The through processess here, my dear Bradskii, are likely to be those that take the entire Pentateuch as a literal, literary unit, with the assumption that one portion of the it possibly sets a context for ever other portion it. The "interior" epistemology and metaphysics of the narrative are taken for aspects of the actual content rather than conjecture.
Forgive my tongue-in-cheekiness here, but when a literalist Christian reads some text that says, "kill them all," this same typical bible reader assumes that this means that the Holy, Just, Almighty and Eternal God who, through Moses miraculously delivered half of the Hebrew people [yeah "half" by default] out of Egypt, also is actually there and speaking through Moses and so on, commanding this or that violent action.
The literalist Christian isn't reading it as an atheist does who might think "...oh look there. This text shows some person telling others they can go in a kill other people without regard, and they somehow mistakenly think there's some god behind it all ... or something. What a goofy and immoral story!! Who could possibly think there was actually such a god there in the first place. Man, they were S...T...U...P...I...D!!!"
But, that's why we have Hermeneutics, for what it's worth to mention it in passing such as I all too often do, to help sort some of this stuff out.
