Kevin M. Levin, “What We Owe the Past” (3.18.26), kevinmlevin.substack.com. Accessed 4.1.26.
Future generations will almost certainly look back at us with bewilderment and grief. Perhaps it will be our treatment of animals, raised and slaughtered by the billion in conditions of documented suffering, which we know about and mostly prefer not to think about. Perhaps it will be climate change, not the fact of it, but the years we spent debating it while the window to act narrowed. Perhaps it will be something we cannot see yet, some cruelty so woven into ordinary life that we no more notice it than a medieval peasant noticed the theological assumptions that saturated his world.
If we hope that our descendants will say, they were limited, not monstrous, that they worked within what they could see, then intellectual honesty and consistency demands we apply the same generosity backward. Again, this does not mean abandoning criticism. It means that our criticism becomes more targeted and contextualized and therefore more useful when it is measured to what was actually knowable, actually resistible, actually imaginable in the time and place in question.
The Amateur Exegete 
I wonder sometimes if rather than focusing on the faults of our ancestors, a different approach might be a good alternative: recognizing those who stood out through their heroic deeds and ideas within the limitations of past eras.
So, for example, we can scratch our heads at some of the unusual beliefs of the ancient world regarding the shape of the earth, but at the same time appreciate the work (done by people like Eratosthenes) to establish that we live on an sphere-like astronomical object. Of course, this understanding would be further refined as time went on.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aye. This reminds me that one of my pet peeves in discussions about the Bible is the phrase “fairy tales from Bronze Age sheep-herders,” too readily tossed around by online atheists chasing the dopamine hit from being transgressive.
First, the Bible certainly has its fair share of mythology, fables, folk tales, and legendary embellishments, but it’s also a collection of poetry, history, theology, moral guidance, administrative advice, correspondence, etc. “Fairy tales” is just reductive, risible rhetoric.
Second, it’s Iron Age, not Bronze Age. History matters, fellow heathens.
Third, the books of the Bible are literary works largely composed, compiled, and copied by elite priest-scribes working in a freakin’ cradle of civilization, not superstitious, unlettered sheep-herders. (Not that there’s anything wrong with sheep-herding. And come to think of it, Seth Sanders makes a good argument that the early Hebrew variant of the Phoenician alphabet took shape in more proletarian, grass-roots circles than was the case with neighboring Egyptian and Mesopotamian court-centric cultures of writing.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
To be fair, most online atheists are more akin to “Bronze Age sheep-herders” than the biblical authors ever were.
LikeLike
Yeah, skeptics (speaking generally) need to be a bit more careful with their characterization of biblical authors, not to mention the rhetoric they use in debates.
After all, the earliest surviving artifacts (e.g. hand axes, flint tools, and cave art) of human history come from people (probably hunter-gatherers) whose lifestyle was no doubt closer to a “sheep-herder” than an educated scribe, even if animal domestication hadn’t then taken place on any large scale.
No matter how primitive their works might look to modern eyes, the Lascaux cave paintings are still something to behold some “17,000 – 22,000 years” later (time of composition is taken from “Lascaux” on Wikipedia).
There’s also those even older figurines whose original purpose still eludes scholars. But that would be to enter some rather odd territory, so I’ll just quote my old history professor’s humorous description of them as “those figures with the big attributes” and leave it at that.
Now let’s hear it for the Clovis and Beaker cultures…
LikeLiked by 1 person