Can God author a text with errors?

[Vinnie]

@Marshall

My best guess is that there are two levels of historical connection. At one level, Israel’s cultural memory preserved a story of someone saved from a flood with their family and animals. I have no problem believing God helped someone in this kind of scenario, and the story endured. Further, in Israel’s perspective in which God is directly responsible for every disaster and blessing, the flood was seen as a punishment from God.

I am a little unclear but I think your answer to my first question is no? God is responsible for all things since He is the creator/sustainer, but He did not specially cause –beyond how he normally runs things– a flood to wipe out an overly wicked humanity? He probably saved some humans from a normal (natural) event (that he sustains and upholds) that made it into collective memory and then inspired them to write a narrative of it as if He specially sent it–or just went with their beliefs?

@Marshall

At a second level, God inspired the formation of an account to show how God deals with humanity, despite our corruption.

If God doesn’t actually send the flood in a special sense as a response to human wickedness like the account suggests, and (if we go this route), he didn’t actually order any of those herem accounts, how is this or those accounts an example of how God deals with humanity when he does no such thing? I can understand an ancient Jewish author writing this, but once we say God wanted it this way or inspired this form of the story I think we run into trouble. I mean, I can see God using a story to teach a lesson, but not a lesson about how God deals with humanity when in fact, our modern sensibilities don’t allow us to interpret the text that way. Unless you think God does deal with humanity this way – whether or not any of these specific accounts occurred?

@Marshall

These chapters take a well-known story (that is also common in surrounding cultures) and reframe it to make a point. These writers had no special access to the historical detail behind that story, but that doesn’t matter because their goal is to teach about God and humanity, not tell history.

Lacking access to historical details is important but most people who accept inspiration would find room for them to get some things right. But that is another issue. What point are they making? That they mistakenly think God sent a flood in response to their wickedness when it was just entirely natural? I understand they don’t make this distinction but that is what it amounts to today if we remove all God’s supernatural judgments because we can’t accept God could cause collateral damage. That was really where I was going with my two questions: Could you accept that God would send a flood to wipe out 50,000 people if their wickedness was so great? I admit I don’t like it but that is not enough to reject what scripture narrates and the rest of it generally takes as a real event in the past.

@Marshall

The ways the story humanizes God are clues it shouldn’t be read flat. God suddenly notices the wickedness of the human heart and is sorry to have created humanity, deciding to wipe us all out except for one family (6:5–7). But it doesn’t work: after the flood God sees that the human heart is still wicked, so God sets down the divine bow and arrows and promises to never punish the earth this way again (8:21; 9:8–17).

That really wasn’t part of my question. Sure, it’s not flat history. God also didn’t parade the animals in front of Adam to see if he could find him a suitable mate only to realize zebras and donkeys didn’t work. I don’t think a single book in the Bible is flat history.

@Marshall

I haven’t thought as much about this one as the flood, but my gut reaction is to make the same moves. At one level, God delivered some Hebrews from Egypt, including through protecting them from a wider judgement that fell on Egypt. At a second level, God inspired ways to tell this story that expanded it and made it revelatory of God’s general character and way of working in the world. God was involved in both that original history and in the history of the text.

So God did something special beyond how he ordinarily runs the world, you just don’t know what?

@Marshall

Because the exodus story is more than flat history of Israel’s origin, Paul asks his gentile audience in Corinth to read it as a story about their ancestors (1 Cor. 10:1). He doesn’t say it’s not historical, but he universalizes the history. It’s instructive to them as much as to Jews in Jerusalem. I think the reason for that is because the story is Scripture. As such, its truth can’t be provincialized or limited to the smaller historical nugget.

I think that is where I was going. If God didn’t actually save his people the story loses its value in my mind. If God doesn’t work such miracles it’s false hope. If he does, well my scripture narrates this here so why not give it the benefit of the doubt where I can? The story is one of God liberating his people. Hearing scripture constantly reference how God liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage kind of needs it to have happened for me to take scripture’s inspiration seriously.

I also don’t think the tenth plague is a historical nugget. Passover, the biggest Jewish celebration there is (millions of people would go to the temple during Jesus’s time for it), is literally named after God passing over the houses with the lamb’s blood–the final plague that led to their freedom. Christians generally believe it prefigured Jesus who, in my interpretation of the last supper, basically identified himself as such as well. Other authors made this connection after him.

