All of the social teachings of the Bible make soooo much sense once you look at it as a collection of moral lessons to keep an early agricultural-based civilization stable. Oh, you’re saying God wants me to focus on working hard, having a lot of children with another person required to care for them, avoiding conflict with my neighbors, and obeying my superiors? Well, I’m not sure why He would have a need for a highly-reproductive and self-sufficient group of servile laborers, but He works in mysterious ways I suppose.
People often try to push back against all the homophobic passages in the Bible by pointing to the weird stuff in Leviticus, etc. about how it’s also a sin to eat shellfish or interact with a woman on her period. But all of that stuff was in the Bible for the same set of reasons! You shouldn’t commit sodomy because you need to have kids, you shouldn’t eat shellfish because that shit can kill you, and you should treat a woman on her period differently both because of ancient hygiene rituals and because she’s less fertile during this time. It’s a perfectly consistent set of instructions, just one that’s completely irrelevant today.
The hygiene hypothesis for some of the Biblical dietary laws is just that, a hypothesis, and IIRC it’s one that’s weakly or not at all supported–after all, lots of cultures have eaten insects or shellfish or animals without hooves and done just fine. I also think it’s a mistake to look at the Old Testament as, like, a handbook for how to organize a Bronze Age pastoral society, for the same reason it’s a mistake to look at the OT as as inspired divine message–both presume a univocality to the Bible, and a common intent that would have been alien to the authors of the individual texts within it, and to all but the very last redactors of those texts–they were not collected into what we think of as “the Bible” until centuries after they were written. Each text, and in some cases each author of each stratum of each text, had their own themes of concern, their own goals, and their own social and political milieu they were writing in.
My conclusion–that this is not a good book to try to use as a handbook to live your life by–is the same, but I think this view is rather flat, and misses what is interesting about the Bible and many of the texts in it. It also misses that fundamentalist readings, readings that do presume univocality, are basically agnostic of the text. What I mean is, much like constitutional “originalism,” it’s very much a conclusions-first way of reading, that then constructs a justification based on what’s necessary to get those conclusions out of the text in question, and applies logically contradictory hermeneutical formulae, such that you can retrieve an arbitrary reading that defends whatever entrenched system of social or political power is important to you out of the text. For understanding how those systems of power operate, and how they perpetuate and justify themselves, I don’t think the actual textual content of the Bible is particularly important, except in certain incidental aesthetic details.
In adolescence I got a book from one of the local used bookstores that greeted a fairly literate population whose historic distribution of commercial property no longer corresponded to lived usage patterns by setting up in the obsolete spaces, the book was something like Cows and Witches, it was a collection of some British pre-Slate columnist’s attempt to explain everything by references to bsnkshots off everything else you could follow if you’d been to college, it accounted for pork being treyf as it would actually have been really appealing in the period Levant but if you tried to scale a culture based on it the power distribution would screw everything up
