this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I do not accept the fundamentalists claim that the book was directly inspired by God himself - and many Christians would not agree with that fundamentalist claim either. Different books of the Bible were written by different authors with different purposes. This is a necessary jumping off point to do any critical analysis of it.
The entire point here is that it is stupid as an atheist to accept the fundamentalist’s argument, to treat the compilation of books like it is even supposed to be a unified Voice of God.
Notice how the compilers of the Genesis often included two versions of a story next to each other. Were Adam and Eve created at the same time, or was Eve made from Adam’s rib? How many of each animal did Noah bring on the Ark? These things contradict, because the compiler was trying to include all versions of the story available. I suspect a big purpose is to legitimize a unified political identity - that you have a merging of different groups, different tribes, and you don’t want to piss anyone off by leaving out their traditional story.
Then later, different authors are compiling stories of historic kings, and they include stories of behavior that was genocidal and awful. They throw in some justification, because at the time these books are serving as political history.
Then you have the “prophets” post Exile trying to cope, trying to understand what went wrong and coming up with different explanations.
By the time you get to the New Testament, you have a strong influence of Greek philosophy, and again, political tensions in relation to the Roman Empire.
Saying “the Bible condones genocide” is meaningless. Saying something like “the authors of Samuel condone genocide” is more accurate.
Thats interesting. The history does explain why it jumps around a lot.
My main thinking however is from the point of view that God intended to bring about his message to the world, whatever that would be. If the Bible is humanities' attempt at interpreting whatever that message is, we didn't appear to do a very good job at all. I understand and agree that there are many things to be learned from the Bible, but its only humans teaching other humans in my view.
Bible scholars who are aren’t apologists start from the baseline assumption that it is not divinely inspired. Academic biblical scholarship which comes out of most mainstream universities treats the books of the Bible as they were written by human hands without divine intervention. It’s not even about trying to get some sort of moral message - it’s about understanding the world that ancient Hebrews lived in and how it changed through different periods of time. Gods existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to the process of analyzing the historical text. A good scholar is looking for biases in what the human author wrote. This is going to be the case for anyone that isn’t at like Moody Bible college.