There is no end to the interpretations of the bible stories, either each one individually or all of them collectively. But the simplest way to understand the bible is that it is a polemic agaisnt the rise of civilization.
What have been constants throughout recorded human history is not only the continual struggle between those who wish to cling to the old and those who seek for a better future, those who dare for a "brave new world" and those who think our best days were behind us, but also the perennial conflict between those who wish to wield power over others and those "others" who wish to rid themselves of those who seek to subjugate them.
And since history is imbued everywhere with such constants, it is probably safe to assume that they likewise existed in pre-history as well, long before humans had ever configured its grunts and noises into a common language, and subsequently reduced that language to the atoms of an alphabet.
Every new invention humans have ever encountered, from the wheel to writing to money and even gods, no doubt forced them to consider, and indeed even fear, the potential ramifications of those inventions, much like we now face today in everything from nuclear weapons to nano technology to the internet.
Even Socrates, for example, condemned writing as being as inimical to reason and understanding as many parents today condemn texting of doing the very same thing. And given the fact that the Northern Tribes of Israel had long held a purely oral tradition before it was reduced to a written format, this is probably why Jesus never wrote a single word.
In the same way the cyber world of the internet now threatens to swallow us all into cyberspace even as we consume the Eden of Earth like an apple, so the rise of civilization itself from the primitive world that preceded it, was probably no different to those who were confronted with those changes from the experience of the Native Americans and later Africans encountering Europeans.
With the rise of civilizations came the invention of writing and numbers that helped to facilitate commerce, with the former and the latter snowballing into a feedback loop that escalated the transition much like technology has lead civilization today to shed the skin of its industrial past as it transitions into an age of information. And if we think this transition is disorienting to us, it was probably as bad or worse for them.
Along with the rise of those civilizations came money, banking, property, ownership, governments, slavery, war, and various gods and religions that not only served to justify it all, but all of which had to fight and elbow for survival among the others, like too many people living in a crowded city block in downtown Manhattan.
Writing lead to a proliferation of knowledge and laws, and sacred texts that were worshiped as if they were the sacred word of one god or another. And in a Darwinian contest of survival of the fittest, tribes and civilizations slugged it out to prove who's gods were mightier, and all for the increasing enrichment and empowerment of their rulers, who had manipulated their fears of the hereafter and seduced them with stories of glory, paradise, and devotion to the gods.
Like Cain, the future, in its insatiable quest for "progress," has always justified its willingness to slay the past. And like Able, all those who stood in the way of that progress have always been justifiably killed and enslaved simply by relabeling their innocence as ignorance, and calling their ignorance of our gods as proof they were no better than demons.
And today, every story in the bible is occurring simultaneously, in a single instant in time.
And here we are, trapped inside the acorn of eternity, with no escape, and history stuck on repeat.
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