Is the Bible a Bronze Age book?
"Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away" Matthew 24:35).
The Bible has been scoffingly dismissed as a “Bronze Age book.” Is that actually the case? If we date the Bronze Age from 3,000 – 1,200 BC (dates differ), then the earliest books of the Bible are from the Bronze Age. That assumes of course Mosaic authorship of the first five books, which is the traditional and (I believe) the correct view. Other books of the Old Testament would have been written in the Iron Age (1200 - 500 B.C.), with the last few books written shortly after that.
The New Testament was written in the Classical Period. That – in case some explanation is necessary – was the period of two of the greatest civilizations of Western Europe, classical Greece and Rome. Although the New Testament books were written during the reigns of the Caesars, the cultural influence of Greece was still very great, in some ways even dominant. In literature, philosophy, architecture, geometry and historical writing, the Greeks and the Romans at their best reached levels of excellence that possibly have been equaled, but arguably have never been surpassed. They are inarguably superior to much of the rubbish that is written or created nowadays in our increasingly backward, primitive, and dark secular humanist age.
Once, while working as a teacher in China, I saw a crowd of people gathered around a store window in a shopping mall. I went to see what they were looking it. In the window was a large modern video screen showing Michael Jackson hopping up and down in a ridiculous manner with some blatantly obscene gestures thrown in. The crowd was all staring silently – no laughter or comments in the short time I was there. I thought the general atmosphere was one of astonishment and also contempt for the ridiculous and stupid Americans.
Our modern era is more technologically advanced than other ages, but also more morally backward and increasingly bizarre and dysfunctional. We are mistaken to dismiss other cultures, including the biblical culture of the Old Testament, too lightly.
Getting back to the subject of the Bible, it is very far from being nothing more than a primitive Bronze Age book. Much of it emerged later, during a period of great international achievement, and the divinely inspired writings of the Hebrew scriptures, including not only the writings of the prophets and the books of wisdom literature but also the works of Moses, reflect an experience of the heights and depths of the human spirit, along with the beauties and the graces of life, that far surpass the earthly intellectual capacities of the greatest of the modern thinkers, or (in my opinion) of all of the moderns combined.
The authentically Bronze Age books, the books of Moses (I am not sure about Joshua and Judges), did much to provide the foundations of Christianity and through it of Western Civilization – for, as Paul wrote in Romans, Judaism is the root, and Christians are the branches that have been grafted into the tree. In their presentation of a single God who created the universe, a God with personal qualities who governs not only by lower scientific natural laws – laws which he himself designed - but also by higher moral and spiritual ones, the books of Moses are incomparably superior to anything else the ancient world could produce.
The Hebrew Scriptures also imparted a rational dimension to the hitherto frightening and unknown natural world, by ascribing it to the deliberate creation of a rational God, about whom we could have limited but sure and abiding knowledge. This encouraged a more hopeful approach to what was hitherto only gross and fearful darkness, and in later centuries, mediated by Christianity, encouraged the first elementary steps of modern science.
“But,” it is said, “we need to base our ethical concepts on scientific, objective fact, not on books written centuries ago.” Needless to say, that is a purely subjective value judgment – but assume, just for the sake of the conversation, that we do set the Bible aside. To which modern thinkers values shall we turn? To those of Marx? He laughably claimed his theory was scientific. He was mistaken there, but what have real scientists like Einstein, Max Planck, or Niehls Bohr contributed significantly to the knowledge of how we should live? Shall we turn to Darwin, Freud, or perhaps philosophers like John Stuart Mill, Kant or Hegel? Untrammeled by divine revelation, they arrived at widely differing conclusions. Should we study Robespierre, Lenin or Stalin? They also followed human reason without any regard for God’s laws, and yet few would look on them as reliable ethical guides today.
The turning away from revealed religion to a reliance on human reason alone has not produced a solid foundation for ethics. It has instead led to the spiritual emptiness and confusion of our own times. It has led not to moral clarity and ethical certainty, but to epistemological, moral and social confusion, which shows every sign of intensifying rather than abating as time goes on. The claim that we need a modern system of ethics based on scientific facts to deal with 21st-century problems is an arbitrary and personal opinion, which will never lead to binding and definitive answers.
Following are some 21st-century questions which modern ethical theorists are unable to cope with in any coherent or uniform fashion – it being remembered that all of their answers are ultimately based on a belief in chaos and blind materialism as the foundations of the universe.
If an unborn child is human in its origin, and human in its end, in what sense can it be considered to be less than human somewhere in between?
