use of the bible as a source i have deleted a long section on the biblical mentions of the philistines there's nothing inherently wrong with using the bible as a source but it has to be done with care and via reliable secondary tertiary sources and that was not being done in this section the dangers of an approach like this can be seen in the failure to place the genesis table of nations for example in context it was treated in the th century work as if it were to be dated from the nd millennium when in fact modern scholarship is just about unanimous in putting it in the persian period modern secondary sources are a must