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Thanks to Fred Clark, I discovered a very interesting post about the Book of Joshua the other day. The post is about why is Israel encouraged to commit genocide on the peoples whose land they are taking.
I don’t fully agree with the blogger’s conclusion, but I liked how he came to it. But what I found more interesting was that this piece of Scripture dates from no further back than the 7th century BC – in other words, hundreds years after the events were purported to have happened. And it is likely that Joshua was edited by the Exiles to make the object lesson stronger. So it is a historical story and very unlikely to be an accurate telling of history.
I wish more Christians understood that.
The host of my Bible Study read the post (I made the mistake of encouraging him to follow me on Twitter) and commented about how he thought the conclusion was a bit forced. Said friend seems to know about the authorship of this book, but I can’t shake the feeling he still accepts the work as historically accurate. And it’s really difficult for me to not troll him about that.
I’m turning into the kind of person who gets annoyed at uncritical belief. :-/ I think my time in my Bible Study is numbered in weeks, not months.
Wade.
Well, you’ve summed up nicely why I don’t attend Bible studies. LOL! At the very beginning of my journey out of fundamentalism, I attended a Bible study on Revelation. I was glad to see that the leader didn’t seem to take everything quite as literally as some do, but I nearly bit my tongue in half trying to keep from saying what was really on my mind.
I’m struggling with how to take spiritual truth from the Bible while acknowledging it’s not historically accurate, especially when it comes to troubling passages. What sort of message am I supposed to take away from a horrific tale of deity-approved genocide? How am I supposed to respond to God punishing David with the death of his first son with Bathsheba? What am I to make of the various passages concerning women? None of the answers I’ve gotten have been satisfactory at all.
I hear you.
Part of my approach to what the takeaway is is to realize that most of the time, it’s a whole-book thing. (For a work like Joshua, the Exilic editor was clearly thinking in terms of what the whole work can teach.) The modern church likes to look at chapters and verses somewhat in isolation. This annoys me now like never before.
The other part of my approach is to remember that editors of the older works had their own agenda, too, which may or may not have been Godly. It’s fairly safe scholarship to see the OT “historical” books as edited to show monotheism in a favourable and desirable light. Unfortunately, churches don’t teach that these books were edited; they teach them as being historically accurate. The trouble with that is that Judaism only truly went monotheistic after the Jews were in Exile: and the monotheists desperately wanted to rewrite history…
I also struggle with inconsistent teachings. Currently, I distinguish between Yahweh before the Exile, Yahweh after the Return, Jesus and the Apostoles. But there are a lot of questions I haven’t found yet.
Wade.
Yes! There are so many layers of agenda-driven edits to the stories, that if we aren’t aware of it can lead us into our own personal spiritual self-genocide.
I don’t read the Bible anymore, but I think the best method of reading any religious text is simply taking the positive/helpful lessons you can from it and leaving all the rest. There’s just no reason in my mind to take all or even any of the stories literally or to try and compile all a books teachings into one, coherent theology of sorts. Not only that, but all those who have tried over the years haven’t been able to unanimously agree on what to take literally or what that one, coherent, unifying theology is…so even if it is divinely inspired or what have you, that’s apparently not the aim of the book.
Just my thoughts anyway.
AnonymousAMEN to what everybody has said so far! I haven’t read the Bible in a year and a half and its one of the best decisions I’ve ever made! Not saying there aren’t some good things in it, it’s just that I can’t read it without all the accompanying garbage I’ve heard preached about it for the last 50 years contaminating what I am trying to read.
Wade – You are right. Your Bible Study days will be over sooner than you thought they would be!
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