What's Up With The Bible?
If Christianity or Judaism is true, why is the Bible so weird, factually in error, and morally problematic?
The Bible is a weird book. It involves quite extensive genealogical digressions, often going on tediously for many paragraphs about extensive chains of begetting (A begot B who begot C, who begot D). It makes God seem like, as he’s described in Deuteronomy 5:9 “a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” It describes in Psalm 137 “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks,” speaking of Babylonian infants.
It describes God commanding the slaughter of the Canaanites, sanctioning slavery in lots of places, including taking slaves through conquest. It also seems to contradict itself repeatedly; Ezekiel makes clear that, contra Deuteronomy, sons are not to be punished for their father’s sin. Luke and Matthew give different genealogies of Jesus. Many early stories in Genesis are duplicates of each other, each with slightly different details that make it implausible they both happened, often containing explicit contradictions.
In light of this, what should a Jew or Christian say about this? Why is the Bible, on its face, such a deeply imperfect book? Why does the God of the old testament look more like a parochial tribal despot than a being of limitless goodness—why does he look more like a god than God? This strikes me as the biggest challenge to both Judaism and Christianity—it’s nearly impossible to square the perfect God of philosophy with the God described in the Bible. It’s one of the main reasons I’m not a Christian or Jew.
And while one can deny that the Bible is without error, it’s puzzling why God’s main method of transferring information to us would be through a book filled with errors, both moral and factual. If one admits that the Bible is riddled with errors, there is a great puzzle: why did God set it up that way? It’s hard to see what method God has for inspiring the Bible that is both fallible enough to keep in the litany of errors, but infallible enough to make it correct in its core theological and doctrinal claims. What is God’s role in biblical composition supposed to have been? It’s not at all clear.
I believe that there are four ways to resist this challenge. If Christianity or Judaism is right, most likely these will each be part of the ultimate story, though none the complete picture.
The first solution involves simply biting the bullet. The things in the Bible that look barbaric are actually wiser than we give them credit for being. Perhaps, for instance, as various people like Craig have suggested, the slaughter of the Canaanites wasn’t so bad as it might seem on its face. If the Bible suggests that something happened in history, this response involves saying that it actually did happen. If that action was attributed to God, then it must have been good. Let’s call this the evangelical reply.
No doubt the evangelical reply should be taken with regards to some alleged errors in the Bible. If one surveys the long lists on the internet of Biblical contradictions, at least half of them are not contradictions at all, but are quite easily harmonized. If a person says “well clearly the Bible is ridiculous because people don’t rise from the dead,” the correct reply for a Christian to give is that, while this is generally true, the rule has at least one particularly notable exception. Sometimes, when the Bible asserts something, the correct defense of it is to say that it’s true!
This might even be the correct reply regarding some of the passages that seem puzzling on their face. For instance, the injunction against divorce may exist because divorce, for much of history, was very bad for women—leaving them without a source of income or power and without the ability to become easily remarried. Strong restrictions on divorce make sense when considered in their historical context.
Nevertheless, it’s clearly not always the right reply. Regarding the contradiction between Deuteronomy and Ezekiel, the solution is not to grant the contradiction and think that some things are both true and false. Even Christians who take a high view of scripture do not think Job, early Genesis, and Jonah are literal history—nor, they usually claim, were they ever intended to be.
The second reply, to deal with these kinds of stories, we might call the Unitarian Universalist reply. This reply holds that the stories are not literally true but aim to teach us a lesson. This is what one should hold about Job, for instance, and Jonah, and perhaps the contents contained in Joshua. It also works for Biblical books not about people whose names start with a Jo.
One should not be a young earth creationist, and should instead think that early Genesis, at the very least, is primarily there to teach us things, rather than provide us with a literal history of how the world came to be. While the Bible contains discussion of historical events, it is not primarily a history book. When the Bible describes Jonah being swallowed by a fish, this is not intended to tell us the chronology of a literal person named Jonah. It’s instead to teach us that we should not wish for bad people to keep doing bad things—we should want them to turn away from their wicked ways. As Ezekiel 33:11 says “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”
Once again, the Unitarian Universalist reply is part of the right story. Much of the Bible is not literal history. About a third of it is poetry! One should not literally think there is a coming Beast with seven heads and ten horns, who will be followed by many people. (Whenever I read about the beast with seven heads and ten horns, it reminds me of an old Norm MacDonald joke about Hitler. The more I learn about this beast with seven heads guy, the more I don’t care for him! Why would anyone follow this guy?)
Still, many of the puzzles for the fundamentalist reply also apply here. If it’s puzzling that God would carry out barbaric seeming actions, like genocide, it’s equally puzzling that a story involving God carrying out genocide would be ideal for our moral and spiritual development. Not only does genocide seem like the sort of thing God wouldn’t do, it seems like the sort of thing he wouldn’t claim to have done for purposes of providing important moral lessons. The moral lessons people tend to draw from the Canaanite slaughter are generally barbaric.
