After a lot of thinking I decided to take down the post about 1 Samuel. I thought I was writing a reflective piece about handling a difficult Old Testament text, and to my astonishment it has been twisted by a number of bloggers to suggest that I, or Christians in general, defend genocide. As I said in the piece, that is the opposite of the truth. I wholeheartedly oppose it. Any claim to the contrary is false.

I guess some will think I just capitulated. That isn't the case. But it seemed to be generating much more heat than light. And therefore failed one of my criteria for good blog posts: is it helpful?