When you come to the New Testament you can't even swing a cat without hitting three demons and two spirits. And magic becomes something that is everywhere. In the Hebrew Bible this sort of thing doesn't go on.

I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition.

I have a concordance to the Talmud at home, which I have to use.