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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I mean a lot of fedora tipping atheist scholars will try and date most of the Old Testament to slightly before or during the Babylonian Captivity at the earliest (so around 600 BC) but if you believe that Moses wrote the five books of Moses then that dates them solidly within the Bronze Age. And the books of Moses and Joshua are all about conquering the holy land because God gave it to them. That was their motivation, but their actual actions often involved completely eradicating the local populace, which isn't too far off from what we see bronze age morality as. Mind you I'm religious and have no issues with the Israelites wiping out the Canaanites but without the divine justification it would be pretty awful.

That's fair and to be clear I certainly wouldn't claim that ancient morality was the same as ours. But I'd also be skeptical that there was no change in culture or values across regions and time periods, and likewise would think there's a limit to what records from one era in Babylon could tell us about a different era in Greece. And if the books were actually written in the 600s then this would be fairly close to the time period the Iliad was written in itself, and I would even have the same questions about a (comparatively) modern culture writing moral narratives about a more ancient one.