I think the view of scripture as a record of our attempts to know God better - that view has a lot to commend itself. As opposed to seeing scripture as a flat God-dictated book that must be taken as perfection from its first word to its last, which opens up so many cans of worms and internal, self-inflicted problems within the scriptures themselves that protestants spend all the rest of their theological energies becoming olympic eisegetical gymnasts putting it all back together again - trying (and failing to all eyes but their own) to achieve even just internal coherence. But if one lets go of all that and just lets the scriptures become a story - a narrative - of the people of God haltingly and slowly becoming aware of who God is - building up to Christ; then it casts new light on nearly everything, and is impossible to then “unsee”.
So in that view, God is first viewed as having much in common with so many other gods of the day - needing to be appeased with sacrifices, having a bit of a temper, looking more like how we would see Zeus than what we later see instead in Christ. He hurls lightning bolts, wipes out entire populations with floods … and for all that … sin remains in the world. It didn’t ‘work’. At least not like the ancients thought it should work. Literalists and inerrantists are stuck trying to defend all these old views because … there it is in the Bible after all, so it must be the final word, right? (Nevermind Christ, apparently). But that isn’t to say these movements weren’t in true and needed directions. First - the recognition that sin exists and is a thing, a devastating thing! And then beyond that, we should be addressing it - trying to atone as it were (enter the whole system of sacrifices). Also an improvement on the notion that everything is just a free-for-all and whoever is strongest just gets to have their way. And that vengeance shouldn’t be unlimited - let’s instead limit it to an eye for an eye and so forth. These are all improvements on what came before. All getting closer to what God is about even if it isn’t yet the final word (Christ) on the fullness of God’s will.
Once read that way, and not trying to justify floods and rivers of blood as having some sort of equivalent authority about what God is like over and against Christ - then a great burden is released and one can go back and actually learn from the old accounts on their own terms about where the people of God have been rather than trying to craft new theologies around old temple and sacrificial systems that Christ definitively informed us were things of the past. John 4:21-24. This new wine just won’t keep well in the old wineskins we keep trying to re-use.