Secular Bible Study: The Book of Joshua
I’m leading Secular Bible Study today, so here are my notes on the book of Joshua (org-mode version).
More details later, hopefully.
Update, Sat Apr 18 17:42:26 2009:
Well, that went pretty well, I thought. I didn’t get to give my presentation, just give out bits and pieces of it as they became relevant to the conversation. Then again, since I wasn’t really able to turn my disjoint collection of notes into a coherent presentation, it’s probably just as well.
I mentioned Iron Chariots, the counter-apologetics wiki (which is where I got the definitions of henotheism and monolatrism. (Consider this a plug for the site. All of you who attended had interesting things to contribute, so you might as well contribute to the wiki and share with the world.)
The topic of theologians tying themselves in logical knots to justify or rationalize things like the book of Joshua reminded me of this post by Greta Christina, comparing religion to fan fiction.
I’ve probably forgotten some references that I promised people. If so, please speak up in the comments.
Andrew,
I’m sorry I missed the study group today. I just read your notes – thorough with lots of references – nice work!
I see Joshua is another book of wanton, brutal mass murder & gruesome violence. Still it was nice of the Jericho lady to let two lonely single chaps spend the night with her and trust them enough to pay her back later with payment in kind. Very touching. She must have missed all her regulars later on though, maybe she hadn’t thought of that? Joshua himself seemed to be of a different disposition – obviously he was very keen to do the chopping off of all those penis ends by himself, nice work if you can get it I guess!
Martin.
Yeah, we tried looking for some moral lessons to be learned, or something like that, and came up empty.
Surely you’re not suggesting that soldiers in a foreign town would have ulterior motives for staying with a prostitute, are you?