People are thirsty for knowledge. That's one of the most interesting aspects of the internet, where one can find all kinds of information (even unwanted information, which is why it must be extremely controlled, both for children and adults).
When you open a website (which has been running for years) and add a "Ask the Rabbi" option, all sorts of questions and queries pour in. Unfortunately, one doesn't have the time to address each one properly, but some questions are interesting and general, which help to provide the right perspective on the Torah.
A friend asked me: Is there more to the text of the Tanakh (the Bible) than just a history book? Because he finds some of the events recounted very strange.
Now, the question is a good one, and it doesn't end there. One of the fundamental principles of Judaism is that the Torah is Divine, meaning that it was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai in its entirety. Even verses that seem superfluous, that wouldn't change the course of history at all if they weren't there, are as holy as the Shema Yisrael itself—Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One—which we read this week in the Torah. Based on this idea, it's clear that every word must have a reason for being, since God doesn't create anything in His universe in vain.
Our sages explain that the word Torah comes from the Hebrew word hora'ah, which means teaching. That is to say, the Torah is not merely a book of stories or an arbitrary text where, in some places, the author "went overboard" when he could have been more concise. The Torah is the ultimate guide, the perfect map of a complex universe, with a starting point, a journey, and a destination. The journey is challenging, sometimes flat, sometimes downhill, sometimes uphill, with mountains, valleys, rivers to cross via narrow bridges, and all kinds of terrain. The Torah shows us the best path to reach our destination.
And it does so through the stories of our ancestors, from whose successes and failures we understand and apply in our own lives the conclusion we draw from both cases.
Could it have been any other way? Of course! But God chose that way. Perhaps to show us that they were also human beings like us, and yet we learn from them. Because if the Torah had been a simple code saying "Do this" and "Don't do that," we might have thought it impossible, that no one in the history of the world could have been at such a high spiritual level as to fulfill everything the code demands. That's why the Torah teaches us with stories of human beings, men and women with the same qualities as us. And they did it... which means we can too.
Note: It should be clarified that the Zohar, the main book of Kabbalah, explains that whoever says that the stories of the Torah are simply stories without a deeper meaning (a teaching) and without a mystical meaning, is like someone who is left with a body without a soul, with a dead body.