I am not saying every detail of the Exodus is history. It certainly isn’t. Logistic problems alone rule that out. That is not what I asked. But imagine passover without an actual passover. To me that is like Christmas without a virgin birth, Christmas without God become man. I am not sure why I should view Passover any different than I do my celebration of Christmas. If Jesus was just a regular man, if he was not God become flesh, I mean, we have a nice day with family but we have lost so much.

If we can swallow passover without a passover, why can’t we swallow a tomb that is not empty? Jesus didn’t really need to be God incarnate and die for us. He could have just been a man. God inspired this story…or the metaphor of God incarnate coming and dying and rising to give us a closer image of how much he loves us. It doesn’t matter if the details are true, only if God’s love is as the story demonstrates it to be. If that were the case I would pass on Christianity and if God didn’t play a central role and do a lot of the things recorded in salvation history, I have to further pass on viewing this text as inspired in any serious sense. Maybe inspired in the same way a mountain inspires an artist to draw it and nothing more.

So if we can argue history for a lot of this stuff in the Old Testament doesn’t matter, why can we not argue the same for Christian beliefs about God become man? All that matters is we understand him as God incarnate who died for our sins. Why does that have to actually be true? Why can’t we just say God inspired the story to call us to a morally higher place and tell us how much he really loves us and that death is not the end?

Vinnie

[St.Roymond]

@RichardG

what is the point of claiming that the Holy Spirit will give us the truth

Assuming of course that said promise was meant for more than the apostles.

@RichardG

if you do not agree with male superiority and slavery you are not taking Paul’s words as you claim.

Given how may places we see Paul putting women in charge, the “male superiority” part is dubious.
And he didn’t care about slavery, he cared that every person in whatever circumstance showed how Christ would live in that circumstance.

@1Cor15.54

Luther’s refusal of Apostolic Tradition

Luther didn’t reject Apostolic Tradition, he rejected an arbitrary claim of the papacy to be right all the time, and he held to the ancient tradition that scripture supersedes tradition.

@1Cor15.54

which led to many other thousands of christian denominations saying different things

That wasn’t Luther’s result, that was primarily Zwingli and to a lesser extent Calvin. That side of the Reformation never did what the Lutherans did, hammering out what was orthodox, instead allowing pretty much anyone to come up with their own declaration of faith.

@1Cor15.54

The guarantee comes from the Holy Spirit, not from fallible men. Catholics and Orthodoxes don’t believe in the importance of Apostolic Tradition because they believe that these men are inherently infallible, they believe that because they think that the Holy Spirit prevents them from leading the faithfuls astray. It also makes sense for the successors of the Apostles to have a special guidance

But the only source of said guarantee is in the Gospels, and if you take the words seriously then the promise failed the moment Rome decided to go its own way in 1054.

@knor

What Luther, Melanchton and the others wanted was a return to previous Apostolic teaching because the prevailing interpretations and practices had deviated from the earlier ones.

In other words, Luther et al believed in apostolic tradition more firmly than did Rome.

@knor

In other words, the decisions of the early ecumenical councils are seen as genuine Apostolic tradition, what RCC councils and Popes declared later is not seen as genuine Apostolic tradition.

Which is fitting since the promise to lead the church into all truth was made not to some but to all the apostles, and may not unreasonably be applied to their successors – but the moment Rome divided the church that promise could no longer function.

@knor

although I have met RCC members who replace Jesus with RCC: the RCC has taken the place of Jesus.

With respect to the Eucharist that is the case with doctrine: Luther pointed to the words of Christ as the authority, Rome invokes a magical power of the priest.

[St.Roymond]

@Vinnie

I am a little unclear but I think your answer to my first question is no? God is responsible for all things since He is the creator/sustainer, but He did not specially cause –beyond how he normally runs things– a flood to wipe out an overly wicked humanity?

@Vinnie

If God doesn’t actually send the flood in a special sense as a response to human wickedness like the account suggests, and (if we go this route), he didn’t actually order any of those herem accounts, how is this or those accounts an example of how God deals with humanity when he does no such thing?