I want to be faithful to my middle-age wife who has born me three children, but my selfish genes are telling me to have an affair with a younger woman. Is my desire to be faithful the result of lingering Bronze Age superstitions? And if I am controlled by my selfish genes, with what faculty do I reflect upon and decide to accept or reject their insinuations?
At what age is it proper for an adult to introduce a child to the mysteries of sex? 15? 12? 10? 5? Somehow, this does not seem right to me – is there something wrong with me? Am I a hate-filled bigot?
If a man with three wives moves to the UK, should he be provided with free separate accommodations for each of them?
I really dislike theism, but am always careful not to criticize Islam too openly. Is this prudence, or cowardice?
Should a serial killer whose guilt is not in question, and who has deprived others of life himself, and devastated their families – should he be allowed to have conjugal visitation rights while in prison?
What will the long-term effects of children being exposed to pornography be? Should this be encouraged, or even allowed?
Many thousands of people have died in highway accidents in America in the last few decades. At what point shall we declare a national health emergency, shut down all of the nation’s highways, and forbid people to drive? Think of all the lives we would save! Also, no driving would help the planet to recover from the cancer of humanity. Can we learn something from Pol Pot?
If a man feels like he is a woman, should he be allowed to use women’s restrooms? What if women feel uncomfortable with that arrangement? Why do his feelings trump theirs? Is it because those women are narrow-minded and intolerant, lesser people whose feelings do not count?
What if I and my followers think we can establish a true society of justice and equality on earth for the first time in recorded human history, but will first need to get rid of 100,000 or maybe 1,000,000 or maybe even 10,000,000 people to do so?
If we are Darwinian in origin, shouldn’t our ethics reflect that? Shouldn’t we have a society based on survival of the fittest, in which might makes right and the domination of the strongest and the fittest is the ideal? And in this case shouldn’t the weak, the unfit, the chronically ill, and the mentally disabled be abandoned and left to perish as essentially useless? Why not just kill them and be done with it? We might even be able to speed up the evolutionary process by weeding out the unfit ourselves. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche meant when he said in The Antichrist (Section 2), “The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak - Christianity . . . .” [1]
In order for a fish’s fin to develop into an amphibian’s leg, there have to be many complex changes in the genetic coding of the nervous and skeletal systems, musculature and skin. Moreover, these all must happen at the same time, by chance. Might not this be considered so far beyond the possibility of chance genetic re-combinations as to seem miraculous?
Secularism can provide no definitive answers to any of life’s basic questions. It has only introduced in the long run the profoundest confusion by removing the possibility of any ultimate standards. So, we need a divinely inspired book from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and from the classical eras of Greece and Rome to give us definitive knowledge. We need higher revelation which alone provides a solid basis on which to organize and lead our lives in this world, and to prepare for the world to come as well.
But what about some of the negative aspects of the books of Moses? Three of them come readily to mind: (1) The harshness of some Old Testament laws; (2) the extermination of the Canaanites; and (3) the biblical endorsement of slavery. Volumes could be written about these and other related topics, but I would like to make some brief comments.
(1) Concerning the harshness of Old Testament laws, the penal laws were never intended to be applied to the world as a whole. They were applied to the Jewish people only in the rare circumstances of their deliverance from Egypt and their establishment in the Promised Land. Moral and ethical laws are expressly reaffirmed in the New Testament – but dietary laws, death penalties, many lesser penalties and outward forms of worship are expressly put aside.
When in the book of Acts the question was raised as to non-Jewish converts and their relationship to Jewish law, the vast majority of Old Testament laws were simply set aside (Acts 15:1-31). So when anyone asks Christians about selling someone into slavery, or putting homosexuals to death, or not being allowed to eat shellfish, they reveal only their own ignorance – the dietary rules and the death penalties for immorality having been expressly set aside by Christ himself.
Moreover, there were the unique circumstances of the Exodus. When God was directly present with the Israelites in such unique and remarkable ways, disobedience to his laws and commandments was a much greater direct offence to God, and hence dealt with more severely.
(2) As to the extermination of the Canaanites, in World War 2 the Allied Air Forces wreaked incalculable devastation indiscriminately on entire populations with no discrimination between combatants or non-combatants, old or young, male or female. I would guess that more civilians were killed in one or two air raids in WW2 than were killed in the entire conquest of Canaan – and do we have more power to destroy than God? God is the giver of life and death, and as such has the right to take anyone’s life anywhere and any time. Most accept that the Third Reich and Imperial Japan were so evil that the most radical means were necessary to destroy them.
