Isaiah 45:7 ('I make peace, and create evil; I am the LORD, that doeth all these things'), 1 Samuel 16:14 ('an evil spirit from the LORD terrified him'), and Ezekiel 14:9 ('I the LORD have enticed that prophet, and I will... destroy him') — flagged in the source spreadsheet itself as 'God doing evil,' cited as proof God directly authors moral evil and deception, undermining both free will and divine goodness.

These three texts are not identical in force and deserve honest, differentiated treatment rather than one blanket explanation. Isaiah 45:7: Hebrew ra' has a broad range from 'moral evil/wickedness' to 'calamity/disaster/adversity.' The context is the Cyrus oracle (45:1-7), asserting YHWH's sole sovereignty against Persian/Zoroastrian-style dualism (a good power and an independent, co-eternal power of darkness/evil in tension). The parallel structure — 'form light / create darkness // make peace / create ra'' — pairs shalom ('well-being') with its opposite on the peace/calamity axis, not the virtue/vice axis, strongly favoring the calamity/adversity reading; most modern translations render it 'disaster' or 'woe' (NIV, ESV, NRSV), and this is the majority critical-scholarly reading (Blenkinsopp, Oswalt, Childs), not apologetic special pleading. 1 Samuel 16:14 is genuinely harder and deserves an honest concession: the 'evil/tormenting spirit from the LORD' resists being fully de-moralized as mere 'bad luck' language. The narrative context is God's judicial withdrawal of the Spirit that had empowered Saul's kingship (16:14a) after Saul's own repeated covenant disobedience (1 Sam 13, 15), followed by a tormenting spirit producing Saul's psychological unraveling. The Hebrew idiom attributes ultimate causality to God without our modern primary/secondary-cause distinction (the same idiom that says 'the LORD killed' for ordinary death), but the narrative logic is punitive/permissive — withdrawal of a good gift, filled with torment, in response to sin, structurally like Romans 1's 'God gave them over.' Ezekiel 14:9 sits inside a covenant-lawsuit oracle (14:1-11) against idolatrous elders who 'set up idols in their hearts' (vv.3-5) and THEN come to inquire of a prophet; the deception is judicial confirmation of an already self-deceived inquirer, not entrapment of an honest one — the identical pattern appears in 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11, where God sends 'a powerful delusion' specifically because people 'refused to love the truth.' Honest concession: even with this context, Hebrew narrative idiom's 'principle of ultimate causation' — attributing everything directly to YHWH without parsing levels of causality — does not resolve into a tidy modern distinction on its own terms; later systematic theology had to do real philosophical work to unpack it without either making God the author of sin (which historic Christian orthodoxy universally denies — Westminster Confession 3.1: 'neither is God the author of sin,' even in the strongest Reformed formulations) or evacuating these texts of their claim to comprehensive divine sovereignty. The classical tool for this is the PRIVATION THEORY OF EVIL (Augustine; systematized by Aquinas, ST I q.48-49): moral evil is not a positive substance God creates the way he creates light or matter, but a privation or corruption of a due good in an existing nature or act. God does not need to 'create' evil as a rival substance; he sustains the existence and causal powers of agents who freely turn those good powers toward disordered ends, and in the judicial-hardening texts, justly withdraws restraint from agents already so turned.

These very texts are aimed at ANE dualism — no independent evil power exists to blame calamity on; YHWH alone is sovereign even over judgment and life's adversarial experiences, which is a comfort (nothing is outside his care or ultimately purposeless) once 'evil' is correctly parsed as calamity in the primary text and as judicial/permissive in the harder ones. This is also the place for the full Thomistic synthesis: Aquinas's doctrine of primary and secondary causality (ST I q.83 on free will as a real appetitive power following intellectual judgment; ST I q.105 aa.4-5 on God's operation in all things) holds that God as First Cause does not act ALONGSIDE creaturely secondary causes, competing for the same causal 'room,' but WORKS THROUGH them as the ground of their very existence and powers, giving each secondary cause — including free rational choice — its own genuine, non-illusory mode of operation. Edward Feser's illustration (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide), developed further in Michael Dodds's work on Aquinas and divine action, is apt: an author's total authorship of a novel does not eliminate a character's in-story free choices — Hamlet's indecision is fully Shakespeare's authorial doing AND fully Hamlet's own trait at the level of the story, because authorial and in-story causation operate on different metaphysical levels, not the same competing plane. This is the historically dominant classical Christian account — a real compatibilism grounded in the Creator/creature distinction, categorically different from reductive secular physical determinism where all causes sit on the same competing physical plane.