“We got to Canaan and killed every living Canaanite mammal” is a wild thing to come up with out of the blue without any supporting oral history.
But I’m not going down the rabbit hole of pondering the historical value of the Bible. It suffices me to know that there is some value in recorded oral histories, even if they cannot be simply taken at face value. It’s how we know nearly all we know about the Inca.
There’s a lot of scholarship out there which is very clear that the conquest of Canaan narrative is just propaganda. There may or may not be oral history behind it with a whisper of a memory of real events, but all the archaeological evidence points towards it being made up. And of course the bible contradicts itself in this regard not much later anyway.
“We got to Canaan and killed every living Canaanite mammal” is a wild thing to come up with out of the blue without any supporting oral history.
But I’m not going down the rabbit hole of pondering the historical value of the Bible. It suffices me to know that there is some value in recorded oral histories, even if they cannot be simply taken at face value. It’s how we know nearly all we know about the Inca.
There’s a lot of scholarship out there which is very clear that the conquest of Canaan narrative is just propaganda. There may or may not be oral history behind it with a whisper of a memory of real events, but all the archaeological evidence points towards it being made up. And of course the bible contradicts itself in this regard not much later anyway.