I am having trouble understanding the God found in Deuteronomy... technically in three parts.
a) Jehovah seems to hate anything that is associated with other religious beliefs and cultures, and seems to support cultural and tribal genocide in chapter 12
b) Jehovah in chapter 17 allows for the killing or stoning of those who have a different form of worship to the early Israelites
c) It seems that in chapter 21, Jehovah allows a man to possess a woman and humiliate her, as well as enjoy her as property. And if the man does not like her, he can send her away. I know well that a woman in the past could only live either as a prostitute, a widow, or a married woman
If anyone has any good commentaries on certain passages in this book found online, or any advice in approaching this book and reconciling that in a Judeo-Christian context, please feel free to do so!
Partly what Outhouse said above has some truth to it: those days were very different, and these commands reflect the need for early monolatrous/monotheistic Judaism to survive, and not be subsumed, conquered, and assimilated into the local cultures (all of which failed to survive). Although not mentioned above, it is worth noting that those of the idolaters who were willing to give up idolatrous ways and become part of our people were spared. Also spared were those who refused to give up idolatry, but were willing to remove outside the borders of the Land of Israel. Those who remained, and not only clung to the various immoral behaviors of idolatrous worship, but attempted to seduce Israelites into such behavior also-- those were whom we made war upon.
Secondly, we understand the commandments regarding the Canaanite wars of conquest to be taken literally only that one time in our history. While it is true that during the period of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, we fought a few wars for expansion or other political reasons, they were none of them commanded by God, but were entirely human affairs. Our Rabbis teach that the wars of conquest were wars of survival, which is why they were commanded to us; without them, the Jewish People could never really have come to be.
Third, it is worth remembering that this is the Ancient Near East of 3000 years ago we're talking about. To attempt to live by modern conceptions of interpersonal morality and cultural ethics in an age in which most of those ideas were utterly foreign would have been mass suicide, even if our ancestors could have been convinced such foreign ideas were right. We are taught by Our Rabbis that God understands that human beings and human societies move forward in small increments, and so what is presented in the Written Torah, when it is intended to be taken literally at all, represents, at the literal level, small steps forward in moral, ethical, and social progress. We were given the Oral Torah along with the Written Torah to ensure that even what was once intended to be taken at the literal level (which is a minority of the Torah) could be re-understood and re-interpreted at other levels as time went on, continuing to provide insight and valuable lessons in very different ways. So, for example, though we do not make war on idolaters any more, we still read these narratives as lessons about the importance of the continuity of the Jewish People, and about remaining faithful to the covenant.
On a brief, tangential note: the term "Jehovah" is a misnomer, resulting from errors in translation (first amongst the Romans, later among the Germans). The four-letter name of God, whose pronunciation has been lost for over 2000 years, was customarily voweled with the vowels for "Adonai," meaning "My Lord," the standard euphemistic title we say aloud when reading the tetragrammaton, as a reminder to say "Adonai" instead of trying to pronounce the four-letter name. Translators erroneously believed those vowels to be the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton, and so Latinized the name as "Iahouah," or "Iahoueh," later "Jehovah" or "Jahweh," in the German texts. The actual Hebrew name is a linguistic symbol of eternality, being the Hebrew verb "to be" in all three tenses simultaneously. But no one yet knows its correct pronunciation. "Jehovah" and "Yahweh" are just nonsense words.