I recall a sermon called “He Who Restrains” for which a professor got into a little trouble for suggesting that God didn’t just up and cause a massive flood but rather knew it was coming and forebore to restrain it. Interestingly a rabbi I knew at the time agreed with the idea that God’s “sending” the flood was a matter of His ordinary workings in the world leading to that catastrophe and He decided not to reduce it.

[Vinnie]

Well, we all agree floods happen and God creates and sustains everything.

5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

The rabbi isn’t failing to reduce, he is simply rejecting the central thrust of the story. I have to wonder what to also make of God’s promise. Was he saying he was never going to allow a natural local flood again?

For me, Jesus mentions both Noah and the Ark. The proper way to understand this is a reference to a historical person since that is what everyone believed at the time and he shows up in Biblical genealogies. Jesus would have grown up—along with with all the other Jewish kids—hearing this story over and over again as events in the past. The only way to make Jesus’s statement a “literary reference” is via ad hoc harmonization where you know coming in the flood never happened/wasn’t specially sent by by God so Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant that. Despite the intention of Jesus in teaching preparedness, that is not the natural way of taking the account in context.

And I’m going against my own thoughts here:

Jesus and Flood

It just seems a very rehearsed way of understanding Jesus…

Vinnie

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@St.Roymond

That wasn’t Luther’s result, that was primarily Zwingli and to a lesser extent Calvin.

From what I’ve seen, they’re somewhere in the chain of causes, along with the Radical Reformers, but that more modern schismaticism is mostly to blame for having a lot more than one denomination per major theological tradition per country.

One slightly misleading thing about the “47,000” number is that that is counting every “we are officially a different denomination because we speak a different language, but we’re fully in communion with each other” as different denominations.

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

@St.Roymond

Given how may places we see Paul putting women in charge, the “male superiority” part is dubious.

We were reading Colossians yesterday, and I happen to have parallel translations out on my bible app. It was interesting to see the NKJV had 4:15 as
15 Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the church which is in his house.

and the CSB, which is still a very conservation, male oriented version says:
15 Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her home.

So, lots of interpretation go into translation as well.

[RLBailey (Ray Bailey)]

Vinnie,

I hear your frustration in this thread! I run into it all the time. I believe the key missing piece in these discussions—and why some find the subject hard to grasp—is the long-neglected interpretive framework John provides in chapters 1 and 3.

John 1:1–4 is the single most important cosmological re-statement in Scripture. It reframes Genesis not as a literal material-origin account but as the purposeful ordering of the cosmos through the eternal Logos: “All things were made through him… In him was life, and the life was the light of all mankind.” This sets up the unified yet distinct realms of General Revelation (discovered through human inquiry in the physical, created order) and Special Revelation (coming down from above through the Word and the Holy Spirit).

John 3 then delivers the hermetical key: Jesus tells Nicodemus, “You must be born again/from above” (3:3). Nicodemus immediately responds with a physical, earthly question: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” (3:4). Jesus corrects the category error with the wind analogy (3:8): we perceive effects in the physical realm but cannot trace origins or full essence from earthly observation alone. This is a master class in cosmology—two intermingled but separate orbs: the physical (seen, time/space-bound, accessed via General Revelation) and the spiritual (unseen, from above, accessed via Special Revelation and spiritual rebirth).

The Bible’s “convoluted mixture” is exactly this: God speaks theological truth through the finite, culturally conditioned horizons of the physical realm (ancient cosmologies, phenomenological language) while revealing heavenly realities that require the Spirit to discern. Without being “born again,” we stay stuck like Nicodemus—misreading accommodated earthly expressions as literal errors or demanding modern scientific precision where the intent is relational and revelatory.

This echoes Jesus’ later principle: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17)—give to the physical/earthly domain (General Revelation, science, culture) what belongs there, but give to God the heavenly/spiritual realities (Special Revelation) that only the reborn can rightly perceive.

Everything in this thread—inspiration, genre, accommodation, “errors”—circles these two realms. The Bible isn’t convoluted by accident; it’s layered by design to meet us where we are. John 1–3 shows how the cosmos God loves (3:16) includes both realms, unified in Christ the Logos, but only spiritual rebirth enables us to navigate the distinction without false dichotomies.

