Besides, the Bible doesn't have any stupid shit in it, except when it is a record of the stupid shit that people do in opposing God. Bible laws are some of the best and briefest that are around.
Flooding the world and capturing two of every animal for no reason seems pretty stupid.
You need to use your imagination. You know that most of this is Jewish oral tradition, but where does it come from?
I already can guess some things, its backed in history. The Euphrates / Tigris was an incredibly fertile valley. It is known that the first city states appeared there because....
They had recurrent floods, as in BIG floods. And it was until the different groups much later banded together to device a solution (channels?), the disasters kept coming every few years (decades?) or so. So i think during that, some farmer thought how to save his livestock, and he devised a solution while everyone laughed at him. I guess the joke was on them...
What is "the world" for a farmer that never leaves his valley? Easy isn't?
Eventually the city states, then warred and a victor came and would be later became the Babylon empire.
Of course most things in there are distorted, it passed not only by oral memory, it also moved across translations and languages. Taking the bible literally is absurd at best. Some things like Moses laws are probably accurate. And there are several books by several authors prophets etc. Mostly Jewish. You can even spot some discrepancies with what current Jews keep from the scriptures and the Christians. Add in context, culture, and the minds of people from thousands of years ago.
More non Biblical content would be nice to have, but it takes a special type of zealot only religion types made it possible to survive time. I mean just how many times wars destroyed everything? Especially books (or scrolls). Even the last war in the area the American soldiers could just not resist humanity's ancestral addiction to just burn the library (again) where the oldest human writing was lost (only pics remain).
So as distorted as it is, there are mention of places, of people, actual rulers, and specific periods. 6000 years could actually just be the age of Judaism, since "Adam and Eve"were kicked of that valley. We know humanity did not start there, but in Africa, and earlier groups starting moving towards that direction so yes.
The Bible is filled with tiny bits of history here and there, they are sometimes hard to spot, but they are there. Very interesting when you have already studied universal history from a secular point of view.
So Jesus brought the Jewish words of love, i guess he wanted to tone down those harsh rules from Moses, so its a next step in civilization. But before Moses, things were even worse, especially the surrounding cultures would not mind human sacrifices and what not. So yes every little bit advanced civilization, even Islam but that's already at a later stage and some argue it had to come after people did not follow Jesus teachings...
But history did not stop there, its still going...
Moses wrote the beginnings of the Bible... the first 5 books. Much of the info was shown to him in ancient Egyptian "paperwork." God directed which parts of it Moses was supposed to write down, and probably geve him aditional info.
The best writings we have are the Septuagint (Earliest Greek Old Testament) and the writings of Josephus. These show that the earth is about 7500 years old since the Beginning.
The reason we have the laws Moses wrote down is because God is a giving God. The Israelites of the time asked for them. He gave them to them.
The toning-down Jesus did was there for all people since the Beginning. The focus is to be in a right relationship with God and people. Micah 6:8:
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
As for the laws themselves, they include all the laws of nature and everything else. Nobody can know all these laws. They definitely are not toned down by Jesus... because they all still exist, and will so exist at least until the return of Jesus.