Hi everyone and welcome to another episode, episode 156, of the Ancient Warfare Answers.

I'm Murray Dam. I'm the assistant editor of the magazine. And with me is Jasper Autas, the editor.

Today we've got a question from one of our patrons, Ken, and of course you could too could be a patron if you go to the website which is uh oh patreon yes patreon.com forward

slash ancient warfare podcast you can uh subscribe to the podcast and also get a copy of the magazine

if you are interested and of course ask a question ask us a question but you can do that anyway

now ken's question which y Yasper is going to answer,

is how useful are the accounts of warfare as described in the Old Testament? Ken is interested

in a discussion about sources as much as anything else. Why were they written to whom and which

biases might have been present? Are any of the Old Testament accounts helpful in triangulating sources?

Jasper.

Well, Murray, that's not a small question, is it?

And it's only the question that has occupied Bible students

and archaeologists, biblical archaeologists, specifically for, I don't know, 200 years or so,

because, of course, a lot of people have tried to go and find archaeological evidence for what they read in the Bible in the Holy Land and the ancient Near East in general.

So it's a complicated topic, and I'll try to say something sensible,

but it's really hard to do with this topic, of course.

I don't want to insult anybody.

So forgive me if I do.

And I'm also not a theologist, which is some of the questions that he's asking are more in

that vein.

But I think we should, when you read the, you know, when we read the Old Testament, of course,

the first, the oldest part of the Bible, you have to remember that anything that is described there is,

...