I'm actually doing a readthrough now and there's a LOT of different stuff, a lot of contradictory stuff, and a lot of dudes that have some serious incel level hangups (looking at you two, ezekiel and paul) but then there's just some bits that absolutely go hard (like the whipping you mentioned, or the times the pharisees be saying stuff about how the religious laws are this or that and jesus goes oooooofffffff ✨🫰✨🫰✨🫰✨ ) but the two things that are actually super consistent are a) do not work on the sabbath b) rich people are fundamentally evil, both with various ways of being said and various punishments up to and including death.

There's also a number of items under the general umbrella of what kinds of sex are good or bad but the specifics are highly variable and often contradictory such as having multiple wives, having children with the female servants, etc being fine or even a sign of status in some books then in later ones it's explicitly a 1:1 deal. I would argue the only consistent item there is that you can make promise to only have sex with a person or certain set of people and you're expected to keep that contract and respect similar ones that others have made. You can say "Adam and eve not Adam and Steve" all you want but what about Jacob Rachel and Leah also taking place in the book of Genesis? The only definite thing about the bible's concept of marriage is that there's few if any definites.

There are a few people described as generally successful but it's usually more in terms of owning / leading a people as a clan / tribe than it is in terms of having money specifically. Like it'll describe the number of servants in the household, their tents, the herds, etc. The only person described positively who has "wealth" in the more modern sense is Solomon, and it's explicitly stated that this was given to him because the one thing he asked god for before anything else was the wisdom to be a good leader, and that the wealth he had was a result of using that wisdom. Like the whole thing where he suggests the baby be cut in half to sus out which woman is the real mother is preceded by a dream the night before where god asks "hey what should I bless you with" and solomon is literally just like "look I just got appointed king and I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing and all I want is to know how to do this properly" and god was like BET. And it's followed by him choosing advisors / administrators that he he uses that wisdom to judge trustworthy enough to delegate decision making to (just read this one last night actually and I vibed with it pretty hard. I don't actually want any responsibility for other people's bullshit, but I feel like it would be a lot easier to do the right thing in life if it was a lot clearer to me what that actually is).

The discussion of where I'm personally at spiritually is a much longer story than I'm going to bother writing out here but the short version is that I mostly just want to know everything that's in it. I feel like if you're really going to truly engage genuinely with this you've gotta acknowledge both the historical context and the deeply complex and fundamentally imperfect humanity of both the writers and the people they're describing. Like even beyond,"these are all divinely inspired allegories," I feel like it's more,"this is one of the oldest books in the world that has managed to last through the ages in some form or another because it speaks to the human experience" and I'd like to learn more about why so I'm starting with just finding out what's in there.

Usery (interest) is expressly forbidden in the New testament, so Christians couldn't give loans with interest. That's where the bad old banker stereotype for Jews comes from, as well, I imagine, as the bad old stereotypes of Jews as the wealthy elite secretly controlling society. They were, essentially, the finance bros of the geopolitical reality in old Europe, because nobody else could issue loans with interest. If we want to "get back to Christian values", then we need to ban charging interest.