Monthly Archives: March 2011

Bible Interpretation, Difficult Bible Passages

Who Did Joshua Kill in Jericho?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many Christians, as they read the book of Joshua, are uncomfortable with the accounts of conquest that are recorded there.  The conquest of Jericho is the first in Canaan for the Israelites.  The biblical writer describes the battle of Jericho this way in Josh. 6:20-21:

When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.  They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

What causes many of us discomfort is the phrase “men and women, young and old.”  It seems that we must understand Joshua’s conquest of Jericho as a complete annihilation of a major population center, including non-combatants who are women, children and the elderly.

Christian scholar Paul Copan strongly disagrees with this understanding of the attack on Jericho in his book Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God.  Copan marshals a case to dispute the traditional view of Jericho being a major population center with loads of non-combatants living in it.

His argument rests on two primary points.  First, the language found in Josh. 6:21 should be understood as Near Eastern warfare rhetoric.  In other words, Joshua’s original audience would not have understood the sentence, “They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys” as literally meaning that.  Instead, they would have heard Joshua describing a decisive military victory.

Joshua’s conventional warfare rhetoric was common in many other ancient Near Eastern military accounts in the second and first millennia BC.  The language is typically exaggerated and full of bravado, depicting total devastation.  The knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized this as hyperbole; the accounts weren’t understood to be literally true.

Copan cites several examples of Near Eastern warfare accounts which used hyperbole to describe their victories, including accounts originating from Egyptians, Hittites, and Assyrians.  This historical data casts new light on how we should understand biblical warfare accounts, especially those recorded in Joshua.

Copan’s second point is that the city of Jericho is not a large population center containing numerous non-combatants which were killed in the assault.  According to Copan, the language used in Joshua 6 is “stereotypical Near Eastern language [which] actually describes attacks on military forts or garrisons, not general populations that included women and children.  There is no archaeological evidence of civilian populations at Jericho or Ai” (emphasis added).

Copan goes on to explain:

Given what we know about Canaanite life in the Bronze Age, Jericho and Ai were military strongholds.  In fact, Jericho guarded the trade routes from the Jordan Valley up to population centers in the hill country. . . . That means that Israel’s wars here were directed toward government and military installments; this is where the king, the army, and the priesthood resided.  The use of ‘women’ and ‘young and old’ was merely stock ancient Near Eastern language that could be used even if women and young and old weren’t living there. . . .  The text doesn’t require that women and young and old must have been in these cities.

If this is true, then what of Rahab?  According to Copan, “Rahab was in charge of what was likely the fortress’s tavern or hostel.”  Evidently it was common for a fortress to have a tavern where “traveling caravans and royal messengers would . . . stay overnight.”  Most of Jericho would have consisted of soldiers, priests, and political leaders.

Copan’s argument is compelling, as it cites ancient Near Eastern historical data to place in context what the original readers of Joshua’s book would have understood.  This is exactly what the historical-grammatical method of biblical interpretation calls us to do.  As we gather more data about the ancient Near East, we must constantly refine our understanding of the biblical texts.

Bible Interpretation

When Reading the Bible, When Should We Look for Application?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you’re reading a Bible passage, when should you start thinking about how it applies to your life?  Many of us think that this is the first thing we should do after reading a passage, but I want to discourage that way of thinking.

Before thinking about how a passage applies to us, we should first spend our time trying to find the objective meaning of the text.  What was the original author trying to say to the original audience?

Theologian Norman Geisler, in his Systematic Theology, Volume One has some helpful advice for us:

The objective meaning of a text is the one given to it by the author, not the one attributed to it by the reader. Readers should ask what was meant by the author, not what it means to the reader. Once a reader discovers what the author meant by the text, he has obtained its objective meaning. Thus, asking, “What does it mean to me?” is the wrong question, and it will almost certainly lead to a subjective interpretation. Asking of the author, “What did he mean?” will almost certainly lead the reader in the right direction, that is, toward the objective meaning.

The first step, then, is to figure out what the author’s intended meaning of the text is.  Many of us are tempted to skip this step because, well, it’s hard.  It’s a lot easier to just read some verses and try to apply them to our own experiences.  Figuring out what the original author meant might require we spend some time studying the text, consulting a Bible dictionary, reading a commentary.

It’s true that trying to find out the original meaning of the text can be hard work, but most things in life worth having come from hard work.  Bible study is no exception.  Once you’ve discovered the meaning of the text, then start thinking about how it applies to your life.  Remember that the text only has one meaning, but it may have several applications or implications.

Geisler offers this example from science to make this more concrete: “Einstein knew that e=mc2 (Energy equals mass times the speed of light [constant] squared), and so does an average high school science student. However, Einstein knew many more implications of this than the average high school student.”

You must first understand what is meant by e=mc2 before thinking about all of its implications.  The better a student understands the meaning of e=mc2, the more implications he will see.  Likewise, when you read a Bible passage, work to understand what the author intended to say to his original audience.  Once you’re comfortable that you have the objective meaning, then start your search for the implications of the text for your life.  If you get these out of order, you’ll surely get way off track with your understanding of the Bible.

Religion, Theology

Does God Pose an Authority Problem for You?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many of the people I know who reject God or who have crafted a God that makes no demands on them have a fundamental problem with authority.  They don’t want anybody telling them what to do.

For a person who wants complete autonomy, who chafes at the thought of anyone having authority over them, a creator God who makes demands is way inconvenient.

Many people who believe in God, but also have this authority hang-up, create their own version of God.  This God gives them what they want when they want it.  He approves of everything they do, as long as they are just trying to be happy.  He encourages them to follow their desires, wherever they lead.  C. S. Lewis compared this God to a senile, old grandfather who never says “no” to his grandchildren.  You want chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?  No problem!

