A lot of the stories in the Bible are the people’s explanations after the fact, after the bad things happened to them - oh it must have been we did this or that wrong, we disobeyed God, - , just trying to make some sense of their defeats in war. They had hundreds of rules and regulations compiled by Ezra and the scribes, and plenty of ways to slant their history showing how disobeying some of the hundreds of rules caused their god to be angry and punish them. The Old Testament dates from Ezra and his scribes and formed the basis of the religion still followed today.