I have a chart that visualizes it,. You can search on me and find it in one of my prior posts on this subject.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

The NRSV refers to “her house”. As does the Common English Bible, and shoot - even the ESV (which I’ve heard @Christy say she is not impressed with) - even that has “her” house. So much the worse for the NKJV. The original KJV even had “her house”!

[Vinnie]

@jpm

So, lots of interpretation go into translation as well.

What they try to do to Junia – the female apostle in Romans 16-- is pretty much the nail in the coffin for me.

I was going through Stanley Porter’s 2023 commentary on the Greek Text of the Pastorals and his translation of 2 Tim 2:12 is different than any I have seen before:

12 And I do not commission a woman to teach falsely or to have abusive authority over a man, but to be in orderliness.

He goes through like 10 pages of complex Greek arguments and it’s all Greek to me…I bought the book to see his modern day defense of the authenticity of the pastorals…I enjoy snippets of the commentary throughout but I just don’t understand what he is talking about 90% of the time. I’m sure this would make some of my own students giggle with delight.

As for the Eve connection, he thinks that passage is being misunderstood as well:

Vinnie

[St.Roymond]

@jpm

We were reading Colossians yesterday, and I happen to have parallel translations out on my bible app. It was interesting to see the NKJV had 4:15 as
15 Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the church which is in his house.

and the CSB, which is still a very conservation, male oriented version says:
15 Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters in Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her home.

So, lots of interpretation go into translation as well.

That’s not the only instance though I would have to look up others at the moment. In one course reading Paul’s epistles this gender-switch provoked some heated arguments from “KJV only” types.
In this instance and others the dishonesty is so blatant it has to be called lying.

[knor (Kai)]

@1Cor15.54

But of course if everyone believed so there wouldn’t be 47,000 different Christian denominations in the world.

During the first 2-3 centuries, there were no centralized leadership or doctrine (AFAIK). There were local churches that had some connections with other churches and shared central teachings (Jesus is Kyrios) but may have had partly differing teachings otherwise. If they accepted the teachings of ‘all the apostles’, they were considered part of the (pre-)catholic network of churches but were fairly independent. In that sense, there were as many ‘denominations’ as there were local churches and groups.

The first ecumenical councils were arranged because there were disagreements about the doctrine between the local churches, groups and traveling teachers. Those disagreements were so serious that they led to aggression and physical violence between the ‘denominations’, in the worst cases even to killing.

The ecumenical councils did not aim to remove all the differences between the local ‘denominations’. Rather, they aimed to draw a line to acceptable teachings - what are such teachings that cannot be accepted within the network of (pre-)catholic churches. For example, the teachings of Arius - Jesus is only a created being - were excluded.

The centralized leadership and doctrine developed stepwise, mainly after Christianity became an accepted and then a favoured religion in the Roman empire. There were basically two different ‘models’ in that development: the leadership where the emperor was the head (eastern parts of Rome) and after the western parts of Rome collapsed, the model where the bishop of Rome gained stepwise more and more power within the network of local churches.

The concentration of local leadership to one person called the episcopos could be seen as a preliminary step towards the centralization of power. Based on early writings, such as the letters of Ignatius, a basic motivation to advocating the leadership of one episcopos (instead of the earlier leadership of ‘elders’, a local group of several episcopos and presbyteros) was the fear of divisions because of disagreements about the interpretations. Ignatius and the other episcopos thought that if everyone stands behind a single leader, there would be no more divisions within local churches. So, a switch to a strong leadership by one leader was a practical decision, not something rising from the Apostolic teachings. Afterwards, those advocating a strong leadership of one person tried to find support to their opinion from the scriptures but that was not the original source of the teaching.

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

First Junia got a sex change and now Nympha!

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

Must have been the inspiration of Johnny Cash’s song A Boy Named Sue.

[Vinnie]

@RLBailey

I hear your frustration in this thread! I run into it all the time. I believe the key missing piece in these discussions—and why some find the subject hard to grasp—is the long-neglected interpretive framework John provides in chapters 1 and 3.

Not frustration but disagreement. Christianity and Judaism are both historic faiths in my book so it’s really a question of where do we draw lines and how do we understand Jesus? I don’t take scripture as inerrant nor do I see it as intending to teach history or science.

