[Serious] A Literal Bible. Answering questions

[Green Diogenes]

What we can learn from other disciplines shows that at least one city with surrounding towns, was wiped out by a comet airburst around 1500bc, at a site now called Tall El-Hamman, just north of the Dead Sea. The flash from the airburst is calculated to have been around 8000c, burning pottery. If you also understand the perspective of the people doing the writing, then it looks much more likely that the 'pillar of salt' is a visceral personal description of seeing another human getting evaporated by a brief moment of very intense light, as the result of a comet strike in the next valley. 

Are you aware that the authors of the papers that claim cited have roundly debunked that claim and repeatedly asked for a correction or retraction?
 
Outside of that, do you notice how you begin with the suggestion that magic book need not be literal - but default to psuedo-literalism anyway, as a conclusion, in the insistence that the story (and others, apparently) recount a historic event?  

Now..wholly within the context of just your own conclusion, and needing nothing other than your own critical thinking skills.  What sort of thing do you think would vaporize another human being circa 1500bce..within visual range of a witness, but leave that witness alive to tell the tale?

I do like your approach though.  Reading it with empathy, trying to feel for the human beings involved.  The trouble is that you're doing so in an implicitly literalist context.  What would you feel if you were a character in the story.  The authors, are not the characters.  It's the predispositions and messages of the authors that explain the narrative contents.  It's not a report from any front about a real event.  It continues on in this fashion to the very end.  With rebels, revisionists, polemicists, and pundits contextualizing their own life's experience, in their own time, through stories of an imagined past and characters familiar to their intended audiences.  In a word, mythbuilding.

I was aware that the site was claimed to be roundly debunked, but I never saw anything other than sophistic arguments based on mockery of religion, and using individual scientist's misinterpretations to rubbish their whole dataset, in the same way YECs rubbish everything from NASA just because of fish eye lenses in launch vehicles. 

Yes, I am completely aware of these different schools of thought. I'm trying to break apart the false dichotomy between them. The entire main point of my first post in this thread is that people are locked into a 'literal' reading which is just religious myths inserted on top of the Bible, and the text itself doesn't support that view. This effectively locks a huge area of study into the realm of "anti-science nonsense" which is avoided by anyone who wants to keep hold of a career, unless they want to go into the other lucrative business of pushing Anti-science nonsense, who are not concerned with truth. 


What do you mean by wholly within the context of just my own conclusion?

That is generally how you can understand religious stories, which have a lot of well documented patterns and a flexible relation to reality, yes. Understanding this is how you understand how specific "Bible Stories" and their surrounding cultural literature have been derived from a book which doesn't contain those stories.