re: #564 Walter L. Newton

And you are well aware that textual critics have shown over and over that there are many problems with the text, historically, anthropologically, archeologically and so on.

Yes, the text certainly CAN be treated like conventional literary output, and it has. Textual criticism is a science, not just some slipshod meanderings.

Who says you can’t apply these tools to these texts? But I do argue that one misses the point in doing so.

Look, there’s evidence to suggest the texts were edited on a number of occasions - and yet, errors in the re-telling of tales, goof-ups in geneologies, deviations from accepted spellings and known chronologies - all appear.

The editors left these in, on the very sound principle that these things, as they do not obviously contradict Mosaic monotheism, might in fact be of some importance. They understood that the thing at which they looked was perhaps greater than they could understand, and so they were very careful not to cut out anything that wasn’t obviously blasphemous or insane.