A third reply is that the reason God made the Bible so weird was to make it hard to interpret it literally. Imagine if the Bible was clear and unambiguous across the board. People would just follow it directly without thinking for themselves. Even with the Bible being a confusing morass of allusions and metaphors, people want to interpret it in a fundamentalist way.
Much of the New Testament is Jesus warning people against fundamentalism. He tells people not to be obsessed with the letter of the law, but to extract the important insights from it. The Muslims went so far as to declare their scriptures divine and preexistent.
Fundamentalism is one of the most common human errors. It hinders sane ethical thought and progress. It causes people to be stuck adhering to archaic ethical traditions, with their ethical thought unable to move with the times. Even with the Bible filled with bizarre bits, filled with obvious guardrails against fundamentalists, the error is so widespread that almost half of Americans think the world is only a few thousand years old—an error on the level of thinking that Australia is twelve feet, or thinking that Jimmy Carter lived to be 230 million years old.
How much worse would it be if the Bible was easy to interpret and contained nothing that looked like an error? How much more would evangelical Churches preach that one should simply read the Bible and come to conclusions, if it was a straightforward instruction manual.
Call this the anti-evangelical reply. This holds that the Bible makes errors to ward off hyper-literalistic interpretations. I think if Christianity or Judaism is true, this will be part of the right answer. If God is to allow us to think for ourselves, he cannot provide a book that tells us what to do in all circumstances—to prevent us from treating the book as the end of the conversation rather than the beginning, he must make it confusing and full of errors. He must make it so that we say of some bits of it “well, it only says that because that’s what people thought at the time—that isn’t actually right.”
The final explanation: the Bible has errors because it was written by humans. God does not err, but humans do. Even the highest views of scripture hold that God had a prominent human coauthor. This human coauthor could bring in errors.
Crucially, this explains why many biblical errors seem distinctly human. They position God as being like a tribal deity, for that is the way humans at the time thought of gods. Humans, through divine mechanism, were able to see some truths about God, but they glimpsed them through a glass darkly. Call this—sorry, I’m out of cool names, so I’ll have to go with something descriptive—the human error reply.
Now, this reply may seem suspiciously convenient. What are the odds that God, in devising his holy book, would include distinctly human errors? But it’s less surprising when you consider that it was humans who wrote the thing! The Bible wasn’t directly dictated by God!
Additionally, we know that God, if he exists, intervenes only rarely in the world. He takes a mostly hands-off approach. If God gives us free will, and with that the freedom to help and to harm, to do good and evil, it’s not surprising he’d give the writers of the Bible the freedom to make errors.
Perhaps the way inspiration works is that he gave the Bible authors a kind of divine intuition. Just as we have the ability to intuit truths about morality, Jeremiah and Isaiah and Psalms1 were given the ability to intuit truths about the divine. They weren’t entirely without error, just as we are not without error about morality. But they all were able to see important core truths, which they then recorded. This, in my view, is the best way to make the argument from fulfilled biblical prophecy—the prophets were not infallible, but were able to see important truths to come. Thus, if they messed up some of the details, that isn’t such a problem.
Despite all of this, the weirdness and litany of errors in the Bible reduces the probability of Christianity and Judaism. There are some responses that can be given on behalf of the Christian or Jew, as I’ve argued here, but none is plausible enough to prevent this from being evidence against their views. I’ve surveyed the responses I find most plausible, but I still regard this as one of the most serious challenges to Christianity and Judaism.
Note: I am aware that psalms is not the name of a person. This is a joke—an unserious utterance made for comedic effect.
One of the most bizarre exchanges I ever had with someone on this was an Orthodox guy who told me that, when the Bible describes God commanding the slaughter of the Canaanites, that was actually a metaphorically exhortation for us to "slaughter" our unholy desires. And it's like... can you imagine a worse way to make a point about moral living than an extended genocide metaphor? If someone wrote a self-help book titled The Final Solution To The Anger Problem: How To Engineer a Holocaust Against Bad Moods, people would probably think that was a little weird.
Of your four explanations, he fourth is the best, though it was only partially presented. The choice by God to use humans to write the holy writ is a core doctrine of Christianity (I can't speak for Judaism). It relates to the incarnation - the word becomes flesh - and relationship between God and humans. The question of error versus not error is a distinctly modern question, as the ancients were not nearly as preoccupied with literal history. Therefore, to understand the Bible, one has to set aside the modern preoccupation with precision and literalness of meaning (a product of, among other things, the printing press and the scientific revolution). Words are symbols, history is narrative, and meaning is fluid. Instead see it as a narrative weaving God into relationship with often primitive and violent humans, attempting to lead them towards a better more godly future. Pulling us out of the muck. Hopefully clarifying our understanding of Him. Setbacks are common. This is the highest view of scripture. Inerrancy is, in my mind, a relatively low view of scripture. The whole question of error, as commonly understood to be literal errors, is kind of irrelevant. This does not mean that certain events did not happen. It just means we need to start by understanding them as the writers themselves understood them (which is the hard part), then add knowledge of God that they may or may not have held, and finally add knowledge we possess but they didn't (i.e., the earth is not flat floating on the waters of the deep, and is not covered by a dome holding back the waters of the heavens).