The weekly TMS Bible Reading assignment is not read, or not carefully read, by most of the sheeples. It doesn't really matter, because the consideration of the Bible reading material is one of the shortest parts on the meeting with a limited number of comments, and those comments are restricted to less than 30 seconds or you will get counselled. Over and over, the dubs are told to read the Bible, yet the organization gives no real encouragement to read the Bible by keeping everyone busy in the recruiting work and using relatively few scriptures in their "talks".
Why? Why do they spend so little time using the Bible? It's not just that their teachings and authority structure are not Bible based, it's because they realize that careful examination destroys their literalist interpretation of the Bible. It's easier for them to just say, "the Bible doesn't contradict itself", rather than address the cases where their literal interpretation is destroyed by facts.
One of the facts for me that destroyed a literal interpretation of early Bible accounts and moved Bible chronology into the category of "fiction", was the story of the Tower of Babel. Just one problematic fact was clearly understandable, but completely ignored, by the recent weekly Bible reading assignments. While going through the family records and looking at the information in Insight, it becomes quite clear that the Tower of Babel incident occurred only about 100 years after the flood. And if Peleg (?) was named AFTER the confusion of languages, there was only 70 families on the earth. And if you follow the Bible record exactly, those 70 families would have been scattered among about 8 cities that had already been named. There is no way for this to be at all in the realm of reality. At the supposed time that Nimrod was establishing an empire, it would hardly have amounted to more than a small village. And if you try to used the Bible records of lineage and years involved, then somehow work the math for an ultimately fast growing population, the vast majority of that population would consist of babies. The adults would spend all of their time just trying to care for the needs of all the babies.
In conclusion, a literalist interpretation would demand that the Tower of Babel must have been built by an army of babies, because Bible chronology is perfect. And it was probably called Tower of Babel, because the babies would babble while building. For that matter, the tower was probably constructed of dirty diapers.
