Before reading thread posts…I am going to say how I feel. I don’t think that any part of the bible should be taken literally. I actually read something recently making an argument that the bible was literally the word of god…word for word. Perhaps the most compelling reason that it stated was the amount of events that are described in the bottle that archeologists and earth scientists have shown to be true. Of course, that just mean the author was there for that stuff. Everything else was essentially stating that the bible was true because the bible said it was true.
I don’t believe the bible is the word of god. There is one part of the bible we can accept as potentially being the word of god – 10 commandments. Everything else was written by divine inspiration.
People who use that as evidence to it being the word of god have no standing. Divine inspiration is described as the concept coming from god, the word from man. That just implies fallibility in translation. Accepting that it is divine inspiration, though, god’s mind is perfect. Man’s is not. God has perfect communication. Man does not. God will attempt to inspire man in a manner so that he can use is poor language to try to capture god’s perfect word. They will fail to get it perfect.
Then there’s transcription pre-printing press. No proof that there has been no change transcription to transcription. Then, translation. Then, translation again and again. Then several different translation. Personally, I like the King James v. Good News approach to Leviticus – KJV addresses men lying as women as “an abomination” whereas the Good News tells people don’t, “God hates that.”
Biblical scholars continue to debate the validity of adhering to various parts of the bible…especially considering the effect of the new covenant of Jesus on the applicability of the laws of the old testament.
On a more personal note…I don’t believe in divine instructional scriptures in the Judeo Christian framework. I like the Eden story as a metaphor…but are we to believe that god expelled mankind, whom he had given free will, from the garden to “toil” physically for eating from the tree of knowledge, but give us an instruction book on how to live saying exactly what we needed to do to get into heaven? I feel like a more significant punishment is to give us a whole bunch of instruction books, no info on which was the right one, and let us use our free will and knowledge try to figure out how to live a good life without any clear rules. That’s the toil – trying and failing again and again to regain the bliss we had prior to a fall from grace.
Adherence to words is always problematic. They’re always a different interpretation. I try to find what rings true, until I find something that rings truer.