This is an interesting one for the question of inerrancy, strictly defined. I’m in the process of writing a blog about the role of inerrancy in historical Christian thought, and the case of exaggerating Old Testament accounts is one that Luther brings up. He frankly admits that the accounts are not strictly correct, but are being overstated for effect, just as other historic accounts from that period were.

when he was answering the challenge about the deaths of young children and the unborn in the Bible (when women were killed in the conquest), WIlliam Lane Craig used Himma’s line of reasoning – saying that it wasn’t as horrible as the skeptic made it sound, because these being were not culpable of sin and therefore went to heaven!

I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. I think the critique I offer against Himma would not apply to the special case Craig cites. More interestingly however I am not sure Craig’s argument is necessary, this is because I have come across some arguments lately which contend that the references to killing every one in the conquest narrative are actually hyperbole. Wolterstorff gave a paper on this at Notre Dame recently citing internal evidence within the text for this conclusion. Funnily enough around the same time I have come across some of the writings of Kitchen, Hess and Younger who note amongst other things that the use of such language is a common hyperbole in Assyrian, Hittite and Egyptian annals of war this is something I have been reflecting on a bit lately and may blog on at some time in the future when I have studied it in a bit more depth.

Btw next years STAANZ conference is in Dunedin so you and Max can both attend.

I came across alot of these spiritual idiots a number of years ago when I used argue abortion, but didn’t realise there were Christian idiots as well. I just thought only pagans argued that way.