The eternal battle among the elite for more power and seeking every weapon available.
Although metaphor can explain what is difficult to understand, it is often used to manipulate the nonelite's perception of things.
Text written by scribes meant to serve the elite and the purposes of kingdom rulers in places of prominence in stone and other materials of permanence.
Later, clay and animal skins became textual media.
God's word appears abundantly on scrolls surrounded by text added for human purposes.
Scrolls of text for spiritual purposes appeared abundantly in the library dedicated to Alexander the Great.
That is roughly early third century BCE when less ancient societies mimicked more ancient content.
That is when the oldest parts of the Torah first appeared.
Plenty examples of the use of metaphor in America.
Businesses associate properties such as reliability to the products and services they wish to sell.
Such properties require a transfer of a characteristic from an object not directly connected to the products and services being offered.
For instance, the business product is said to be durable like a trunk of a tree.
In would be difficult to fully explain why a product with many parts is durable but an analogy about a tree trunk's durability is easy to understand.
The different levels of government do similar things.
In the case of government, it is often to distract attention from one government activity by promoting attention to another activity.
Commercial and government use of metaphor have been refined over the millennia.
So here is the question.
How much of God's actual words do we have and how reliable were those words reported?
One way of examining scriptural content for reliability to God's will is to determine how unique the scriptural content is with respect to text appearing before or after that content.
There is plenty of evidence of fabrication of text by the writers of scripture and the merging of text created in different societies as well as epochs.
Many examples of insertion of content within a textual dialog intended for a different purpose.
It has been speculated such insertion is done later by someone with a different agenda.
I question any scripture which defers to the leaders of a society and scorns the opinion of those without similar advantage, displays hubris.
That is especially true of metaphor depicting God in action because it is blatant elite glorifying themselves at a rival's expense.
Is it accurate that God only spoke to ancient leaders and ignored the general populace?
I think not, it is more likely that God spoke to the general populace and the elite painted over.
What happened to all that advice God gave that was never recorded?
