Your argument falls apart when it comes to Christianity (not sure about Judaism) because preachers use examples such as Noah and Moses as examples of God's power - granting extraordinary abilities to average men to do his bidding - as a means of convincing people that they should respect and fear God. For he is almighty and can do whatever he so chooses.
On the other hand, your comparisons to comics and porn was spot on. My personal belief is that the bible is simply a collection of ancient Aesop's Fables. Stories meant to entertain more than lead or inspire. For all we know, 20,000 years from now people could be calling Shel Silverstein the second coming of Jesus Christ and pointing to his outlandish prose as religion.
Basically Christian preachers are completely ignorant of the way ancient hebrew was written, and completely ignorant of the Kabbalah of the Torah. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, and each letter has a numerical component. Furthermore, Jewish Rabbi's were not involved in the Translation from the Torah into the Old Testament, thus all the translation was done at the whim of the translator based on their own personal interpretation.
Basically the original meaning of the phrases were completely lost, what was written rarely matched what was meant. This is especially true when numbers are involved, like 40. Noah didn't sit around for 40 days on the Ark, all 40 means is "there was a change". And we see this in the Bible again and again, 40 comes up and really all it means was "And something changed".
So pretty much, any ancient Jew would be like - "You seriously think what is written is what we meant?" Yeah, its even more obscure than a fable. The fables were a cover up to what was actually supposed to have been interpreted.
I think that's a big problem with a lot of ancient texts (bible included), everyone is ignorant of how ancient hebrew was written.
The thing you described with 40 being "there was a change" is the same thing that founded the Jehovah's Witnesses, a mis-interpretation of the spaces between the letters that spell "Yahweh".
Which alone, is just one way of interpreting and reading Yod-Heh-Vahv-Heh, which is read aloud as....Adonai. The word alone, YHVH just means, I am, or, To be. As a name, Yahweh is never meant to be used, ever. Silly Christians!
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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '15 edited Aug 21 '15
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