Everyone's wrong because of your buddies in Babylon, aren't they?
Care to address the point I made with the U.S. Constitution vs the Martian's counterfeit version?
Your hypothetical would be a good comparison if the OT books were already established before the captivity. I provided links from Jewish scholars concerning Babylon but your pride wont allow you to ever admit you are wrong about anything.
The educated, elite priest class had scrolls that they taught from. A generation later the group that returned to Jerusalem and began rebuilding the temple were teaching from their expanded accounts.
This is how the new records became the accepted record of the Jews:
"The
Babylonians, because of immediate contact with the remnants of the civilization of the Adamites, enlarged and embellished the story of man's creation; they taught that he had descended directly from the gods. They held to an aristocratic origin for the race which was incompatible with even the doctrine of creation out of clay.
The
Old Testament account of creation dates from long after the time of Moses; he never taught the
Hebrews such a distorted story. But he did present a simple and condensed narrative of creation to the
Israelite, hoping thereby to augment his appeal to worship the Creator, the Universal Father, whom he called the Lord God of
Israel.
In his early teachings, Moses very wisely did not attempt to go back of Adam's time, and since Moses was the supreme teacher of the Hebrews, the stories of Adam became intimately associated with those of creation. That the earlier traditions recognized pre-Adamic civilization is clearly shown by the fact that later editors, intending to eradicate all reference to human affairs before Adam's time, neglected to remove the telltale reference to Cain's emigration to the
"land of Nod," where he took himself a wife.
The Hebrews had no written language in general usage for a long time after they reached
Palestine. They learned the use of an alphabet from the neighboring
Philistines, who were political refugees from the higher civilization of
Crete. The Hebrews did little writing until about 900 B.C., and having no written language until such a late date, they had several different stories of creation in circulation, but after the
Babylonian captivity they inclined more toward accepting a modified Mesopotamian version.
Jewish tradition became crystallized about Moses, and because he endeavored to trace the lineage of Abraham back to Adam, the
Jews assumed that Adam was the first of all mankind.
Yahweh was the creator, and since Adam was supposed to be the first man, he must have made the world just prior to making Adam. And then the tradition of Adam's six days got woven into the story, with the result that almost a thousand years after Moses' sojourn on earth the tradition of creation in six days was written out and subsequently credited to him.
When the Jewish priests returned to
Jerusalem, they had already completed the writing of their narrative of the beginning of things.
Soon they made claims that this recital was a recently discovered story of creation written by Moses. But the contemporary Hebrews of around 500 B.C. did not consider these writings to be divine
revelations; they looked upon them much as later peoples regard mythological narratives.
This spurious document, reputed to be the teachings of Moses, was brought to the attention of Ptolemy, the Greek king of
Egypt, who had it translated into Greek by a commission of seventy scholars for his new library at Alexandria. And so this account found its place among those writings which subsequently became a part of the later collections of the
"sacred scriptures" of the
Hebrew and Christian
religions. And through identification with these theological systems, such concepts for a long time profoundly influenced the philosophy of many
Occidental peoples.
The Christian teachers perpetuated the belief in the fiat creation of the human race, and all this led directly to the formation of the hypothesis of a onetime golden age of utopian bliss and the theory of the fall of man or superman which accounted for the nonutopian condition of society. These outlooks on life and man's place in the universe were at best discouraging since they were predicated upon a belief in retrogression rather than progression, as well as implying a vengeful Deity, who had vented wrath upon the human race in retribution for the errors of certain onetime planetary administrators." UB 1955
