@critical
As i explained the A&E and C&A stories are more about respecting social structure and understanding god has allocated each one of us to a position. We must understand this cannot be changed no matter what even if something wrong (murder] is done by someone special (aka Cain]. The priests, who pretty much wrote every line int he Bible, want the lay person to understand striaght away its important to pay their dues to the clergy. We must realise just how influencial and wha ta burder on the common jew the priests were. We have recorded in the Bible that fewer returned from Babylon that left, which is probably a good indication that most people just werent happy with the old system and preferred to stay away from Jerusalem and Judea. The same attitude is very much prevalent in the NT were the writers basically admit what a pain the entire religious requirements have become.
Remmeber, the Bible is not about morals, its not attempting to tell us Gods plan or perhaps answer history. Many xians today just assume some stories explain certain intellectual problems, thus they invented original sin and use the Eve and the snake story. The Catholic Church invented origin sin simply because it was a business. In the old days you could buy prayers or pay for sins both committed and if you were foolish or evil enoiugh yo could pay ahead. The story of protestanism, remember it contains protest was very much influenced by these payments of indulgances as they were known. For whatever reason people like Luther etc were very much offended byt he wealth teh chrch gained from this. Just ass the RCC was a scam to fleece money, the same agenda drives the OT. We have an entire book called Leviticus which discusses the law about priests and other religious ceremony but no where does it have time to protect women or kids or slaves. The above asnwer is of course that these laws were prepared to give some group in socity an advantage, so its no surprise that theres nothing about helping the poor or women or slaves. Its pretty obvious that no priest or rich man would be dumb enough to give away his slaves, thus we never hear such a directive. Given men wrote the Bible, its also amazing that men are permitted to fight but if a woman helps her husband and touches the other mans naughty bits, she is condemend to have her hands cut off but nothing happens to the fight men. JWs think all those rants from Isaiah, Jeremiah and the countless other prophets are against worhsipping false gods and that is partially true, but the real motivation is of course the fact that the jews were giving business to those other temples instead of the yahwists.
Somehow i think the jews went to the other temples because they werent control freaks. We can also appreciate the ban on idols, as a requirement from the financial perspective. Its better to tell locals not to spend money on fancy idols when they can give it to the temple and let them build their own idols. The temple in Jerusalem had lots of idols, statues and more, costly decorations, its all recorded in the Bible. Its also the reason why the WTS never shows a full color set of pictures and explaination of the temple. They never show it because that would raise too many questions.
