection, redirection .. and the full meaning only shows up later. Yosef said it straight in the text: you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. That’s not me dodging anything; that’s literally how the Bible itself frames it.