In struggling with some of the “higher criticism” assessments of scripture, I've had to attempt the same ruthless look at the Bible that I applied to the Book of Mormon when I left Mormonism. The “documentary hypothesis” asserts that Moses did not write the Pentateuch but rather someone(s) patched together different versions of the creation story and other elements of the history depicted there. Evidence of this, such higher critics would say, is the way that God is named in different sections, and other elements that tie such sections to various individual writers.
I'm no Hebrew scholar. But I am a writer. And if I were going to collate an historical document, I'd try to be true to each temporal and geographical element of the narrative. (If I were writing about the history of the US, for instance, I wouldn't describe any 18th century episode with language tying it to the reader's understanding of telecommunications, for instance.) I'd use titles, names, and descriptions that would be “true” to the time period and people. If I intruded as an author into the narrative, there would be a good reason for doing it.
The information in the Bibleical narrative, though, didn't come just from the accounts of others. If the Bible is telling the truth about itself, it doesn't consist only of the collated accounts of others (whether written or memorized.) These great men wrote as the atemporal and omnicient Holy Spirit directed them.
Now, there's an Author I'd love to collaborate with.
