“I thought this was answered. Text alone can mislead. Old Testament scholarship is immersed in text, context, subtext, allegory, dreams, translations, issues of authorship, and interpretation over a period of several centuries spanning interconnected as well as disparate events.”
No, which is why that discussion the other day was rather fruitless. You are selectively choosing verses for validity based on arbitrary application of your current ethics. When the verses were penned, did the authors think that they might have sounded vile for suggesting ritual child-slaughter? Besides, such contortion of verses which are simple in structure, and unambiguous in message, to virtually mean the opposite of what they really convey, makes a mockery of Scripture, since they can all be interpreted as one pleases.
“unambiguous in message”
Therein lies all of your problems- you are a textualist pure and simple, utterly incapable of admitting contrarian interpretations. Even an ordinary modern-day will is not infrequently contested for discerning the testator’s true intent.
Yet you purport to assign a conclusion “unambiguous in message” and keep repeating this text with blinders to historical and Old testament scholarship with reference to an assembly of text written over several centuries by different authors nuanced by subtext, culture, purpose, audience, language uses, and interpretations. If all this is all beyond your ken then so confess.
I suspect part of this problem lies in the fact that you have consistently relied upon this text only to be exposed of its inherent fallacy and now the post-fall Humpty-Dumpty theory is difficult to reconstruct.