Chris

I doubt they’ve said much different, and nor would they. The Bible isn’t a science textbook and doesn’t set out to be. Furthermore, it treats history in the way those who wrote it treated history, which shouldn’t be surprising. Bronze Age warrior kings understood the world in quite different ways than we do. That doesn’t mean that Christians shouldn’t claim the Bible is inerrant, but it does mean they shouldn’t try to make it say things it never intended to say.

For example - certain sections of the book of Joshua claim the Israelites swept through Canaan and utterly destroyed the tribes already living there. Then later on in Joshua and on into the later history, in the book of Judges, it’s clear there are actually plenty of other tribes still in the land. If Joshua was a history textbook you would have to conclude it was pretty useless. But that isn’t what it is. It contains historical detail, for sure, but actually its usefulness lies in the way it discusses the relationships between God and people, and God’s unfolding relationship with humanity. In the middle of all that, its authors express themselves in ways absolutely consistent with the Bronze Age culture in which they lived. If you’re a warrior chieftain of that period, you always claim to ‘utterly destroy’ your enemies from the face of the earth. It would look odd if you didn’t. To return to the point I made earlier, this is why it’s important to maintain the distinction between inspiration (which belongs to God) and authorship (which belongs to people inspired by God). Attempting to emphasise the Bible’s divine inspiration by ascribing authorship to God creates all sorts of problems, because if you do that you suddenly have no means of understanding the extremely human, culturally-rooted ways in which the Bible speaks.