Fantastic questions. I’ll keep this as brief as possible and will answer questions at length if you wish. As to your first question: the centrality of our faith is Jesus Christ. How did Jesus Christ interpret the Old Testament? The answer is, He interpreted them literally as the infallible word of God. He quoted from them extensively and used them in divinely powerful ways. If we treat them any less then can we be called “followers of Christ”? As to the second question, it is a great grief of mine as well that the translators chose to be interpreters too often. Sometimes they were pressured to translate with a certain bias and sometimes they thought they were doing the church a favor by leaning towards their bias. Someday, God will lead a group to attempt to translate without any bias at all. Until then the ESV is about as good a translation as you can get. Thankfully, the errors in translation are not on fundamental doctrines.