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Originally Posted by byHismercy
Can you first go into or expound on the reference to digging brass? I googled the term and only found one verse combining digging with brass. Understanding it is an alloy, I don't understand what we are supposed to understand from the expression, or what you believe about it....what you are conveying with it.
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I do not recall what version I was reading when I first came accross this years ago. It was probably when I was near 20, so 40+ years ago. It is not that it is some heinous error, but that it is a statement that on its face is not accurate. No one has a problem with it, but there are many other references that would be scientifically incorrect. You don't dig brass, but its components. The sun, moon, and stars do not move through the sky — we rotate on an axis which gives the illusion of the movement we think we see.
These are examples of places where "facts" of nature are made in the Bible that we know to be incorrect. But that is how the people of the day would understand what was going on. If God was inspiring an "inerrant" book, he would have seen to it that everything was factually accurate. He wouldn't have left so many things only partly explained, but would have fleshed them all out.
Instead, we find in the Bible stories/narratives in which we learn progressively more and more about God. It starts with one of the most compressed narratives imaginable. Creation — a grand and complex series of events — is described as a six-part play that can best be described as "summary." Only a very brief description that probably doesn' really describe any of the actual steps or actions but one — God did it. Did he only speak six times, once each day over the course of six days? Or was there something much more complex that is simplified into those 6 steps because the point was not the details of how the earth was made, but the fact that God made it? And because that was the goal, the description is far from scientifically "accurate." The earth itself constantly reveals its age as many times greater than 6,000 or so years.
Now there are clearly some miracles in the Bible that deny the ability to be scientific. And one of them could have been creating the earth in 6 literal days while hiding artifacts of billions of years for us to find. But it seems kind of capricious to have gone to all that trouble if the earth was really just brand new when Adam walked on the earth.
Then we get to the recording of battles in the OT. Was the annihilation of enemies that we know continued to exist an error of God? Or was it that men, in an era when those kinds of overstatements were the norm when writing of battle victories, wrote the words? Therefore the description is partly bravado on the part of man, not some "error" in the word-by-word dictation by God. So God didn't write everything in the Bible?
And if God was going to dictate it word-by-word, why wouldn't he write in a consistent voice and style? Why write simply for some, and in a more complex way for others (like Paul)? Peter wouldn't have written like Paul if he was the writer. But if God was really the writer, he suddenly has a much more robust language to use. But he didn't.
Instead, for the OT, we have the writings (or eventual recording of the oral stories) that men wrote/spoke after events in which they encountered God. The coming to Abraham and making a promise. The miraculous intervention in Egypt when he lied about Sarah being his sister. The saving of Jacob and his clan from the famine. The rescue from Egypt generations later. And so on. It is more difficult to discuss the prophets as it is likely that it is more than just men writing down what has happened. Yet even there, the particular words may not have been laid out, but only the sense of what was to be covered.
The NT is full of eye-witness accounts of events and statements, but even they do not simply record precisely what was said, but rather the things that impressed each of them. Consider that there are 2 different versions of the words Jesus used when telling the disciples how to pray. Is it "debts" or "trespasses?" It was only said once, but there are two different renderings. Is one "wrong" and the other "right?" In literal terms that would have to be the case. But in terms of the narrative that the two different writers were creating, they used different words — at least in Greek.
The point is that while there may be certain kinds of inconsistencies, and even errors in what is written down, the truth about God is learned a little more in each account. The first oral narratives provide grand themes, but no much details. The histories provide more, but also a lot of factual history of Israel that may not always be given in the manner that we would forensically call "facts" in this day and age. The gospels tell bits and pieces from Jesus' ministry, the most troublesome being John's gospel because it was not strictly chronological and covered many different things than what the other three did. They sometimes seem as if they are covering a different person.
Even where you think there might be something hinky in the narrative, do you learn about God? That is profitable for teaching. Probably not the part where the Israelites waxed barbaric in their description of the defeat of some enemy.
I realize that my analysis might make some question the Bible. But I don't. I just recognize the fallibilities of the writers and choose to see God revealed in the narrative.
And since there was not a complete "Bible" as we know it when Paul wrote that thing about "all scripture," why do we think that simply because it is included in the book that we call the Bible that it is all that there really is to "scripture?" Scripture is profitable for teaching. Reproof. Correction. Instruction in righteousness.
"Break their teeth in their heads" doesn't sound very instructive. But "God so loved the world" does. And the evidence of the whole of the Biblical narrative is that he does love the world.