What Was the Point of the Bible?

It's more than plausible that the Five Books of Moses and the rest of the Hebrew Bible are about political domination and submission. (The other bibles may well be that too, but I haven't read them.) It's reasonable to think that the authors wrote them on behalf of, or to curry favor with, their rulers in an attempt to make the masses afraid to think for themselves and perhaps defy the ruling elite. (They may have had more than one motivation, of course.) 

There were 12 tribes that a ruling class wished to hold together through anticipation of divine rewards and fear of divine punishment. The objective was to promote allegiance. (I can imagine an honorable but misguided motive for this -- group survival in a violent world.) The scriptures were a warning: do what we say your god commands or Yahweh will be so angry he will do some or all the horrible things that are threatened and in some cases perpetrated throughout these books. Follow his commands to a T (as conveyed by us) and you'll be rewarded with fertile wives, fertile livestock, and bountiful crops. For earthly political purposes, it was all about establishing Yahweh as the tribes' exclusive sovereign to be worshiped and obeyed without question. (The existence of other deities was not denied. In other words, this was henotheism or monolatry, not monotheism.) People with incentives to live that way, so the thinking likely went, won't seek to make their own lives according to their own rational judgment, self-interest, and freedom.