Eran of Arcadia said:
The people who wrote the various books of the Bible (nobody wrote "the Bible") weren't idiots.
I beg to differ.
They were writing for their audiences, simple as that.
Most of whom were illiterate.
So take the writers of the first chapters of Genesis. What they did (I think) was take some of the creation and origin myths of the area, and, inspired by God, restated them in a form that would get certain moral messages across.
In other words, they made crap up as they went along, and being especially unimaginative, couldn't come up with a mythic cycle on their own, and so had to borrow Babylonian ones.
Or take, say, Micah. He made specific prophetic statements to the Israelites of his time. Some of what he had to say has meaning now, because he was inspired by God, but not all of it, so we can't rely on him (or anyone else) to come to the entire truth about God.
So the conquest of Samaria has relevance now? I guess I missed it. I also missed the failed prophecy (Micah 5:5-6) when the Israelites were rescued from the Assyrians. The kingdom of Israel was never rescued from the Assyrians. Samaria was conquered and the whole nation dispersed so that it no longer exists to even be rescued.
Take Ezekiel. On an earlier thread, some called him clearly insane because the imagery that he used makes no sense to 21st century Westerners. But we are only his secondary audience. What he did was give a series of moral messages using the imagery and cosmology of his time.
No, what I said was that the bizarre imagery that he describes sounds like the ravings of a schizophrenic. Schizophrenics tend to hallucinate bizarre and macabre images. Having heard it first hand many times, I have some perspective.
Take the writers of the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. They were writing the national history of the Israelites under the monarchy. As all ancient historians, and most modern national historians, do, they wanted to paint themselves in a good light. Historiography wasn't a science back then. But nonetheless, they end up condemning a lot of their shared history because it fits with the moral message they want to get across.
Much of this "history" is in doubt. There's some archeological evidence that there may never have been a united Hebrew kingdom. Also, the books suggest that the Hebrews were a different nation from the Canaanites, when in fact, much evidence suggests they were one and the same, and simply adopted different religious practices.
So I think that there are many moral messages in the Bible, and many accounts that are true. There is no real "junk", but there are parts that are meaningless to us because they were not written for us. They were written by members of the same society that would read them, according to the best knowledge of the time.
Considering that some of these messages include stonings of adulterers and support for slavery, I'm unimpressed by the "moral" messages. What people fail to understand is that the morality observed today is vastly different from what was accepted in antiquity, and any similarities are more coincidental than anything else. The last thing that I would do is accept moral teaching from an illiterate lunatic than a modern sage.
Add to this the fact that much of this existed in oral form before it was written, and that it has undergone numerous translations and transcriptions while the nature and meaning of certain words has changed, and you can begin to see why the Bible doesn't seem to make sense.
Do you think there are no scholars of languages today that are so stupid as to fail to understand these ancient languages? I speak Latin, and believe me, it's not that difficult to grasp its context. And I'm no fabulous scholar.
The Old Testament, at least, wasn't written for Christians so it doesn't matter that Christians disagree over it. And it wasn't intended to be the literal all time truth. I think that a lot of the wise men who told myths (both in Israel and in all societies) at least had an idea that some of these myths didn't happen exactly as described, but what mattered was the message.
Yes, it was a moral lesson for people of its time, but that was thousands of years ago.
To make use of it now requires the guidance of the Holy Ghost, to understand what applies to us and what it means in modern terms. Additionally, we are dependant on more modern revelation that clearly applies to us and not to small pastoral communities 3000 years ago.
I'd rather rely on the scholarship of unbiased historians to determine the actual meaning, rather than apologetic priests with an agenda.
Some people ask Mormons why we believe in modern revelation, why we don't think that the Bible is enough. The answer is that we deserve God's words directly to us as much as we deserve to hear what He said a long time ago.
You also believe that a Jewish community existed in North America in antiquity. 'nuff said
