If you look at the dietary laws, the injunctions to monotheism, and the laws concerning sexuality and marriage it suggests that the prime concern was with providing the numbers to outcompete other nations, and I am using the word in its original meaning of an alliance of closely related tribes or clans. Israelite Nation, who are the people we have to thank for the Abrahamic religions, could see that it was a pure numbers game. If you could prevent food poisoning and other biological hazards and could also provide an extensive system of laws to adjudicate disputes without the need for violence within the tribes, then you could get everyone faced the same way. You had a growing population so that once the warriors killed the neighbours you could then quickly settle and colonise with the civilian contingent who could then produce more supplies for ever bigger military campaigns.

It was a written down collection of oral traditions and laws, so I guess the purpose was to get it all down in one place so people wouldn’t have to keep remembering it and passing it down that way.

New Testament: Given that the bible, as we know it today, wasn’t assembled into its current form until hundreds of years AD…

While being written, it wasn’t being used as anything other than a record of events. Given that most of the events recorded in the Gospels happened decades before they were written down, they were effectively turning oral tradition to written tradition. The later books in the new testament, excluding Revelations, are largely letters traded between early churches.

Revelations is where shit gets weird. A bible without this would be far superior, harder to weaponize, and probably would be considered a living corpus rather than a fixed thing. If there was intent when writing anything in the bible, it was here. And here is where we can start arguing nefarious intent, turning the religion into a death cult.

It was never written, it was compiled. There’s like double the amount of books but the church cherry picked the books they wanted to include and ignored the ones that went against their world view. I’m the end it was put together for power and control. Even the fact that most people weren’t even allowed to read it, meant that all the “laws of god” were being filtered to you through the church and whatever it was they wanted at the time.

Control.