The Covenant of a Vassal State

While reading How the Bible Became Holy, one specific passage caught my attention and so I'd like to focus on it for this post, despite the fact that it isn't central to the overall message of what we read. Starting on page 26, Satlow describes the covenant between Israel and Assyria as loyalty for military protection, terms that sound surprisingly similar to the Covenant Code found in Exodus- a passage that became core to Israelite beliefs.
Satlow's comparison shows, then, that in actuality the Covenant Code would have been a fairly commonplace piece of writing with a format that was meant to be recognizable to any scribe. Originating possibly as a tool for scribes, this snippet's inclusion in the Bible was not foreseen at its inception. With the understanding that a part of the Bible considered crucial today was not so at the time of its origin, it becomes clear that no section of the Bible as we know it was meant to be wholly authoritative, and that many texts' origin stories might not be as glamorous as one might expect.
What I take from this is that the popular idea of reading the Bible as a complete guide was never the intended use for any of the texts originally, but rather an ideal imposed as the Bible became holy.