Do you find the Old Testament hard to believe? I find the New Testament to be compelling, but the Old Testament seems to be complete fiction.

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The OT was essentially written as fiction, by that I mean using the literary forms of fiction. And it was written for the spiritual edification of people that are very very different than we are today.

Trust me, if you spent your whole life as a farmer or carpenter and had to deal with constant war upsetting your apple cart, dragging your sons off to die in battles with people no different than you, to appease silly kings or idiots wanting to be king, you’d be writing books like these too.

When your kids ask you why brother Jacob jumped up, grabbed a spear and ran off in the middle of the night, and you didn’t want to bore him with a point-by-point analysis of the political issues of the day, you’d tell him about David and Goliath.

Some of the Bible is intended as scripture, like Genesis and Exodus. But a lot was folk legends, not intended to be scrutinized or believed in the same way. Scholars gathered it all up later and canonized it. By the time the New Testament was written, authors learned all the literary lessons and so they were able to make the stories more powerful, more poignant.