Person

Joshua Bowen

Intro

Joshua Bowen is an Assyriologist and the most academically credentialed of the current popular critics of the Old Testament. He holds a PhD in Assyriology from Johns Hopkins University and runs the Digital Hammurabi channel with his wife Megan Lewis, also an Assyriologist. He was raised and trained in Pentecostal Christianity, attended Bible college, served in the US Army, and later became an atheist.

He matters here for one reason: he is the critic most apologists are least equipped to answer. The usual dismissals do not apply. He reads Akkadian and Sumerian, he works from primary cuneiform sources, and most of what he says is mainstream critical scholarship rather than personal invention. An argument that works against a popular internet atheist will not work against him.

His two books that come up in debate are The Atheist Handbook to the Old Testament (two volumes, 2021 and 2022) and Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? (2022). The second is the one to prepare for.

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In full

Bowen occupies an unusual position in the apologetics landscape: a working Assyriologist writing at a popular level for an explicitly atheist audience, with the stated aim of equipping non-specialists to argue from the scholarly literature rather than from slogans. His method is to relay the mainstream critical consensus on the composition of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near Eastern background, supplemented by his own specialist competence in Mesopotamian legal and religious texts.

The rhetorical consequence is that the standard apologetic counters aimed at popularizers are misdirected against him, and using them costs credibility. He is not overstating his credentials, he is not relying on discredited nineteenth-century scholarship, and on most of his claims he is reporting a genuine majority position rather than advancing an idiosyncratic one. Engagement has to happen on the substance.

Principal claims

1. Composition. The Pentateuch is a composite work assembled over centuries from multiple sources, not a Mosaic unity. See Documentary Hypothesis.
2. The origins of Israelite religion. Yahweh emerges within a West Semitic religious environment, with the divine name plausibly attested in Egyptian topographical lists referring to Shasu nomads, and Israelite religion developing out of a Canaanite matrix in which El, Asherah and the divine council are inherited features rather than borrowed corruptions. See Yahweh Borrowed From the Canaanites Objection Defeater and Elohim Is a Divine Council Objection Defeater.
3. Late monotheism. Strict monotheism is a comparatively late development, with earlier strata reflecting monolatry or henotheism. See OT Polytheism Objection Defeater.
4. Israelite origins in Canaan. Israel emerged largely from within the Canaanite population rather than by external conquest. See Israel Emerged From Within Canaan Objection Defeater and Canaanite Conquest Objection Defeater.
5. Slavery. This is his sharpest and best-supported argument. He holds that the Mosaic legislation endorses genuine chattel slavery of foreigners, that the common apologetic description of biblical servitude as time-limited indentured labor is simply false as applied to non-Israelites, and that Leviticus 25:44-46 says what it appears to say. See Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater and Israelite Slavery Possession-vs-Ownership Defeater.

How to engage him

Concede the slavery point that is true, immediately. Leviticus 25:44-46 permits foreign slaves to be held permanently and inherited as property. Any response that describes all biblical servitude as seven-year indentured labor is false, Bowen knows it is false, and leading with it forfeits the exchange. The arguments that survive the concession are the ones worth making: the structural contrasts with the Mesopotamian codes, the accommodation and trajectory framework, and the fact that Israel's law creates rights in the slave that no neighboring corpus contains.

The comparative law material is where his own field cuts back. He is an Assyriologist, so the primary sources he works from are exactly the ones that supply the contrasts: the capital penalty for sheltering a runaway at Hammurabi §15-16 against the asylum requirement of Deuteronomy 23:15-16, the vicarious execution of a builder's son at §229-230 against the prohibition in Deuteronomy 24:16, the compensation-to-the-owner treatment of a slave's eye at §199 against the manumission required by Exodus 21:26-27, and the absence of any biblical death penalty for property theft. Full treatment at ANE Legal Codes, Comparative Context.

Do not concede the genre point without using it. The mainstream Assyriological position, which Bowen holds, is that Hammurabi is royal apologia rather than an enforced statute book. That cuts both ways: it weakens the argument that Babylonian practice was as harsh as the stele reads, and it equally weakens any inference from a harsh-sounding biblical clause to routine Israelite practice.

Do not fight the composition-history material on his terms. The documentary questions are a separate battlefield with its own defenses, and trying to win them inside a slavery or ANE-background exchange loses both.

Be careful with the deconversion narrative. Bowen's Pentecostal background is part of his public presentation and is sometimes used against him as evidence of bad faith. That is a Genetic Fallacy and it is also unkind. Polemical on the position, tender on the person.

See also

• ANE Legal Codes, Comparative Context, the comparative hub his slavery volume is aimed at
• Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater, the main response to his central argument
• Israelite Slavery Possession-vs-Ownership Defeater, the legal-category argument
• Chattel Slavery vs Biblical Servitude, the distinction and its limits
• Yahweh Borrowed From the Canaanites Objection Defeater, on the origins claim
• OT Polytheism Objection Defeater, on the late-monotheism claim
• Elohim Is a Divine Council Objection Defeater, on the divine council
• Israel Emerged From Within Canaan Objection Defeater, on Israelite origins
• Documentary Hypothesis, on the composition claim
• Old Testament Difficult Texts, the parent cluster
• Bart Ehrman, the closest analogue in New Testament studies, a credentialed critic writing at a popular level
• Paul Copan, the apologist whose work most directly addresses these arguments