There are no answers in Genesis

[Belacqua]

I just meant that what's most important to me to evaluate as a claim to truth, for the sake of my own beliefs, is only the author's original intent.

I certainly don't mean to criticize, if this is what most interests you about the texts. It's a fascinating question. 

I'm sure you know how difficult it is, since we can't really know the answer. Ancient writers didn't operate under the current academic rules about sticking to one's own genre, and properly attributing sources, what's original, etc. After Plato died lots of people wrote "dialogues of Plato" containing what they thought he would have said if he'd had more time, and signed Plato's name to them. It took centuries to work out which ones are by the man himself, and there is still disagreement. 

One source I read suggested that the Genesis creation stories were written quite late, during the time of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and were intended as founding myths to solidify religious coherence in the face of competing myths from nearby competition. As you know from the OT, Hebrews were continually tempted away to nearby faiths due to more popular festivals, less strict commandments, etc. So it's quite likely that the 6-day creation and Adam and Eve were relatively late and intended as national foundation myths, like the tall tales Americans tell about their Founding Fathers. (I don't think this has been proven; it's one theory among others.) 

So there are a large number of interlocking problems: was it written when they claim it was written? Was it re-edited to get a different meaning later on? 

Did the original author even intend it as a claim to truth, or as something more like a "speech act"; an act which, by speaking something, something is made to change? Such acts may not be evaluable in terms of truth or falsehood. 

Anyway, you could have a good long career working on these issues, and I'm sure people have. It's not irrelevant by any means. 

If you're saying that there are far reaching consequences from the views that have built up around those original texts, some allegorical, some not... basically all the different schisms of Christianity and all their negative affects on the world... then I don't dispute that and in that sense agree with you and Belacqua that that is indeed important, practically if nothing else. 

Yeah, I don't think we're fighting at all. More a question of which part interests us. 

To me, the Book of Job, for example, can be analyzed textually to try to figure out when exactly it was written, and in what context, so we can make educated guesses about what its original authors may have meant. 

But the significance of the Book of Job for history, for the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Western thought in general, doesn't rely on that original intent. Like it or not, the Book of Job now consists of the original text plus all of the influential interpretations which have come since, including those of Blake and Jung. It's impossible for 21st century people to read it as ancient people did. 

Maybe we could compare it to those guys who dress up and do Civil War reenactments on weekends. They can learn a lot about what really happened, and can refine the accuracy of their uniforms, placements on the battlefield, etc. But there is no possible way they can experience what those soldiers experienced. What the modern guys do is a different thing. Likewise, 21st century readers can't experience a text the way the old guys did.

This is not just my crazy idea, either. Mostly I am thinking here of Roland Barthes and what he said about the "death of the author," which (like so many ideas in literary hermeneutics) is taken into the secular from Bible hermeneutics. The idea is just that once the text is "out there," and becomes the property of its readers, it is no longer limited to what the original author had in mind. This is not to say that every interpretation is equally good -- just that the text becomes an open-ended source of dialectic and debate, not an authoritative list of facts.