The scriptures are typically trotted out as examplars of how to live, how to behave, how to be. Of course, one does not have to read these texts all that closely to be quickly confronted with horrific examples of violence and destruction. We are still inhabiting the same old joke of the pious parents who make their kids read the Bible because they think there's too much sex and violence on TV. The smart atheist and angry fundamentalist alike can point to numerous passages in the Sacred Canon where human beings perform blood-thirsty acts in the name of God.
However, all this blood and horror only presents a problem if one makes the utterly-uncalled-for assumption that the scriptures are supposed to be wisdom literature. Though replete with sermons and doctrine, the scriptures by and large are actually the opposite of wisdom, and that intentionally--as Mormon notes, the point of these religious histories is not to learn from their examples, but to avoid it at all costs, to "learn to be more wise than we have been." With only one very significant and shining exception, the people populating the scriptures present us not with lives to pattern our own after, but rather an extended presentation on what not to do.
You are not to examine King David and learn from his ability to get money and babes, but realize that that's exactly why he fell, and fell hard; you are not to read about the Nephites and read a lesson in how to get rich, but to read how their quest for wealth is why they completely and genocidally destroyed themselves. The scriptures, over all, are not a compendium of the wisdom of mankind, but of our utter folly and idiocy.
I've lately come to realize that that's more or less the function of literature generally. I bring this up because in the 18th and 19th centuries particularly (and their collective influence is still felt today), defenses of the study of poetry and fiction tended to center on the moral effect they could potentially have upon students: e.g. literary characters can provide us with models to pattern our lives after (the Illiad was supposedly read anciently as a model for warfare and chivalry); or fiction can stimulate the imagination, which in turn can increase our empathy, as we can now better imagine what it must be like to be someone else (this was Percy Shelley's defense of poetry, still utilized in defense of the English discipline today). Literature, so the argument goes, is a compendium of all the wisdom and deep thoughts of the human race, saving us from having to constantly reinvent the wheel by sharing with us more profound ideas than we would ever be able to come up with on our own.
All this may or may not be true, and these various defenses and arguments certainly have their value, both in the classroom and beyond; but what I've lately begun to focus upon instead is how literature is a compendium of the folly of mankind, of all our mistakes and errors and rash foolishness. You read Great Expectations not to learn from Pip's example, but to avoid it; you read the Illiad not to learn proper forms of warfare and chivalry, but instead to learn, as Goethe argued of the epic poem, "this world is hell," that all wars are unjust, and always have been, and no soldiers ancient or modern have been the least bit fooled on that point.
But we are not to read literature with the purpose of smugly condemning the gross imperfections of our ancestors, and pat ourselves on the back, "but rather [to] give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been," for we are in constant and real danger of repeating all that same foolishness again and again and again, and towards similarly destructive ends.
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