Reading the bible can make more sense if you try to come up with the motives for certain passages. Some of them are fairly obvious. For example, a newly formed church in early Christianity is having difficulty with leadership or with certain followers doing things that others don’t like.
“Well what have we here? We just found this letter that Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus. In it he tells Timothy that women are supposed to keep their traps shut in church. Got it? God wants you to shut your piehole.”
The Pastoral Epistles of 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus are probably all later Pauline forgeries to further certain agendas within the early church.
I can imagine that admonitions against blends of more than one fabric or growing different crops in adjoining fields in the old testament had more to do with which merchant had influence with the rabbis than a deity’s distaste in fashion choice or shellfish.
“Damn that Zebulun! His new woolen/flax blended fabric is far more popular at the market. No one wants to buy my woolen garments. ‘They’re too itchy,’ they say. Well I’ll show him. My cousin Levi is very powerful in the Synagogue…”
The story of Elijah and the bears is obviously a twisted fantasy penned by a bald rabbi who had issues managing his anger with the kids that teased him. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a number of tragic ‘bear attacks’ near the village of that author.
“The villagers are getting suspicious of all these mutilated kids turning up. Maybe if I start telling a story about God sending bears to maul children that mock God’s favorite follower, they will just assume that a bear killed those kids….”
The entire book of Revelations can be explained as an hallucination brought on by consumption of Amanita muscaria, a magic mushroom common on the island of Patmos.
The entire bible makes so much more sense seen in light of the very human shortcomings of its authors. Maybe that’s why believers fall so short in trying to make it into something mystical.
Gotta Stop Killin'...Maybe Not! 