The bible, by todays standards, evidences morals we reject.

The argument silently assumes that 'more recent' equals 'more correct' — what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. That modern intuitions feel self-evident to us does not establish that they are the objective standard by which all prior eras must be judged; the question of whether current moral fashions are themselves correct is exactly what is in dispute and cannot be assumed as the premise. That said, the honest scholarly move is not flat denial but comparative and hermeneutical analysis. First, distinguish description from prescription: narrative texts (e.g., polygamy, Levite's concubine, Lot's daughters) typically narrate without endorsing, and the surrounding narrative frequently signals disaster following these episodes (Judges' repeated refrain 'everyone did what was right in his own eyes' functions as editorial critique, not approval). Second, apply comparative Ancient Near Eastern analysis: measured against contemporary law codes (Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian Laws, Nuzi/Mari texts), biblical law is consistently more restraining and humanizing — e.g., Exod 21:26-27 mandates manumission for injuring a slave (no ANE parallel affords slaves this remedy), Deut 23:15-16 forbids returning an escaped slave (unique in the ANE), and cities of refuge (Num 35) curb private blood-vengeance that other codes left unchecked (John Walton, *Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament*). Third, apply William Webb's 'redemptive-movement hermeneutic' (*Slaves, Women & Homosexuals*): many OT statutes function to regulate and restrain pre-existing evils inherited from surrounding culture, moving incrementally toward a trajectory whose endpoint is disclosed only in the New Covenant (Gal 3:28), not as God's timeless ideal frozen at Sinai.

The specific moral commitments modern secular society prizes — universal human dignity, opposition to slavery, equal worth regardless of sex or ethnicity — are not free-floating axioms discovered by secular reason ex nihilo; historian Tom Holland's *Dominion* traces how these commitments are the historically contingent inheritance of a Christian moral revolution (imago Dei, Gal 3:28, the early church's countercultural practice) rather than a universal human default (most civilizations, ancient and otherwise, took hierarchy, slavery, and inequality for granted without internal critique).