I agree with you that the hermeneutical issues are very important but it also strikes me that the lack of primary data may be adding its bit to the confusion. By getting into the text itself, we may find that some of the supposed options are not convincing or we may find that there is a need for  other options to be proposed…

Probably, our text was ‘literal’ as opposed to being designed to be mythological/typological/allegorical to the original author(s), but the fact is that now we almost have to treat it as myth or at least as ‘story’, perhaps  based on historically true happenings, but in a literary category other than ‘chronicle’.

Apart from early redactions there is also the question of later reconstruction, during the time of rabbinic ascendancy or after the exile, but perhaps even during the division of the kingdom, when political forces may have had a vested interest in promoting one reading over another…

A related fascinating exercise will be to try to delineate what we mean by history and how history does and does not coincide with the early chapters of Genesis.

In any case the text should be our starting point, the ‘raw data’ as it were, in the light of which the various hypotheses will finally need to be judged.

Live to serve : Serve to live