Bible Study... Wha' Happened?

I tried. I tried to read it from a literary point of view, but it just doesn't work that way. It's not a book that can be taken simply. I ran into problems in the second chapter of Genesis, in the fourth verse, where a second version of the creation story seems to be jammed into the first. Worse, the second version directly contradicts that first version, saying that humans were created before the animals.

And I just couldn't keep going. I just couldn't read it the way I intended.

So I pretty much stopped reading. I suppose I might get back to it at some point, and maybe I'll even write about it, but for now don't expect anything from me. When the first two chapters of the Bible contradict themselves, reading it as a simple story doesn't work for a brain like mine. I have to look again and read it from some other angle.