Those of you who have been reading here for a long time may
remember that I have struggled with the idea of Bible history being
authoritative. Many things were done by many people during the roughly 4,000-year
period during which the history of mankind is explored in scripture, some of
them good and some of them bad. We can learn from all of those stories, but
that doesn’t mean we ought to imitate the conduct of everyone we find in them.
Abraham makes a better role model than Ahab, but even Abraham was far from
perfect.
Accurate history simply records what happened.
Telling you what you should conclude about it — or, much more importantly, what you should do about it — generally requires some sort of
editorial comment or authorial aside. As Hume famously put it, you can’t get ‘ought’ from ‘is’.