In the ongoing discussion about whether those who wrote the Bible were
goatherders and primitive, a few points occur to me.
It is not surprising that those who were thinkers of any kind at
an early time were engaged in the economic activities of the day.
Imagine if someone in two thousand years says of our best narratives,
"Well, if you want to believe the stories written by a bunch of
automotive makers". Goatherding is actually a complex activity (I once
had one of the buggers, and they make sheep look like robots). To do it
well takes skill and knowledge. Granted, not knowledge of astrophysics,
biology and geography, but then neither does car manufacture.
To claim that the myths of the past were intended to be read as
literal history presumes that they had a notion of literal history.
Arguably (at least it was argued to me when I did historiography in
university) such a notion wasn't invented until Herodotus and
Thucydides wrote their investigations with an attempt to get it right
rather than to get it politically or religiously acceptable. Nobody
even knew about history until then. The annalists and chroniclers of
the ancient and more recent periods were largely engaged in presenting
political and religious myths for the purposes of propaganda than
presenting objective histories. We have to reconstruct the past
histories rather than simply read them. Even as late as the mid-20th
century, histories were being written to do this, as a result of which
each generation has to critically examine the histories of the past as
myths, to correct any interpretations that are local to the period and
culture. Even the idea that one might give correct details is a late
addition.
To understand a narrative, one has to treat it with respect. Genesis
and the patriarchal histories must be read as if you were one of the
intended audience if you are to grasp it. Once that is done, of course
you "re-enter" your modern persona, but to interpret the past in terms
of today is a specific historical sin called "Whiggism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
and it does nothing worthwhile other than make you feel all warm and
cozy about yourself. If that is what you want from history and other
cultures, fine, but do not expect the honest scholar to find that all
that attractive.
The Bible was not written as history (with the possible exception of
Luke-Acts, as the author of that work seems to have read his
Thucydides) and to critique it for not being what it was never intended
to be, or to be read as, is simply dishonest. I say that of the
literalists as well as the scienticists of our disputants. You can't
understand those texts by sitting in a 21st century western mindset;
although of course you want, whether you are a believer or not, to
interpret the results in your own terms.
This is called "exegesis"; and it is a canon of historical
interpretation that before you can impose an interpretation on a text,
you must understand it in its own terms. Genesis is not a scientific
text, and sensible people know this because even the very notion of
"science" was absent when it was written. Not until the late classical
period do people start to interpret the Old Testament in scientific
terms, which is when the problems begin.
Now how a modern "Abrahamic" theist reconciles their scriptures with
the knowledge we have from science is their own problem and not mine,
but at the very least a sensible theist must realise this is not a
science text, a history text, nor even, I would suggest, a particularly
deep psychology text. It is, however, and was always intended to be, a
set of myths around which a tradition clusters. Some of it may also be true.
