Using a thorough and clearly canonical reading of the Old (and even New!) Testament, Fleischer can full-throated answer in the negative to each of those.
His chief argument in defense of God's character is the concept of "incremental revelation": That in order to best reveal God's Self (in the person of Jesus for the work of the Church), God incrementally revealed ethical expectations and character throughout the Old and New Testaments. It's not really a new idea, but it's an idea with which more fundamentalist modern readers will find difficult to swallow.
Not too far beneath the surface of Fleisher's hermeneutic, though, is a richly woven narrative theology. We distort the message of scripture, he contends, if we fail to read those scriptures in the socio-historical and literary contexts of the Ancient Near East and in the narrative arc of God's full revelation throughout the whole of scripture and supremely in the person of Jesus Christ. Just reading the Old Testament (or, as often happens, the conquest of Canaan and monarchy portions of the Old Testament) without considering the creation account, messages of the prophets and transformative teachings of Jesus provides a severely limited picture of who God is and how God expects humans to act.
The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence is a sweeping account, drawing on all the rich sources of Scripture. His exegetical work is balanced and fair and Fleischer doesn't shrink from asking difficult questions and proposing answers based on the text itself. While some of those answers skate around Marcionism only slightly (sometimes I think he even falls in!), this isn't a book that scholars will be able to discount on the question of the Old Testament canon's reflections on nonviolence for years to come.
I was even more heartened to see that Fleischer takes the New Atheism to task very directly. The New Testament amateur in me wishes Fleischer had taken the nonviolence of the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament into more account in his dealing with its Old Testament sources. Because in so doing, I think he would have had even more evidence with which to silence those New Atheist critics.
That said, I cannot too highly recommend The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence. It's an amazing book that will long become a standard on the ethical questions asked of Old Testament texts.
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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.