@RLBailey

The Bible’s “convoluted mixture” is exactly this: God speaks theological truth through the finite, culturally conditioned horizons of the physical realm (ancient cosmologies, phenomenological language) while revealing heavenly realities that require the Spirit to discern. Without being “born again,” we stay stuck like Nicodemus—misreading accommodated earthly expressions as literal errors or demanding modern scientific precision where the intent is relational and revelatory.

I agree with all this but my questions were rather specific to something Marshall said.

Marshall: At a second level, God inspired the formation of an account to show how God deals with humanity, despite our corruption.
Vinnie: how is this or those accounts an example of how God deals with humanity when he does no such thing?

I want to know how accounts show us how God deals with humanity if we reject the historicity of the parts of them showing God dealing with humanity. I think that is a fair question. This was in the context of, well, the icky and violent passages in the OT.

The end of my post stems from Passover. I agree the Bible has little interest in history, but it’s my view that certain events need to have happened for me to take Judaism and Christianity seriously. The Exodus is probably the primary one in the OT—but not in all its details literally, but it forms the backbone of so many different areas of scripture, if it didn’t happen, that is to Judaism what a full tomb is to Christianity.

@RLBailey

I have a chart that visualizes it,. You can search on me and find it in one of my prior posts on this subject.

I took a quick peak but you’ve been here since 2017. Not quite a needle, but its like finding a pebble in a haystack.

[Marshall (Janzen)]

@Vinnie

He probably saved some humans from a normal (natural) event (that he sustains and upholds) that made it into collective memory and then inspired them to write a narrative of it as if He specially sent it–or just went with their beliefs?

There are places where history matters for my faith, but the flood account isn’t one of those places. A primer on the key events of early human history would probably look nothing like Genesis 1–11. These chapters reveal who God is and how God deals with people. And there are many ways they do that even if the stories aren’t historical or are only loosely historical. I can trust Scripture directly, not just trust it as far as I trust it to be historically accurate.

I do think the flood account has an inspired message. It shows why God doesn’t just wipe out the bad and start over with the best. It wouldn’t work. People, as Genesis shows, are all veined with corruption. So a story about God wiping out everyone gives assurance that God won’t wipe out everyone; that seedtime and harvest will continue, along with rain falling on righteous and wicked alike. (It’s not that different from how some take the sacrifice of Isaac story as teaching how God doesn’t want child sacrifice.)

@Vinnie

Lacking access to historical details is important but most people who accept inspiration would find room for them to get some things right.

Sure. But since the Spirit didn’t even help Paul remember who he personally baptized (1 Cor. 1:13–17), this can’t be an expectation for inspired writers.

@Vinnie

But imagine passover without an actual passover. To me that is like Christmas without a virgin birth

To me that is like Christmas without a Christmas tree. What I find so odd about the account of the tenth plague is how it contains the later Passover. In Exodus 12, the distance between those slaves in Egypt and later Israelites suddenly contracts. The story blurs between then and later, event and observance, history and ritual. There’s this irony where on the day of the tenth plague, even before the people are told how in a few hours they’re going to need to have killed and cooked a lamb, Moses is given long, plodding instructions for how to instruct the people to celebrate Passover each year, how to make bread without waiting for the yeast to rise, how to eat hurriedly – so it will be just like how rushed they were back then!

It’s like Luke telling us the manger was right next to the Christmas tree. The later Passover celebration is right in the tenth plague account. But maybe this isn’t odd, since after all Exodus is law. It tells later generations of Israel how to live, so its history is always in service of that purpose.

Since this is the way the tenth plague is told, I’m very hesitant to say exactly which details are historical fact and which owe more to the later festival. My faith would not be shaken if they didn’t kill and cook lambs in the process of being rescued from Egypt. Yes, I believe God rescued them. But pinning down the details? We don’t have the kind of account that lets us do that.

[Vinnie]

@Marshall

There are places where history matters for my faith, but the flood account isn’t one of those places. A primer on the key events of early human history would probably look nothing like Genesis 1–11. These chapters reveal who God is and how God deals with people. And there are many ways they do that even if the stories aren’t historical or are only loosely historical. I can trust Scripture directly, not just trust it as far as I trust it to be historically accurate.

