That said, it cannot be denied that (a) people at the time of the writing were a lot more tolerant if not outright favourable to slavery and (b) people have used these books to support or at least normalize slavery throughout time.

Personally, I read it all as a slow tale of moral navigation and evolution. Animal sacrifice was ordered as a moral step ‘up’ from human sacrifice; rabbis later say we’ve now ‘upgraded’ to prayer as the true goal.