The view of conservative readers of the Hebrew Bible is that the Bible is a holy book. That means the Bible is mainly theological. The view of liberal readers of the Hebrew Bible is that the Bible is part of history and culture. That means the Bible is mainly "human" and not "holy." These two ideas are exactly the opposite of each other. Thus here is the hypothesis: that putting God in the middle of a debate about the Hebrew Bible does not help anybody understand why the Bible is important to Jews and Christians.
Two ideas about the Hebrew Bible get summed up by Arnold Jacob Wolf. This summary is in an article about the Jewish Theological Seminary in America.
The profound question for the Seminary, one that lay underneath more obvious conflicts and that pervades all modern rabbinic (perhaps also Christian) schools of theology, is the conflict between Wissenschaft and Torah or, as University departments of theology often put it, between Scripture and the scientific study of ancient sources. Is the Torah the Word of God or is it a series of historically embedded documents of a given time and place, to be studied like any other ancient text, with neither prejudice nor preference (Wolf).
Wissenschaft is a German word that means "science" in English. Thus, the debate about the Hebrew Bible between liberals and conservatives can be seen in a formula: Liberal = Science. Conservative = Theology.
For most people, science and theology do not mix. Also, the liberal (scientific) point of view has different ideas about how the Bible got written than the conservative point of view does. The theological idea is that Moses "received Torah at Sinai and passed it on" (Sommer 423). However, the same author who stated that idea says, "For most modern Jews . . . the stenographic theory of revelation . . . does not remain compelling" (423).
Another liberal idea about the Hebrew Bible and God and history comes from Martin Buber. Buber says rea...