[Serious] The Story

[Angrboda]

How do you know this?

You mean, how do I know they are attempting to communicate a vision or divine experience? Usually because that is how many chapters are introduced:

• "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple" (ESV, Isaiah 6:1).
  

• "In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar a vision appeared to me, Daniel, after that which appeared to me at the first" (ESV, Daniel 8:1)
  

It's suspected that the book of Daniel, while pretending to recount visions of future events is actually written after the events for rhetorical reasons. It was a common exercise in rhetoric in ancient schools to attempt to write or speak in the style of a great author or orator. Many of Paul's epistles are thought to be forgeries. It was also rather common for groups of people, schools, to write as if they were a legendary author (Laozi comes to mind). It is a common literary device to write from a first-person perspective even when no such first-person perspective existed. Given all the millions of religious accounts of visions and the mere fact that only a few or none of them can be true, the first-hand accounts of most of them are not true. And we know that various other motives than telling the truth are strong in writing pertaining to religious topics. The book of Deuteronomy is likely not what it appears to be given its miraculous "discovery" in an ancient temple after the fact.

Given the ubiquity of artful but false narratives in this genre, why do you think a naive reading of these statements is most likely to be true?