(February 18, 2019 at 6:41 pm)fredd bear Wrote: but illiterate goat herders tend not to leave behind written records.
Indeed.
I don't think I said or implied that. My claim was that the oral tradition was composed by illiterates, which is the reason for the creation of oral mythology. Oral traditions can be passed down for millennia before being written down.
The simplest example I can think of is of one culture I've actually studied formally; Australian aborigines have the oldest culture on earth, at ca 50,000-years. This is a rich complex culture, with an ancient and equally rich oral mythology. (aborigines had no written language)
The 'bronze age' comment is not something I really want to argue. It's pedantic and not central to my position, which is that at the time of concoction/cobbling together the future Israelites were an illiterate people. I may be wrong with this notion, and will accept evidence to the contrary.
That's interesting about the Australian aborigines. I don't know anything about them. Of course I've read the standard stuff about oral traditions leading up to Homer, so I know that the stories can be floating around a long time before they're recorded.
What I've read in the past is that literate Hebrews wrote or edited together the stories for ideological and political reasons. The dates given by the book you linked us to are in agreement with what I'd heard before.
To what extent the editors relied on ancient oral tradition is more difficult to piece together, of course. Nothing is ever invented from zero, but I also wouldn't want to assume that these editors took over old stories unquestioned. They were obviously literate people who were influential at the time.
As much as possible, I think it's best to stick with the things that serious scholars have reason to conclude. Flood narratives from nearby cultures, for example, were obvious sources. But making assumptions about things overall is something I want to be careful about.