I do think the flood account has an inspired message. It shows why God doesn’t just wipe out the bad and start over with the best. It wouldn’t work. People, as Genesis shows, are all veined with corruption. So a story about God wiping out everyone gives assurance that God won’t wipe out everyone; that seedtime and harvest will continue, along with rain falling on righteous and wicked alike. (It’s not that different from how some take the sacrifice of Isaac story as teaching how God doesn’t want child sacrifice.)

The account seems to serve as reassurance God won’t do this again. That is what the narrative plainly says. Humans were wicked to the point of God repenting that he made us (that is a serious verse!) so he pushed the reset button. But now God says even though humans are bad, never again will this happen. I must admit that a story of God killing everyone aimed at teaching how God won’t kill everyone is a bit odd. To use the language of the counterpoint Kristin raised in your paper, it reads like a boyfriend beating a woman and then realizing it won’t change her behavior so he promises he won’t do it again. But in this case, it’s a just God punishing a sinful humanity then claiming to not punish them similarly again even though they are still bad.

I just don’t understand how removing the again–the fact that God flooded humanity–is “trusting scripture directly.” I’m getting Chicago-statement vibes from that. But we agree that Genesis 1-11 is not strict history. For me, the wider-Biblical argument suggests it is based on actual events.

It seems to be that an argument for your interpretation could go like this–and you can correct anything I get wrong: At the time people attributed all natural disasters to God or the gods. They also had a collective memory of a great deluge that everyone knew about that just couldn’t just be ignored. So God hijacked it to tell them not to worry, you are always bad, but I won’t do this again.

I will admit that if we take it literally, does God choosing not to do something again imply His earlier choice was not ideal? A strong argument may be able to be formulated along those lines. I don’t think that is what the account intends to teach though, and apparently, the message that God would never do this again didn’t really stick because the Bible continually attributes the misfortunes of Israel to sin and God punishing them. Maybe the Exile isn’t a global deluge, but the same worldview still seems to be present. I disagree it’s similar to Isaac and Abraham because in order for the analogy to work, Abraham has to actually sacrifice Isaac to show God doesn’t like child sacrifice. Imagine if he let him go through with it and said, never again will I have you sacrifice a child.

For me, the strongest aspect of your view might be divine immutability. None of the classical reconciliations such as character vs action, contextual changes or even responding consistently to new human situations really fit here. But in the end, the position that the flood was actually sent by God does not need to read every detail of the narrative in a concordant fashion anymore than the contrary view does. So there is still no reason to deny God caused a flood in a special sense.

@Marshall

Sure. But since the Spirit didn’t even help Paul remember who he personally baptized (1 Cor. 1:13–17), this can’t be an expectation for inspired writers.

We can apply that to anything. We need to be able to discriminate and that is a bigger hermeneutical question. The purpose of scripture is to bring us into a proper standing with God through Jesus and transform our hearts and equip us to do Good works. That is my default and we should have complete trust in scripture in that regard and that is really just trusting God to provide us with what we need. Beyond that its degrees of trust and arguments about what is important. Paul quickly corrects himself (spirit at work or just him remembering?) then accurately claims to not remember if there were others. What that account shows is God is letting the human authors be authors. He is not micromanaging. It tends to refute dictated models of inspiration. But on the flip side, I also accept the sensus plenior of scripture (section 7) and approach it with a hermeneutic of trust (section 5). If I don’t have solid reasons to doubt the gist of a Biblical story, I will not. Not having historical evidence for it isn’t a solid reason for me. Having historical evidence against it would be.

@Marshall

Since this is the way the tenth plague is told, I’m very hesitant to say exactly which details are historical fact and which owe more to the later festival. My faith would not be shaken if they didn’t kill and cook lambs in the process of being rescued from Egypt. Yes, I believe God rescued them. But pinning down the details? We don’t have the kind of account that lets us do that.

I would agree on the Exodus. That it occurred is more essential to an inspired view of scripture than how or all the details. But my approach was from the upper room where Jesus is celebrating a passover feast and declares himself the paschal lamb. The plagues look like polemic against Egyptian gods which makes me skeptical literarily but this is not justified since if God did send plagues, why would He not want to send ones that simultaneously showed he is the sovereign Lord over everything–including the gods of Egypt? I’ve also read there many have been different lists of the plagues and different numbers, but we are talking about the final form of scripture and inspiration so that is not as relevant.

