Why the "There are so many interpretations of the Bible" claim is confused

[TheRocketSurgeon]

That being said, very few claims of contradictions and errors actually hold up under scrutiny. 

Many skeptics study the issue just enough to support their conclusions and then ignore everything else. Then they blow the apparent discrepancy totally out of proportion.

But on the flipside, are the inerrantists who hold the Bible to be the literal, physical, magical word of God. Can't have two more ignorant groups of people go at it than these two.

Except "many skeptics", meaning atheists (including most of us here on the forum) started out as Christians when studying the Bible, for the purpose of confirming our beliefs, and instead ran into so many morally-unpalatable concepts and/or contradictions that we ended up rejecting the Bible as an appalling piece of Bronze Age tribal warrior-sheepherder-priest nonsense.

My personal favorite is the passage in Genesis 30:25-43, where the Bible praises Jacob, the founder of Israel, for his "cleverness" in realizing that Lamarckian inheritance/plasticity is real (it's not!) and using that principle to make spotted sheep via stripes of white he cut into the bark of poplar branches he placed in their watering troughs when they mated, since he got to keep the nonwhite sheep. This is what people thought about evolution before Gregor Mendel discovered genetics, and it's dead-wrong.

Equally amusing-while-being-disgusting are the places where it explains how to own permanent slaves as property you can will to your children, as long as they are of another race (Lev 25:44-46), how you can beat those slaves within an inch of their lives as long as they don't die for the first couple of days after the beating (Exo 21:20-21), and a list of "divine commands" for the Hebrews to kill, rape, and enslave in the name of God that are far, far, too numerous to cite here. (I use quote-marks to indicate irony, since of course there were no divine commands, just humans using the name of God as a way to give their genocidal motives some divine enhancement/justification.)

The Bible is chock-full of the fingerprints of human ignorance and bigotry, showing that it is clearly and entirely made up by humans, rather than being the work of divine transcriptionists acting as secretaries for what God "revealed" to them. Whether or not some parts of it are historically accurate (and yet, many parts are not) is irrelevant to the clear evidence that it was humans, not gods, who made it up, and humans, not gods, who determine what parts are to be "metaphorical" and interpreted as we wish, or which parts are literal (and to be interpreted as we think it wishes to be). The fingerprints are there, if we stop wearing blinders of faith that tell us to ignore those obvious signs of human motivation in the actions/claims/commands of this imaginary divine being.