Is this the Christian God?  Philosopher Paul Moser answers the question:

It would be a strange, defective God who didn’t pose a serious cosmic authority problem for humans.  Part of the status of being God, after all, is that God has a unique authority, or lordship, over humans.  Since we humans aren’t God, the true God would have authority over us and would seek to correct our profoundly selfish ways.

If you are “worshiping” a God who makes no demands on you, you’re worshiping no God at all.  You’re just trying to find a deity to make you feel good about your selfish choices.  What’s the point?

Evolution

Can Fossils Indicate Ancestry?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In most cases, fossils cannot give us ancestry, according to paleontologist Donald Prothero.  This statement, coming from Prothero, shocked me when I first read it, because it seems like fossil news headlines always make claims about ancestry, but here is Prothero, a staunch supporter of evolution, disagreeing.

Let me explain, lest I be accused of quote mining.  In his book Evolution, Prothero dedicates an entire chapter to explaining how scientists classify plant and animal life.  According to Prothero, the dominant method used today is cladistics, where the relationships among animals and plants are determined by the comparison of shared derived characters.  This theory has only taken hold in the last few decades, replacing older systems of classification.

A cladogram (cladistic diagram) comparing an assortment of vertebrates (e.g., lamprey, shark, frog, cow, monkey, human) might look at shared derived characters such as jaws, vertebrae, lungs, four legs, hair, mammary glands, opposable thumb, and stereovision.  Cladograms are powerful tools for classifying life because they are using directly observable evidence taken from living animals and from fossils.  But do cladograms indicate fossil ancestry?  Only minimally.  Here is Prothero:

Some aspects of cladistic theory have proven more difficult for many scientists to accept.  For example, a cladogram is simply a branching diagram of relationships between three or more taxa.  It does not specify whether one taxon is ancestral to another; it only shows the topology of their relationships as established by shared derived characters.  In its simplicity and lack of additional assumptions, it is beautifully testable and falsifiable.

Prothero explains that cladistics frustrate some evolutionists who want to say more about ancestry from the cladograms, but Prothero urges caution:

The biggest sticking point is the concept of ancestry.  We tend to use the term ancestor to describe certain fossils, but we must be careful when making that statement.  If we want to be rigorous and stick to testable hypotheses, it is hard to support the statement that ‘this particular fossil is the ancestor of all later fossils of its group’ because we usually can’t test that hypothesis.  Because the fossil record is so incomplete, it is highly unlikely that any particular fossil in our collections is the remains of the actual ancestor of another taxon.

What is refreshing about these statements from Prothero is that we are seeing actual scientific restraint when it comes to the analysis of fossils.  Unfortunately this kind of restraint is almost never present when the news media trumpet a new fossil find.  We only hear about “missing links” and how “X is the ancestor of Y” throughout the reports.

To be fair to Prothero, he does believe that ancestry can be verified if the fossil sample size is large enough.  In his own research on planktonic microfossils, he claims that there are enough layers of fossils to draw scientific conclusions about ancestry.

Planktonic microfossils aside, it is time that palentologists become more careful with their language and stop referring to new fossils in sensational terms.  In most cases, there is no way to determine ancestry; we can look at what features a new fossil shares with other taxa, but that is usually as far as we can go.

Philosophy, Polls

Do We Have Intuitive Knowledge?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Philosophers who study how we know things (epistemologists) have long debated whether we have innate or intuitive knowledge.  This kind of knowledge is often referred to as a priori knowledge.  It is knowledge that one has prior to or independently of sense experience. It cannot be proven by experience.

The debate over a priori knowledge is important to Christians because atheists, agnostics, and naturalists often deny the existence of most kinds of a priori knowledge and claim that we can only know what we observe with our senses.  For example, do we know that raping little children for fun is wrong?  Most people would say “yes” and in a poll I ran last week on the blog, 89% did answer “yes.”  Now, this is hardly a scientific poll, but the results, I think, are still indicative.

This is an example of a priori knowledge, because we don’t come to this conclusion by observing the world around us – we just know intuitively that raping little children for fun is wrong.  Philosopher Louis Pojman lists eleven examples of propositions that have been proposed as a priori knowledge by epistemologists:

  1. If John is taller than Mary and Tom is taller than John, Tom is taller than Mary.
  2. 5 + 7 = 12
  3. Nothing is both red and green.
  4. Some sentences are not both true and false.
  5. If Socrates is a man and all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal.
  6. Every event has a cause.
  7. All bodies are extended.
  8. A greatest possible being necessarily exists.
  9. It is wrong to harm people just for the fun of it.
  10. If I believe I exist, I exist.
  11. Not both p and not-p.

These propositions represent several different categories of knowledge: mathematics, knowledge of “greater than,” laws of logic, morality, deductive logic, causality, knowledge of space, knowledge of God, and introspective knowledge.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga holds that a priori knowledge, besides being true, must fulfill four conditions:

  1. The proposition p must be believed and believed to be necessarily true.
  2. You must be able to form the belief immediately upon understanding it.
  3. The proposition p must not be believed on the basis of perception, memory, or testimony.
  4. The belief must be accompanied with a certain phenomenal feel, what the rationalists call intuition.

What do you think?  Do you think certain kinds of knowledge are built in to human beings, that we just know some things intuitively?  If so, what kinds of things do you think we know intuitively?

I’ve given you 11 examples of what some philosophers have considered to be a priori knowledge, but I’d like for you to vote in the poll below.  The assignment is easy: tell us which of the 11 propositions, once you’ve read and understood the terms in them, are intuitively obvious or self-evident.  I look forward to seeing the results.