That is a beautiful Question and I wish that God will give me insight and wisdom enough to answer it. The Quran as you may already know was delivered to Mankind for the very first time by Muhammad The Prophet Peace be upon him=pbuh. The Quran very explicitly states that it is not from Muhammad, not from any other book, not from a spirit or a demon but from God himself. In fact the Quran challenges the reader to prove that it is not from God and presents very logical and thought provoking questions about it for the reader. The Quran is very different from the Holy Bible because it is one book in one language delivered by only one Man during 23 years of his life while the Bible was many books collected out of original order by varied men most of which were not the prophets of the book it self in varied languages. Another major difference is that the language/ grammatical style of the Quran is not very story tellish but more conversational as it was to be speech of God to his servent Muhammad Pbuh which is another reason why readers of the Quran often say they feel they are being spoken to directly. There are stories in the quran about past events or future events(like end of the world) but the format in which they are introduced remains in the conversational style from God to Muhammad or you the reader where as the Old and new testaments contain lots of story telling in which it is grammatically evident that it was not written by the one about whom the story is talking (Moses or Jesus for example)and in some cases not even written by the writer whos name appears as the title of the book in the bible. Such is the case that proved that much of the biblical accounts were third party information legends passed down and so on but when reading the quran you feel a sense of freshness and direct connection to the divine. Now the level of belief in your heart will determine whether or not you will take its meanings literally or you will just accept the gist of it. The example of the prophet Muhammad and his followers set the road map for approach to the Quran and its application in that time they live in. Another point is that the Quran itself stated that sections of it are very litteral while other sections of it are allegorical and basically the level of purity of ones heart, devotion to God and ultimately the amount of knowledge gifted by God to the individual will determine the ability to have deeper and clearer understandings of the Quran as well as meanings that are more applicable to the modern world. No one can claim to know all the meanings of the Quran and One of the best teachers of Islam after the Prophet Muhammad saws was Imam Malik ibn anas who was not afraid to state as an answer to a question "Ï do not know". Mind you several chapters of the Quran begin with Mystical sets of Arabic alphabet for which the exact meanings are debatable whether you approach it from numerology or grammatical symbolism there is not proven correct answer. One possible purpose of this is to display to the reader that there is still a higher sense of knowledge that is available only through worship of God and not by intellect or research and as such all muslims should remain humble and accept that God knows what they are not aware of. This is similar to God commanding Moses PBUH to learn from a man of normal status while he Moses was indeed a Prophet of God but still had a lacking in certain knowledge that God designated should be given to him by that simple man. Conerning the Quran being old testamentish that is not the case grammatical style wise but remember Jesus stated that he came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfil as heaven and earth would pass away before the smallest letter of the hebrew alphabet size of the law would perish. (Gospel of Mathew-New Testament). The main reason for Jesus rejecting Christians upon his return is that they vainly (falsely) worhsipped him but did not obey the commandments (the law)of his father(his lord God) and for that he would tell them he never knew them and command them to get away from him!(New testament) So I would question how much the New Testament changed the commandments of GOD? So obviously there is a misunderstanding about the actual purpose of the New testament about which most christian scholars admit that no particular gospel was written by Jesus himself but if it ever existed then it would have been forbidden and destroyed by King James or maybe St. Augustine and the like who promoted Trinitarian views while it never before existed in the time of Jesus and before him in the Old testament. For issues such as this many early believers in Christ were killed among them clergy men for not falling in line with the wave of Trinitarians (Christians) that came to wash them away and form a new religion and new bible. For those and other reasons if you read the Quran with an open mind and a humble heart you can see that it makes lots of sense both logically, intellectually as well as suitable for the human emotion sprirituality. The rule of thumb about the Islamic teachings is when you do not know something you must ask the people of zikr (those that mention and remember GOD)-Ask those who know. Thank you for your question and I hope that Right and complete Guidance will reach and satisfy your heart and forgive me for my errors. :-)

Sorry, should have been a comment.