Ah the shifting meaning of translated and retranslated words, I actually just bought Rosetta stone hebrew course with the plan of reading it in its original language (Greek later haha). I intend to do a contextual study of some of the words in question by seeing how the same author in that particular book uses them in other sentences. I'm sure the same process could be used in the translations but I like to be thorough. As for different interpretations, I'm sure many come in with an agenda looking to prove or disprove a preconceived notion. I'm of the opinion that one should read a piece of writing without stretching to make it say something it doesn't. Simplest most apparent meaning. Many sections of the bible are indeed parables and are explained as such, the parts that aren't parables aren't. The text points them out. It was written thousands of years ago to a different culture than ours. I think many people fail to contextualize the message through this lens and use those modern notions of ancient words that you referred to, ending up with wildly different opinions on what it means. Your referring to the epic of Gilgamesh, I believe. Aside from a flood and a few shared characters it reads much differently, kind of like the Iliad or the odyssey. A fictionalization of history. The fact that it is older and written by the Sumerians, the people from which God supposedly called Abraham out from is very interesting. The council of Nicaea, I've actually studied this one in depth. It was called together by emperor Constantine to codify the christian faith. They summoned the leaders of many disparate groups of Christians from all over the empire. What is amazing is that they all believed the same thing, possessed the same writings (somewhere in the neighborhood of 90+ %) and unanimously agreed without argument that this was the faith handed down to them. (If only something like that could happen today haha)