Well, the less cynical version of what rynner says (most of which I agree with - and kudos for pointing out the the "Bible" is a diverse collection of books, and is predominately and originally Jewish/Hebrew) is that the texts collected as the "Bible" were human responses to their experiences of the divine, which were necessarily filtered through their local, social situation. So nationalist propaganda would definitely influence your experience of the divine in 8th-century BCE Israel. That doesn't mean the insights recorded in the Bible have no value beyond propaganda.
Additionally, the process of canonization (deciding which books are in and which are out) took a LONG TIME. The Hebrew Scriptures weren't fully canonized until AFTER the Christian Bible was! That's why the Catholic Bible has extra books in its Old Testament that the Protestant Bible doesn't. They were books in general circulation among Jews in the Greco-Roman diaspora, which were considered Scripture by the first Christians (and many or most of their contemporary Jews). Since they fit so well with Christian thinking, and they were composed in Greek instead of Hebrew, and other reasons, the Rabbis who settled the Jewish canon left them out. Martin Luther and other Protestants at the time of the Reformation discovered that the Hebrew Scriptures didn't contain those books now known as the "Apocrypha," and jettisoned them from the Protestant canon.
Not all of us Christians see the Bible as an "instruction manual for living." Many of us shudder to hear it spoken of that way. We think the Bible needs to be read in the light of both tradition and reason (some also add experience, but that's really part of reason). Hence, the popularized "three-legged stool" of my own tradition, Anglicanism: Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. The 3-legged stool is a milking stool, meant to be the most stable support on rugged ground. If any of the legs is longer or shorter than the others, or if one is missing, you can't trust the stool. We recognize that "sola Scriptura" (only the Bible, a tenent of many Christians in the Reformed tradition) is an illusion - any reading (of any text) is an interpretation. The trick is to interpret responsibly, and you can only do that (1) in community (hence Tradition), and (2) intelligently (hence Reason), informed by experience.
I should also add that the Scriptures are considered by Christians to be a "living" text. This means that we keep wrestling with the texts; we keep finding new insights in them; and that we are in a relationship with the text such that its meaning is not static over time - the Bible doesn't necessarily say the same thing to us in the 21st Century as it did in the 17th. Primarily, that's because our situation has changed. Of course, it also has to do with advances in exegesis (determining what the text really says in its original languages and context) and hermeneutics (interpreting the text for the current context), including translation issues, textual analysis, historical analysis, new methodologies, etc.
In the opinion of many of us Christians, you disrespect the Bible if you refuse to criticize it, pick it apart, disagree with it sometimes, etc. We are in dialogue with it, and we bring something to the conversation. Other Christians think the Bible is basically static, and speaks to us one-way. I was raised in such a tradition, and it doesn't make sense to me.
BTW, another point to be made in response to rynner's post -
The Hebrew Scriptures, since they were written over such a long time period, can be seen to actually criticize themselves in places. The Prophets, for example, reinterpret the Law in ways that seem plain enough to us on this side of things, but at the time, they really were carrying a new interpretation forward and questioning their own tradition (refining it). You can also see edits of a sort, evidence that at one time the religion was henotheist (there are many gods but we worship
this one): El was the "Most High God" and YHWH the local god. At some point people either figured out that there was only one God, or they simply identified their own god YHWH with El, the Most High, and now the Scriptures read as if all the names for God are synonyms. You can see some of this in the use of the word "elohim," which is plural (means "gods"), and sometimes rendered "the gods," referring to idols (i.e., gods that don't really exist), sometimes rendered "angels," and sometimes rendered "humans" - "sons of God," or "Israelites." It seems that all the pantheon of gods from the henotheistic period got demoted and became angels (which is possibly why the angels' names all end in "-el," which means "god"). Plus there's the figure of Satan ("ha satan" means "the adversary", or the prosecuting attorney) who starts out as an esteemed member of the heavenly court (cf. the Book of Job) and ends up the instigator of all evil, in cosmic rebellion against God. And there's a probable reference to a heavenly court in the opening chapter of Genesis ("let
us make man in
our image..."). In many ancient Near Eastern religions, the heavenly court consisted of all the lesser gods. At some point in the Bible, it's the angels - who also devolve from being terrifying, beastly figures to looking like men, to looking like winged women or babies in later Christian art. That's a complicated one, but it points to ancient religions' use of strange animals or conglomerations of animals to represent gods - something carried forward in the Christian tradition of representing the Gospellers (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) as a (winged) man, (winged) lion, (winged) bull, and eagle, respectively.
Anyway, it's that kind of editing that makes some people see propaganda, but I see just the opposite: the text wasn't considered so sacred that it couldn't be amended to match emerging insights - and, yes, sometimes a political agenda. The result is there will always be employment for Professors of Old Testament / Hebrew Scriptures.
