It's really not that complicated Leauki. We tend to make things much more complicated than they really are don't we?
I found that the story became more complicated the more Hebrew I learned and then even more so when I started learning Sumerian mythology and reading about the ancient Assyrian language.
As a child, knowing the story in native tongue only, I thought it was a simple version of a more complicated truth.
Now I am beginning to realise that it is the summarised version of a gigantic mythology which was taught to the Children of Israel but has its basis all over Mesopotamia (Iraq), Aram (Syria), and Canaan (Lebanon and Israel).
The Sumerian and Semitic mythology that was before the Bible (remember the Bible was only given to Moses _a long time_ after many of the events it tells of) has only been written down in distinct versions much later. And I believe that to understand the Bible correctly we have to know all of that mythology so we can know what it was the Bible was correcting.
I'll give you an example.
This article tells the story of no X signs. (You don't have to read the entire article. It is about software development.)
When you go into a restaurant and you see a sign that says "No Dogs Allowed," you might think that sign is purely proscriptive: Mr. Restaurant doesn't like dogs around, so when he built the restaurant he put up that sign.
If that was all that was going on, there would also be a "No Snakes" sign; after all, nobody likes snakes. And a "No Elephants" sign, because they break the chairs when they sit down.
The real reason that sign is there is historical: it is a historical marker that indicates that people used to try to bring their dogs into the restaurant.
Most prohibitive signs are there because the proprietors of an establishment were sick and tired of people doing X, so they made a sign asking them to please not. If you go into one of those fifty year old ma-and-pa diners, like the Yankee Doodle in New Haven, the walls are covered with signs saying things like "Please don't put your knapsack on the counter," more anthropological evidence that people used to put their knapsacks on the counter a lot. By the age of the sign you can figure out when knapsacks were popular among local students.
Sometimes they're harder to figure out. "Please do not bring glass bottles into the park" must mean that somebody cut themselves stepping on broken glass while walking barefoot through the grass once, and it's a good bet they sued the city.
It looks like an esay one. Why is there a "No Dog Allowed" sign in the restaurant? As the author says, it's not merely because bringing dogs to the restaurant is not allowed. Otherwise there would be a "No Elephants" sign as well. No, it's because people brought dogs to the restaurant (and not elephants).
This is the first point: rules are written down not because we don't want people to break them but because people have broken them in the past. (They might also have broken them before they actually became rules. For example Abraham has probably eaten food forbidden to his descendants later.)
But more interesting (and surprising) is the second part of the story. There are actually more prohibitions as history proceeds as people are over time more likely to do things that one might eventually want to prohibit.
Either way, there is information missing in the written version. Some information is missing because people at the time knew it (but we do not any more). Some information is missing because it was implicit at the time and isn't any more (i.e. people then learned it immediately and we can't). And some information was missing then but we have it now.
So in order to understand the written rules, we HAVE to know the context in which which they were written.
What was it those originally addressed would have known which we don't? What was it those originally addressed would have understood immediately which we can't? And what was it those originally addressed didn't know which we now do?
In Judaism we have the Oral Torah, which is a number of told stories, later written down in parts of the Talmud, that tell us some of the stories related to the laws that explain what people then knew or would have assumed.
But we also have the imperative to study the world as well as the Bible.
The Oral Torah does a bit to solve the first problem. Study of natural sciences does a bit to solve the third. (It can explain to us why we know what we know and so allows us to figure out what our ancestors didn't know.) But the second problem can only be solved by study of ancient texts and mythology apart from the Bible.
If there are no dogs allowed, we have to find out if elephants were common pets. Otherwise we won't know whether elephants are disallowed as well. And since the written rules don't tell us that, we have to look elsewhere in order to understand the full truth of scripture.
