And you continue to make errors.

1. I said Josiah was the only "ideal" king in the House of David. David was its greatest king for many, many reasons, but not its "ideal" king, which is painfully obvious to anyone reading the later stories about David. I countered your absurd statement that Solomon was the "greatest, wisest and holiest". He was only the wisest, and that was tarnished by his large number of wives and concubines (the worst part about that being the fact that many were foreign and worshipped foreign gods). If you seem to think that you were not in error, please provide something other than conjecture. There are several statements throughout the Old Testament that lay out clearly how a king is to behave to be pious, and only Josiah meets them. Every king other than Josiah is mentioned to have "done bad in the eyes of Yahweh". 2 Kings 23-25 says, regarding Josiah, "And there was none like him before him, a king who returned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to the Torah of Moses, and none arose like him after him." A very long analysis of Josiah's reign can be found in Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?.

2. You continue to labor from a false reading of Scripture with respect to adultery. First, you ignore common prostitution, which is never prohibited. Second, you say "it's just adultery for a married man to have sex with anyone but his wife" when this is patently and expressly not the case. The statement is that if a man is found lying with a woman who is the "wife of a husband" (or "mistress of a master" literally), then both shall be killed. This means that all sexual relations with unmarried women are licit unless for some other reason they are prohibited. Third, your "playing the harlot in her father's house" statement overlooks several key and vitally important parts of the passage. It refers only to young women virgins (na'ara bethulah), which means that any woman who is not a virgin (such as a divorcee or a widow, or an innocent victim of rape, among others) can have sex with men. It also refers only to young women (na'ara), because after the woman reaches a majority she is no longer prized property or under the complete domination of her father. It SPECIFICALLY changes the language from passage to passage in Deuteronomy - the adultery section specifically says ishah, which means ANY woman, whereas the passages that you are citing say na'ara bethulah, which means a young girl who is a virgin.

The only people who were REQUIRED to marry virgins were the high priests (Lev. 21:13-14). All other people could marry non-virgins. The "whoring in her father's house" statement refers SOLELY to women who are REPRESENTED AS BEING VIRGINS WHEN THEY ARE NOT. The statement at Deuteronomy 22:28 - "If a man will find a young virgin girl who is not betrothed, and he'll SEIZE her and lie with her" is nearly universally recognized as discussing rape, just as the passages before it do, as the "seize" verb used (t-f-s) means "to seize, to CAPTURE".

Any woman who had reached a majority and would no longer be considered "marriageable" could become a prostitute (as was often the case). Ironically, the genealogy for Jesus in Matthew names four women, and all four of those women were not traditional "wives" - first Tamar, who pretended to be a temple prostitute (this was before the Law was handed down banning it) to seduce her father-in-law, then Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho, then Ruth, whom you've already been so kind as to mention, and finally Bathsheba the adulteress. And yes, what David did to her was "bad in the eyes of Yahweh". Obviously prostitutes aren't that uncommon, are they?

3. I am not a Biblical literalist. It's funny that you say I'm acting like a Biblical literalist simply because we are arguing about WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS and I have the temerity to actually USE THE SOURCE TEXT as a basis of making that determination. When people try to use the Bible to imply things that are not stated stated in the Bible, I will make damn sure that they know what they're talking about, and you have not shown that you know anything beyond what a simple Wikipedia read could give you. You for your part, then, had better make damn sure you can back up the wild statements you make because, unlike your political posts where your verbal diarrhea and scattershot tactics ultimately express nothing more than your own unique spin on reality, we are working off an easily verified set of source materials (the Bible). However, I don't believe most of the stories of the Bible as literal facts, and Jewish tradition says I'd be a fool to. Christians are all over the place on that one, probably due to the large number of uneducated fools who occupy positions of influence in many Christian denominations.

4. You once again made unfounded statements regarding genocide in antiquity, namely: "You know the ancient drill: Kill all "men" (any boy old enough to carry a spear), impregnate all the women, carry the able bodies off as slaves and salt the earth so anyone who manages to survive has no way to grow food. Are you saying that's all just falsified intimidation combined with embellishments centuries later? Sprang forth fully formed like some R rated Athena? Assyria doesn't seem to have engaged in that much, but genocide via relocation and assimiliation rather than mass slaughter and enslavement was one of the biggest Assyrian contributions to ancient culture. The way I recall the biblical text we're selectively treating as an authority that's how Israel ENDED, not how it began, and the land hungry Israelites didn't have many places to send conquered people at the birth of their nation regardless."

What a load of bullshit you've just shovelled here. Find a genocide from antiquity that is adequately documented and proven. Taking ancient propaganda at face value and treating it as fact is a sure way to discredit yourself. For example, the famous Merenptah Stele of Egypt says that Merenptah "wiped out Israel; its seed is no more". We know that isn't the case, as over 14 million people alive today can tell you. Selective punishment of the sort you're talking about happened in the ancient world, and was a not uncommon fate for rebelling cities in many ancient cultures. It happened to Carthage at the end of the Punic Wars. However, killing people in a rebelling city is not the same as GENOCIDE. At no point did the Romans say "we are going to crucify every inhabitant in every settlement where Punic is spoken and destroy the population that comprises the Carthaginian Empire".

You make statements and you can't back them up with anything. Anything. Cite the "well-documented genocides" of antiquity that you claim exist. If they are truly "well-documented" as you claim, you shouldn't have to resort to inferring their existence on the basis of vague statements made in ancient propaganda that generally only referred to a city here or there, usually as a punishment for rebellion.

5. You misunderstand my intentional lack of recognition of the "paternity" issue. It's irrelevant to what we're talking about. It has nothing to do with any of the issues that I addressed in my response. I said I thought that paternity issues (which I never denied as being valid concerns in many cultures in antiquity; in fact, I said exactly that) had little to do with why female masturbation and lesbianism were ignored, and why there is no prohibition on oral or anal heterosexual sex or, arguably, male masturbation. The simple fact is that they don't. They have a whole hell of a lot to do with the idea of marriage.

6. Your final point about the "spirit of the law" shows an incredible amount of willful ignorance about exactly how precise Jewish law gets. The reason that Christianity was so oppressive is that it placed a "spirit of the law" set of interpretations on what was a highly legalistic text to begin with. As Jewish scholars note, IF there were a situation in which it was possible that two women would be in the same bed (both being wives of the same man), there would have to be some mention of what touching was permissible and what wasn't. Furthermore, the prohibition on temple prostitution but not on regular prostitution is either intentional or the result of one of the worst legal codes ever created by man. It would be like writing "You cannot kill someone with a knife or sword" but say nothing about clubs, arrows, strangulation, etc. Your assertion that it was difficult for it to occur is contradicted not only by the frequency with which prostitutes are encountered in the Old Testament, but also by the fact that you are misreading the text to begin with to assume that portions discussing rape are talking about all unmarried sex.

7. I am sorry to hear that you are an evangelical Christian. I'm sure that it was quite clear to you that I was using that term in its common sense meaning, and not to provide you with an intro to affirming your faith.