(May 24, 2018 at 11:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote: The exodus narrative is a microcosm of the entirety of the ot. Garbled semi-history, misplaced in time and edited for certain purpose.......then fucking shredded in transportation and recobbled back together by the remaining elements of society that weren't -always- the brights bulbs in the set.
-then along comes some random nutballs...taking a look, they say to themselves "legit, Imma build a whole new religion out of this material, it;s fantastic!"
When you really step back and consider how all of this went down, theres no idiocy or atrocity committed in the name of god that;s even remotely surprising.
The answer to the OP Q is, pretty damned stupid, but not just the isrealites...and not nearly as stupid as the stories suggest. A significant portion of the target audience for any of these stories..were children. They were made to propagandize children.
It pays to remember that all of the biblical stories are used to illustrate the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 34:11-28 and that the miracles are based on Exodus 34:10. Consequentially the stories may or may not make logical sense because the purpose is for the listener (or reader) to associate the story with one of the Ten Commandments. Sometimes the stories show the "good" results of obeying the particular Commandment and other times it shows the consequence of disobeying the Commandment.
People have trouble with the biblical stories because they don't know that or even know what the real Ten Commandments are. So in effect they are just reading a bunch of words without appreciating how intricate the whole fairy tale is. A person should be able to read any biblical story and identify which Commandment it illustrates and if it shows the positive of obeying it or the negative of disobeying it.
The Bible wasn't written as a complete book until the 680s-690s when a committee of story tellers, writers, and artists produced three master copies each weighing 75 pounds. It didn't exist until then. So they were able to weave a very complex tale that flows from book to book. They also cleverly included all kinds of clues to show that it was just an elaborate prank designed to fool the gullible church leaders. Of course there were bits and pieces of various manuscripts and the oral stories but they didn't contain all of the dialogue that's now found in the Bible. The committee wrote that.
