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Indeed, the whole theory of the Israelites existing for centuries without writing is based on a largely discredited 19th century German theory known as the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis.

My point was about the creation narrative. If the world is 6,000 years old, and writing is any less than 6,000 years old there was of necessity a period of oral tradition. The oldest Hebrew writing found was 3,000 years old. So to avoid translation Hebrew writing would need to predate the earliest known writing by 3,000 years for there to have been no period of oral tradition.

I'm not saying that writing didn't exist earlier than the find. It might even get pushed back centuries further, but we are talking the necessity to push it back millenia.

Even then you introduce a translation problem. As the language found on the pot shard was quite different than classic Hebrew.

If writings as massive as the Torah were common 6,000 years ago. Common enough to be distributed to every wandering tribe. And if literacy was common enough to use them we should be finding more evidence of writing. As it is the finds drop of precipitously thousands of years short of the mark.

My point was about the creation narrative. If the world is 6,000 years old, and writing is any less than 6,000 years old there was of necessity a period of oral tradition.

There's an assumption here that in my view needs to be questioned: that oral tradition is necessarily flawed. This is a typically modern Western way of thinking borne of a world with the printing press and computers. However, having lived in the Middle East and having studied ANE culture, it is evident to me that Eastern peoples transmitted "sacred knowledge" very accurately and reliably - orally. Texts were committed to memory with a level of accuracy unknown to us, and there were methods of checking the accuracy. A more modern example would be in Islamic culture in the East, where it is common for the entire Koran to be committed to memory in the Madrassas (Islamic schools).

But I mention that only as another aspect of the issue which many Western scholars ignore. The more important question is one of Biblical inspiration. As Christians, our entire understanding of the Bible is predicated on the belief that it is the product of Divine inspiration.

Now, inspiration is different from interpretation - which I gather is the nexus of your questions. Genesis needs to be properly interpreted according to it's genre. However, when all is said and done, it is incumbent upon Christians to affirm the Diving inspiration of Genesis along with the rest of Scripture.

But back to inspiration: if God inspired the Biblical writers (as I believe He did), he guided them to accurately write down His Truth. So, we do not have to worry about a long period of oral transmission: either God preserved that tradition as known by Moses, or the inspiration was more direct, as in "Thus saith the Lord..." In either case, I have full confidence that the final product accurately expressed God's Truth.

The Jews ... * memorized * Scripture.

That was why it was a big deal to speak on Scriptural issues in a way that contradicted Scripture - there was an ample supply of men who knew Scripture by heart. If one walked in the synagogue and started saying something blasphemous, one could not get away with it for 2 seconds.

The more we discover in our little “modern world”, the more amazing the “oral tradition” becomes, i.e., how accurately the text was transmitted.

We simply live in a society today that does not value memorization - students don’t memorize anything any more, to speak of - so it’s difficult for us to grasp the idea of fathers teaching sons Scripture word-for-word.

There were no modern public schools back then, just fathers, teachers/priests and of course the occasional prophet.

As far as modern science goes, we think, as all prior generations, that people from more than our parents generation ago were hopeless idiots, that we live in “modern” times and all prior peoples were ignorant.

We vastly underestimate the intelligence of men from thousands of years ago.

IMHO, as far as the Bible’s inerrancy and divine inspiration, if one simply looks at the sophistication of the philosophical concepts that are being dealt with in Scripture, and in such a supremely elegant way, and then considers the fact that the entire document was written over many centuries, it’s fairly readily apparent that mankind could not have developed such a document. There are no contradictions between all the abstract ideas presented, i.e., the doctrine, or teaching. A comprehensive moral law is described. It is complete, non-contradictory and unambiguous. Think of the U.S. Constitution. It has glaring logical holes in it, things that are ambigous. Interpretations of it have done 180 degree reversals in only a few decades. Any comparison of the Bible to Greco-Roman philosphers makes their work pale in comparison. While they struggled with questions of morality, the Bible presents a complex and cohesive moral law that is without a flaw. Who were these men who wrote something that codified such a document; how can this be ?

Every thing that we think we discover about science, we label it a theory and it starts to be assumed to be true by scientists and then by the general public. Inevitably, when the truth does come out through scientific discovery, we find that it is consistent with Biblical doctrine. Our theories are just that, theories. They are not facts. Pride is why we cling to our own ideas of truth. What does the businessman say to the scientist ? “I can’t make money on a theory, come back to me when you have something working”. Well, more people should have the good sense to not simply take what a university researcher says for truth. If they have a theory, I say fine, prove it. And don’t prove it by assuming it to be true, or prove it by relying on other theories that are not proven, but assumed to be true.

Logic is a funny beast that most people have a difficult time with. I took a class in logic at Rutgers years ago. Since I was a decent programmer, I cruised through it easily; everyone else was hopelessly confused by it, and many actually got argumentative, not being able to “deal with” a binary system of logic. I also had a class in probability. Same thing. People could not get past the idea of “separate trials with replacement”. That is why people gamble, they do not understand probability. That is also why they have no idea if something like “evolution” is plausible or implausible. Also, they don’t fact check anything they are told about such theories. If they read what is not presented to them in high school textbooks, they’d see just how perplexed those who are publishing the “theories” are - and the theorists admit this readily in the documents they publish. All the parts where they basically admit they have no clue are simply sanitized by the time the text gets to high school textbooks or the news media - the parts where the theorists say “it just must be ___ because this had to have happened ___ years ago”.

In economics, one makes assumptions - in order to solve equations. The economist (if they actually know their field) must be extremely careful in their assumptions to avoid the ecnomic models they develop being sheer fantasy. In science, on the other hand, there is precious little that can be assumed. In no way would I presume to know the “age” of a rock. I was not there when it was created, I have no video of the event, nor do I have 2 witnesses. I’ve made assumptions when troubleshooting computer programs and have been very surprised by the truth - which I came to only after dropping my assumptions.

Job 26:7

“He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”

At even the latest estimates of it’s authorship, this would have been written hundreds of years before Christ. This sentence proves an understanding of the fact that the earth is in space. Did men of the day know this ? Interesting...