A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context

You might want to start with Coogan's A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament. This is a liberal seminary's intro to critical analysis of the old testament. Coogan is a harvard critical biblical scholar. He is heavily involved in the NRSV translation of the bible. You might find it useful to provide context for the stories in the hebrew bible. If you want something extremely dense and scholarly, there was a recent Anchor Yale Bible book released on Genesis 1-11 that you can get. It's a nice scholarly commentary by Ronald Hendel. That series is fairly neutral and provides historical critical analysis if you want. The level of detail you can get into is incredible. Alternatively, and I would highly recommend it either way, I would sit with ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and tell them what your goals are for your interpretations. These models aren't perfect (and neither are any of the books you'll find), but they are actually extremely knowledgeable about these system and can adapt to what you'd like and run with you like an interactive guide to the old testament. Really I'd recommend this avenue first. Even just save a text file or doc that has a statement of your background and your interests and the way in which you would like to understand the text and load that into every conversation you have with any AI model about any section of the book.