I'm sure I'm not the only person who is involved in scripture studies who asks himself--repeatedly--why am I reading this and what real relevance could it possibly to life as I know it? And, as with most questions that I've stumbled across recently, the answer seems to be "nothing" and "everything."
The textbook we're reading makes it clear that the Hebrew scriptures are literature and not mathematical formulas or scientific data. Nor is this literature historical in a contemporary sense, although the historical elements are very important. But what's there is, at its most essential level, narrative and poetry.
So any appreciation, I think needs to start from that place. We're not likely to find hard and fast historicity or hard and fast anything, for that matter. The genius of the Hebrew Bible, at least in part, is its stubborn and apparently purposeful ambiguity.
We are so far removed from the authors/editors/redactors/copyists of these works that it's pretty much impossible to understand exactly what they were thinking and what the exact significance of this literature was to them.
So, the tradition that becomes most important is the one that points to the narrative itself, to the poetry, the wordplay, and the other devices employed to create something that is endlessly meaningful. And how does meaning (and in some cases Truth) emerge from that which is so ambiguous?
I'm beginning to learn that meaning and truth are elusive targets. I'm beginning to learn that the struggle which is ours is informed and enriched by the struggle that others have had for centuries when facing these same ambiguities contained in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere.
Jacob wrestled with God and was rewarded for his efforts, even though he had no idea what he was doing. We, as students (of life, of love, of meaning and truth), wrestle with what we have inherited--the myths, the poetry, the redundancies and inconsistencies--in order to reap the reward of making sense of what is going on in our own lives in our own time.
We can't fully know what the scripture meant to those who wrote and developed it, but by building our own relationship to it, we can find our own meaning. And therein lies the great big, muddy wisdom of the Hebrew Bible.
