The themes, arcs, symbolism, prophecies, moral structures, deeper messages, all of that stuff.
God, by definition, defies human understanding. In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas, the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.
There's plenty of history in there too, of course. Often seen from different perspectives.
Though your argument is unconvincing, I still disagree, because now you are employing syllogism. The Bible is an anthological compilation of sacred literature of radically different genres, connected only by belief that they are revelations of God.
> God, by definition, defies human understanding.
Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding: by God, you mean the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority, the supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Or perhaps you are referring to Jesus of Nazareth, the notorious Cynic philosopher, poet and rebel Jew that dared to suggest loving one's enemy, who knocked over tables and caused a commotion at the Temple in Jerusalem, passed bread while saying, "do this in memory of me," and was crucified. I think I know what you're getting at, but, in fact, most ordinary people defy human understanding.
> In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas,
I think you must mean Buddhists.
> the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.
Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?
No, I mean Zen people. This includes Zen Buddhists.
> Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?
https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
> Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding...most ordinary people defy human understanding
Quite true. Another argument in favour of religion, at least as a starting point. I don't think we're going to make much progress here. Perhaps a long conversation over several glasses of wine, but not on the Internet.
There are many statements in the Bible that God is "beyond understanding" but when God shows up he seems cut from similar cloth as every other ancient sky-father deity, which is to say mercurial, violent and authoritarian (as expected of authority figures of the time) but still comprehensibly human.
But the universe is absurd, isn't it? I mean, look at yourself, where you're sat, what's going on. It's crazy, and yet it has meaning. And if you spend a while contemplating the fact that the source of the universe must be beyond the confines of space and time, I think that's ample material to get started with.
The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.
You or others may read the Bible and find some sense of a God beyond those confines in its pages, but I find that God to be depressingly limited in that regard. The God of the Bible is the God of tribesmen who hadn't even smelted iron, a God that demands blood sacrifice and plunder, not the being who crafted the meticulous balance of universal constants, relativity or quantum mechanics. The God of the Bible is small compared to what we now understand of the universe.
Seven days of Genesis isn't crazy. Evolution is crazy. Hundreds of thousands of years of struggle from small, scared primates to sentient apex predators that invent language, civilization and technology and discuss the nature of divinity over the internet is crazy. A fish with its own windshield[0] is crazy. The vast majority of the universe being void and most of the rest being something we can only call "dark matter" because we don't really understand it is crazy. Black holes and pulsars and the Great Attractor are crazy. The Higgs field is crazy.
>The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist family with Pentecostal friends and relatives in the Bible Belt. Trust me, I've read the Bible. But to metaquote Douglas Adams, it's enough for me to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe faeries dwell at the bottom of it.
I like the Bible as a work of literature, poetry, philosophy and even moral teaching (disregarding the Apostle Paul's misogyny, and the OT in its entirety, and see George Carlin's bit for my opinion of the Ten Commandments[1].) but as far as its depiction of God goes, it's just one culture's set of evolving opinions, out of hundreds if not thousands or more. It has its value from an anthropological and cultural perspective, but no more or less so than any other.
[0]https://www.mbari.org/barreleye-fish-with-tubular-eyes-and-t...