The first question prompted by the title is “according to whom”. Among the shelves of religion you are just as likely to find a secular perspective as a religious one, and the religious ones have a religious interpretation of one stripe or another. Hoffman's credentials is in linguistics and he's (as far as I can tell) from a liberal jewish cultural background. This means a lot of of hairsplitting over words and some incredible pretzel logic to put the most tolerant spin on what's fairly obviously not a progressive book written in the second millennium. While discussing the exact wording of the text of the Bible is the bread and butter of the text and what should be most rewarding, all too often it's accompanied by real humdingers of interpretive reach that pays no mind to the historical and cultural context of when these words were written, instead wanting to stress that a modern reader can interpret it in such a way as to make it more palatable to his sensibilities. This is at direct cross purpose to the idea of a critical linguistic analysis in my view, and far more into theological juggling (which is odd given the author doesn't seem to be playing for a denomination as is usually the pitfall here).
In one illustrative attempt to swipe at Christopher Hitchens for attacking the God of the Bible as a murderous tyrant he uses the most contrived interpretation possible to paint Hitchens' problem being that wars are "mentioned" in the Bible (as if it had no bearing to the nature of God, and just described things happening) - this to sell a point about context. Of course the context of Hitchens argument is that it is God that's directly commanding a lion's share of the violence in the book, making the author look incredibly inelegant and fumbling the ball on precisely the point he intended to stress.
While this book was a mixed bag of partly illuminating and entertaining points, the credibility of the material raised is in severe doubt given these frequent jarring attempts to spin and slant the matter discussed. ( )