Deuteronomy 28:63 says the LORD will 'take delight' in bringing Israel to ruin and destruction, just as he delighted in prospering them — implying God derives sadistic pleasure from destroying his own people.

Deuteronomy 28 is structured as a covenant blessings-and-curses list, the standard closing element of ANE suzerain-vassal treaties (attested in the Hittite treaties and the Neo-Assyrian Esarhaddon Vassal Treaties, both studied extensively by Kenneth Kitchen and Peter Craigie as direct formal parallels to Deuteronomy's structure). Verse 63 is a deliberate rhetorical inversion: the blessing section (vv.1-14, esp. v.9, 'the LORD will take delight in prospering you') is mirrored, word for word in the Hebrew (*sus*, the same verb for 'delight/rejoice'), by the curse section to maximize the curse's rhetorical force through structural parallelism — this chiastic 'as... so' construction is a stock feature of ANE treaty-curse rhetoric emphasizing the certainty and completeness of judgment by inverting the blessing formula, not a literal psychological claim about God's emotional state (see Peter Craigie, *The Book of Deuteronomy*, NICOT; Jeffrey Tigay, JPS Deuteronomy commentary, both noting the deliberate chiastic inversion). More fundamentally, this connects to a real classical-theistic point about how to read all emotion-language applied to God (this text and the 'God changes his mind' cluster addressed elsewhere in this batch are the same underlying interpretive issue). Classical theism (Aquinas, ST I q.3 on divine simplicity, q.9-11 on immutability and the denial of literal passions in God) holds that God, as pure act with no potency, does not undergo literal changing emotional states the way creatures do; Scripture's emotion-language for God (delight, grief, anger, jealousy, regret) is *anthropopathic* — accommodated, analogical language describing, from the human narrative vantage, the fittingness and certainty of God's just action in response to creaturely conduct, not literal passions supervening on a mutable divine psyche. On this reading, 'the LORD will delight to destroy you' functions the way the human idiom 'justice will have its due' or 'the law does not spare the guilty' functions — a statement about the unwavering certainty and appropriateness of the consequence, expressed via the vivid, personal, covenantal idiom the whole passage is written in, not a claim that God experiences glee at human suffering the way a sadist would.

The doctrine of divine impassibility, properly understood (not as 'God is inert or indifferent' but as 'God's perfection is not subject to the fluctuation and passivity creaturely emotion involves'), actually protects the coherence of God's goodness against exactly this kind of objection: a God whose 'delight in destruction' were a literal, uncaused mood swing would indeed be morally troubling; a God whose unwavering, eternal commitment to justice is described anthropopathically through the vivid covenant-curse idiom of a treaty document is not.