Reddit reviews The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites

You're not the first to struggle with these issues. Here are some books that helped me:

Inspired, by Rachel Held Evans

The Bible Tells Me So, by Peter Enns

The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, by John Walton

The Exodus by Richard Elliot Friedman is a good moderate-liberal academic-light book on the historicity of the Exodus/Conquest. Probably can't beat Lost World of Israelite Conquest by John Walton.

>why wouldn't you just wholesale reject that 1% then?

Because the cultural distance and the time distance between me and the actual events lead me to tolerate a margin of error for what I can and cannot grasp about the Bible. I choose to let the clear parts enlighten the confusing ones, and I'm OK with not understanding everything. That being said, I'm a bit angry at God for how the Bible is. But while there are things in the Bible that my gut would tell me come from men, I'm still very much inclined to believe that the essence of the Bible is from God.

That being said, if God is God, then this is His world. So if he wants to kill a few thousand Egyptian babies (who were all going to be destroyed anyway), whether He does it when they're babies, or in the Last Days, it's pretty much the same to me. Also, who am I to say that my Western, 21st century view of justice and human rights is the right one?? That's where I have to trust God.

The stories about rape and other conquest collateral damage are much harder to stomach. And it's a topic that I'm about to study, after spending 3-4 years on the NT and the Historical Jesus (which takes a lot of energy, as I'm not a theologian, and I have a full-time job, kids, yadda yadda yoda). Also, Bible inerrancy is a doctrine I had to take distance from.

We're in a 21st century, post-modern world, where most of what we think is shaped by these principles. In other words, we're all wearing glasses. But we can't really understand how much these glasses affect or distort "truth". So I try to be humble. And ultimately, this leads me to trust Jesus, because he spoke like no one before or after him, and he is the center of the Bible's stories of new creation, return from exile, and redemption. He's too perfect a fit for the accomplishment of OT expectations to be just another prophet.

I'm rambling.

Anyway, if I have one book to recommend about harsh OT passages, it would be the Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, by John Walton.