When I see Jesus as the new Adam or the new paschal lamb, I take these as being based on actual events because that is how everyone at the time understood them (historical-critical method) and the only reason I would have to believe otherwise is if I came in already thinking they did not occur. Jesus constantly does miracles and events occur that recall the Old Testament. I mean, Elijah and Moses appear on the mountain during the transfiguration (unless you deny this event is historical?). That is where I think we differ. When we make all these just “literary references”, this is rationalization after the fact. Which is fine. If we have two things we think are true, there is nothing wrong with seeing how they could fit together or coming up with a consistent framework. Though maybe I also come from a Catholic perspective on the Eucharist…they had to eat the lamb in the OT, just as we need to eat the Lamb. I just don’t bring in “they didn’t happen.”

I have seen nothing to convince me God did not send a flood or that he did not strike down the first born of Egypt. My hermeneutic of trust does not require me to prove every statement in the Bible is historically true before I give it the benefit of the doubt. This is in regard to what I deem the big picture of salvation history (Exodus, Moses getting the commandment from God, etc). I recognize the purpose of the Bible is not to teach historical events and narratives can often have meaning without concerns of historicity. But stories of things like God saving his people if he didn’t actually save his people, is a bridge built too far for me.

And this has moved in a direction away from what I originally wanted to know. I have really been trying to get an answer on this question: do you believe it is possible or within God’s good nature and character, to strike down the first-born of Egypt and send a flood? Not save a family from a natural flood (due the processes he upholds) but specifically alter the way things normally run and send one? A yes or no would have sufficed to the two questions I posed.

Obviously, if we think God would never do something scripture directly attributes to him, we will find alternative explanations for why these accounts are in our scripture. I don’t think God can lie, I mean I think it’s a metaphycal impossibility. So I will naturally be skeptics of scripture to the contrary. I also don’t think God is capable of evil (which is a privation of good of which God is goodness itself). So if commanding herem warfare is evil, God could not have done so anymore than making a round square. I think that is the real issue. At one time or another, many of us Christians have turned from the love of Jesus in the New and been shocked by what we saw in the Old. That gut punch hits hard but I think it’s the underlying issue and what drives our interpretation no matter how fancy we dress it up. I certainly don’t “want”-- in my heart of hearts, any of this violent stuff to be true. But that is not a valid argument. I think when we decide on Old Testament violence, and what details may or may not have occurred, we should first address the elephant in the room and ask, “could God do this” before asking “did God do this” "or “how much of this event we generally think happened is historical.” Because in the end, we are all capable of great ingenuity when it comes to making scripture fit our own views. I am trying to ask the prior question.

Vinnie

[St.Roymond]

@Vinnie

I will admit that if we take it literally, does God choosing not to do something again imply His earlier choice was not ideal?

One of my professors would have argued that it implies that the earlier choice wasn’t related to whether or not it was “ideal” but rather to whether or not it served to set up conditions for the arrival of Christ. From that view, the Flood happened because it was necessary to ‘trim down and start over’ in order to have events arrive at “the fullness of time”, that given how long the situation of wickedness must have gone on the timing was such as would lead to the right situation for the Incarnation.

The same would apply, then, to the timing of the reduction of the northern kingdom and later of the Exile, the return, and for that matter even the conquest by Alexander.

I like this view because it puts Christ at the center of the scenario; it makes history revolve about the Incarnation.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))]

@Vinnie

The account seems to serve as reassurance God won’t do this again. That is what the narrative plainly says. Humans were wicked to the point of God repenting that he made us (that is a serious verse!) so he pushed the reset button. But now God says even though humans are bad, never again will this happen. I must admit that a story of God killing everyone aimed at teaching how God won’t kill everyone is a bit odd

@Vinnie

I find your observations to be consistent with mine regarding Esther. The story of
Esther takes the Magophonia (Herodotus’ “Slaughter of the Magi”), and “Judaizes” it.
Instead of being a story about the slaughter of the Magi, the story becomes a story
about the wickedness of those who seek to slaughter the Jews … and then the story
flips into the more familiar slaughter of the Magi who attempted to take over Persia.

The drama is fantastic. But I am very skeptical that there was ever really an attempt
to slaughter the Jews!

G.Brooks