I apologize that I have not diligently read through each and every post here. But I've checked on the progress of the various ideas. I don't think anyone has brought up the following points.
1. Genesis is a compendium of material from numerous more ancient oral traditions that were collected as another larger oral tradition and then centuries later put down in writing close to the Greek classical period of history or possibly as late as the Roman - don't recall exactly.
2. all the different original oral traditions were carried forward by different more ancient tribal societies which would merge together at various times with other tribes and merge their oral traditions - fixing the disconnects between their stories with their own surmises at the time to connect them.
3. for the most ancient materials we may presume a whole lot of merging and re-merging over long millenia of time and loss of any coherence to the original meaning and purpose of the story which has taken on new meanings and new purposes with each new merging with new tribal associations.
4. what we have now is just the state of the materials as they were when they were finally written down - the explanation about the one language and the multiple languages is considered by scholars to be the insertion of one of the later or final redactors of the material to make sense of a story fragment that had lost all it's connecting meanings.
5.so basically a very long version of what in the last century we called the "game of telephone" which probably isn't used any more but hey, I'm old
1. Genesis is a compendium of material from numerous more ancient oral traditions that were collected as another larger oral tradition and then centuries later put down in writing close to the Greek classical period of history or possibly as late as the Roman - don't recall exactly.
2. all the different original oral traditions were carried forward by different more ancient tribal societies which would merge together at various times with other tribes and merge their oral traditions - fixing the disconnects between their stories with their own surmises at the time to connect them.
3. for the most ancient materials we may presume a whole lot of merging and re-merging over long millenia of time and loss of any coherence to the original meaning and purpose of the story which has taken on new meanings and new purposes with each new merging with new tribal associations.
4. what we have now is just the state of the materials as they were when they were finally written down - the explanation about the one language and the multiple languages is considered by scholars to be the insertion of one of the later or final redactors of the material to make sense of a story fragment that had lost all it's connecting meanings.
5.so basically a very long version of what in the last century we called the "game of telephone" which probably isn't used any more but hey, I'm old
having passed through many states of believing I was right I have come to the place of finding "rightness" rather irrelevant to the project of becoming human
