How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

When God tells the Israelites about creating Adam from the dust of the ground, he is saying he is the creator and all human beings are mortal. They will one day return to nothing but dust. This same language is used hundreds of years later in Psalm 103:13–14, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”