Originally posted by mikhael
That would be hearsay, strictly speaking. Besides, in many cases, a clear conflict of interest can be shown, which would impeach the witnesses in question.
Reading the Bible as a means of understanding history is rather like watching Fox News to understand current events. Sure, in both cases, we get reports of what's going on, but in neither case do we get an unbiased, rigorously factual accouting of events. The events are always filtered through the agenda of the reporters at hand. Luckily, with Fox News, we have other sources of facts to which we can compare and contrast their reporting of events. We cannot say the same of the Bible.
The picture becomes even more muddled, when once considers the provenance of the dusty tome in question. The decisions in the second century that led to the formation of the Canon are hardly above question, even assuming that nothing in the text changed from the original formulation until then, and that nothing changed from the formation of the Canon until now.
At best, we're dealing with a hundred and fifty generations of hearsay.
You overstate your position, mikhael. Even the most suspicious stance towards the Bible cannot reasonably dismiss it as a witness to history. Frankly, we accept the historical value of scores of other ancient documents with religious content without difficulty, so why should the Bible be especially singled out as untrustworthy? If the biblical text says in multiple passages in multiple books that the Canaanites made it their regular religious practice to burn their babies alive as sacrifices to their gods, it is difficult to see how one could dismiss that evidence out of hand so easily while accepting Herodotus' history as substantially true without any more corroborating evidence.
Moreover, the Bible shows a remarkable willingness to paint its supposed heroes in a bad light when they deserve it. Both David and Solomon are shown with all their faults, despite the status and esteem their memory had in the minds of the people. That's a far cry from the records one finds in Assyrian or Egyptian or Hittite annals.
Furthermore, I might point out some serious inconsistency in your approach. It looks to me like you are willing to accept the biblical evidence when it suits you, and disregard it when it doesn't. That the Israelites killed many Canaanites you'll accept on no one's testimonty but the Israelites, but their testimony that the Canaanites regularly, universally, and systematically practiced infanticide is dismissed. What basis do you have for picking and choosing? Do the Israelites report history, or not?
Now having said all that, I'll point out that there actually is corroborating evidence that the Canaanites sacrificed their babies in this way. Heaps of babies bones have been found near sacrifice sites, apparently burned.
But returning to the case in point, the killing of the Canaanites comes down to one issue so far as the Bible is concerned: they sacrificed their babies to their gods.
This quick search shows just some of the references made to it. Burning babies alive is, so far as God is concerned, such a terrible thing as to be worthy of capital punishment, and is the underlying reason for 1) why he decided to have the Canaanites executed and the survivors dispossessed of their land, and 2) why he later decided that the Israelites who emulated the practices of surviving Canaanites would similarly be killed and the survivours dragged off into exile.
Now, what do we do with baby killers today? Where captial punishment exists, we execute them. Where it does not, we lock them up with no chance of parole. We kill them and do the modern equivalent of dispossessing them of their land. So, was God's action against the Canaanites murder or execution?
Oh, and what do you find questionable in the process of canon selection? I've heard you mention it before, so what exactly is it you have issue with?
