asaris

But that ignores several things. First of all, the scribes believed they were transcribing the word of God, so they were probably pretty careful. Second, their culture was much more of an oral culture than ours is (especially when we start talking about the OT). Third, and perhaps most importantly, when we've discovered manuscripts earlier than what we've had previously, there were almost always only minor differences (the sort where one person says hills and the other mountains).

Yeah, I don't remember that story being in the Bible either. There is a verse which says "A day in your courts is as a thousand elsewhere", but that's pretty clearly metaphorical (it's in Psalms). There's another in the NT that says "A thousand years to the Lord is as a single day", but when taken in context, it's clear that it just means to emphasize God's patience.

Purity laws were explictly revoked in the NT. Wrt slavery, that's a difficult issue. Most people I know would say that God was going easy on a people whose moral sensibilities weren't the same as ours; Christ says explicitly that this was the case with OT divorce law.

Funny, I'd say the same thing about people who say that the Bible should just be taken as a general guide, without having any principled way of distinguishing between passages we should follow and those we should ignore.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche