An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries

In the end this kind of comes down to a belief or not in free will, which is a faith based discussion since we can never ethically prove whether we have free will or not being our own observer.

I figured "giant" could be a metaphor, after all it's in a collection of traditions of pastoralists, wherein God rejects the agriculturalist's offering, who then kills his sheep herding brother.

Then the farmer builds the first city, and his descendents are the first blacksmith, the first musician, the first dancer (debateably), and the first animal farmer - who also often conflicted with semi-nomadic herders.

Great metaphor for the Iron Age equivalent of the Range Wars.

I think there are some good reasons why we don't call them "forgeries".

One is that people in the ancient world had different understandings of authorship from what people do today. Today, if you are copying a text written by someone else, either you copy it verbatim, or you very clearly mark your changes, so no one mistakenly thinks they were the work of the original author. In ancient times, people didn't necessarily think there was anything wrong with "improving" a text while copying it, and not failing to note the changes.

Nowadays, it sometimes happens that an author dies with a work unfinished, and a close friend or colleague is called upon to finish it off. However, we'll make it very explicit that's what going on, and to fail to do so is seen as unethical. In the ancient world, it was quite common for students to add stuff to texts written by their late teachers, based on their oral recollections of what the teacher said – or even just their opinions on what the teacher would have said – and few thought it necessary to explicitly note that they were doing it.

As these particular texts came to be seen as holy, intentionally changing them began to be seen as sinful. However, there was likely a lengthy period – possibly measured in decades – between the first drafts, and when they came to be seen as too holy to intentionally alter any further.

Finally, "forgery" generally implies something done to be intentionally deceptive, and we don't have any evidence that the authors of these texts were intentionally deceiving anyone. Even if they wrote falsehoods, for all we know, they honestly-yet-mistakenly believed they were true.

> For a more recent example, you don't see the term used to describe The Book of Mormon, which is purported to have been written two millennia before non-Mormons think it was written.

Part of the problem with calling it a "forgery", is that could be interpreted as making an assumption about Joseph Smith's psychology – that he was a conscious charlatan. While non-Mormons aren't going to believe he was a genuine prophet, genuine prophet and conscious charlatan aren't the only two options – is it possible that he was deluded? That he honestly, however falsely, believed that God was revealing stuff to him? Even if he was "making stuff up", was he consciously aware he was doing it, or was it unconscious creativity, which he subjectively experienced as coming from outside of himself, even though in truth it didn't? One of the reasons why scholars don't call it a "forgery", is it allows them to avoid that debate except when they specifically want to delve into it.