“...but in what is essentially one large run-on sentence in an ancient text, it is not so clear-cut and translators do the best they can”
Using this argument, I can say every book of the Bible is a “large run-on sentence” that we can have no hope of interpreting or understanding. But that would be foolish, and obviously an argument simply constructed to avoid a plain reading of the text and what that plain reading would tell us.
There is no "plain reading of the text" if one does so apart from context and discerning the particulars of any given text. If we were native speakers at that time we could easily do it, but even scholars, 3000 years removed from the original text disagree and sometimes just flat-out don't know what the original writers intended. Translators do the best they can, but even they have biases and make mistakes. Most of us non-scholars rely on translations and there are bound to be differences in interpretation.