Some of those who make the most noise about the destruction of the Canaanites care nothing about the vastly greater numbers of human life lost due to abortion, or by the crazy policies of secular Marxist fanatics in various countries in the 20th century. This is because they do not really care about human life at all – and why should they, if we are only meaningless blobs of chemicals, highly advanced animals with no immortal souls? No, they have no concern for human life, but seek only an excuse to reject God.
(3) As to slavery, we need to be aware that slavery in the ancient world was much different from the race-based chattel slavery that existed in the South before the Civil War. In the ancient world – including not only biblical Israel, but also Greece, Rome, and many other cultures – slavery was driven by other factors. It could be a punishment for certain crimes, especially non-payment of debts; and it was also the result of military conquests, in which people were routinely sold into slavery. The Old Testament put definite and specific limits and safeguards on this practice.
Apart from these and some other difficult areas – and life itself is difficult, and does not always admit of easy solutions – the Old Testament has many profound and beautiful teachings. Respect for parents, not stealing or practicing immorality, dealing with the poor and the rich equally in courts of law, charitable obligations to widows and orphans and the poor, obligations of kindness and fairness – these and other commandments of practical righteousness give the Old Testament a moral depth and richness that is essential to Christianity, and far superior to anything else that has come down to us from other cultures of that period. The poems of David, the wrestlings of Job, the reflections of Solomon, Isaiah’s and Jeremiah’s prophetic promises of God’s mercy and forgiveness, along with warnings of his inexorable and drastic punishments for sin – these are profound and sustained calls to a higher level of thought and spiritual existence than anything we can find in the works of Sartre, Darwin, Kant, Freud, and all of the other apostles of modern darkness and alienation.
In the light of the Old Testament we can see deep spiritual truths. The loss of these truths, especially as amplified and refined in the New Testament, has led to the current degradation of society that we can see all around us. Of course, there have always been problems of various sorts in all societies, but much of what we are seeing today is uniquely our own.
That God does exist; that the universe and our world and all that is in them did not come about by blind chance, but are the creation of a supreme and infinite Mind; that God is concerned about us, and will judge us for our actions; that there are rules from God which are given us for our own good – that the beauty and the majesty and the depth of the universe testify to the beauty and majesty and depth of God; that the evils and pains and trials of the universe have a purpose; that we live in a world corrupted by sin in which there is yet love and life and hope – these and other truths exalt the human mind and lead to a higher level of human flourishing with eternal consequences.
None of these things have been made untenable by science. The events and teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures – and of course of the New Testament as well – take place on a spiritual plane about which science has nothing to say. The reality of the God of the Bible, who spoke the worlds and all that is in them into existence out of nothingness by the power of his Word alone – such an inconceivably great being is infinitely beyond the petty and nitpicking criticisms of people who know nothing of reality beyond the lowest material plane.
The God of the Bible provides a foundation for real morality such as can be gotten nowhere else. Divine creation of human life explains the mysteries of consciousness as science will never do. The problem of sin also explains the otherwise insoluble dichotomy of the goodness and badness that we all know to be co-existing within us. How can humanity be so good and kind, yet also so cruel and evil? Darwin and Freud have nothing to say, but Moses and Paul do.
It has been said that religion makes good people do bad things – but secularism allows bad people to do bad things in the belief that what they are doing is right and good. The fact is that the problem of evil extends to the entire human race, and is found among devotees of all philosophies and religions.
Secularists have called the God of the Bible cruel and evil – but they know nothing of his infinite power, and of his divine right, as the author and giver of life, to take life in a way that none of us have the right to do. All of our lives are in the hands of God, and he can take them in any way and any time that he sees fit. Thus, the flood that destroyed the world in the book of Genesis, was a not a case of a trivial little humanly conceived God getting upset and having a temper tantrum. There are many passages in the Old Testament prophets, about how God sends his judgments – and what if the current state of Los Angeles and San Francisco are the result of God’s judgements? What if the uncontrollable flood of immigrants – the long term effects of which are incalculable – what if that too is the judgement of God?
We read in Jeremiah where God says, “And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them.” And again, also in Jeremiah, “Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”
We do not really understand the greatness and the infinite power of the God whom we are dealing with.
I would like to close with a couple of verses from Galatians in the New Testament:
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. H. L. Mencken, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924). Online edition https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19322/pg19322-images.html. Accessed September 11, 2003.