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Thanks for the reply, James. I'll probably parse out responses.

What do you mean? What lesson are we to derive from David's child being killed for being born a bastard?… What's the anachronism…

The OT is comprised of theology, history, myth, etc. that was composed, revised, orally transmitted and finally written over centuries. It is the record of a group of related people in the ancient world and reflects their view of events and their view of what the events mean. It was of great value to them as knowledge and for their identity.

We can start with this in order to keep the proper context. Our modern interpretation from outside this group is difficult, even more so if one takes the Christian view of the Jewish scripture. We can remember the first Christian martyr Stephen was killed in part for teaching God does not reside in the Temple. Supreme blasphemy in Judaism.

We can also remember that much of Jesus teaching was that the scriptures were being wrongly interpreted and applied by the Jews. There was debate early on in Christianity of whether God in the OT was the same or different God. The point here is that what meaning we take from the OT is not standard, not the same across even Judeo Christianity.

At the bottom line, we have in David's story some history and its context according to the writers of the time. If we assume the history is correct we have that David had a child out of wedlock who died and its death was attributed to God.

An anachronism, I think comes in when we don't realize that the people we are talking about, and the others in the region, had no concept of the "laws of nature." Everything in their experience was directly and personally ordered by God or gods. The very concept that God could enter into contracts, or covenants, with man was a novel concept.

I subscribe to the view that what we see in scripture is differences in man's understanding of God and his relationship to the cosmos. We see both contradictory views and a wide arc of progression. It is to these people's credit that they saw no need to exclude one view or the other or make all scripture conform to one view.

The OT is comprised of theology, history, myth, etc. that was composed, revised, orally transmitted and finally written over centuries...

You make good points, D, but you must remember that the idea that the OT God was not the same God as the one of the NT was only promoted by Marcion, whose teaching was condemned by the Church in his lifetime (mid second century).

Appealing to different interpretations is somewhat disingenuous because by the end of the second century (mostly through the work of Irenaeus of Lyons, c. AD 180, Against Heresies), the Old Testament was reintegrated theologically into the Christian doctrine. It is also worth mentioning that most if not all 2nd century Christian apologetics not only quote from the Old Testament (actually the Greek-language Septuagint which differs from the Hebrew Massoretic Text at times radically), and that, more importantly, the New Testament is full of Old Testament reference verses.

There is no instance where Jesus, for example dismisses or condemns the slaughter ordered by the OT God of any of the Canaanite settlements, or of David's bastard son, etc. The only instances where Jesus diverges from the commonly held practice of Judaism is in disputing the "eye for an eye", or washing of the hands before meals. His main thrust in accusing the Pharisees and the Sadducees of not knowing the scriptures have to do with him being the the "I AM" of whom Moses allegedly wrote (although no such verses sexist), and for them not believing that God sent him.

Most of these argument are somewhat manipulated by Christian authors, and easily debunked by Jewish scholars. But to the superstitious Greeks in search of mystery religions who knew nothing about Judaism, these stories made perfect sense. In fact, some of the things Jesus is quoted as saying are simply so outrageous that no Jew would ever said them!

So, the disagreement with the Old Testament was not over the morality of some of the stories in it, but mostly over the Jewish refusal to believe Jesus' claim that he is the Jewish messiah (he simply doesn't fulfill the OT prophesies what that messiah ought to be).

There is also evidence of blatant and scandalous alteration of Jewish scriptures by the Christian scribes, so as to make OT prophesies and stories appear as pointing to Jesus. I know some of the FR Bible believers^TM crowd would take issue with this, but that's to be expected.

So, in summary, your post is a distinction without difference. The important thing to remember is that the Church accepts the OT as God-inspired and inerrant in terms of spiritual and moral truth, along with the NT, and that the moral and spiritual truth of the OT was never questioned or condemned by the Church or the NT writers.