Is it your claim that Jews in Daniel's day had some teaching from their rabbis and scribes that the six day creation account was not to be understood as literal? Even in Jesus' day, have you found evidence that the religious leaders of Israel taught something other than a literal understanding of the six days of creation? It honestly has always been my understanding that at least up until the days of Jesus, Jews, for the most part, understood the six days of creation to be six actual roughly 24 hour time periods in which God created all that there is in this realm. Do you have evidence that there is some writing outside of the Scriptures that addresses this and teaches otherwise?
I certainly am not (and I don't suspect Speedwell would either) suggesting that the "days" of the Genesis creation narrative should be interpreted as anything other than "literal" days (sun up to sun down, or whatever is the normal constitution of a "day"). The question is not whether these words should be interpreted literally, but whether the narrative itself should be interpreted as an "historical" narrative (in the sense of modern notions of historicity). It is not the features of the narrative that should be necessarily be interpreted literally or figuratively (e.g., I don't think we need to say that "day" is "1000 years", or "1000000 years" or "an age"), but rather the framework in which it is written. That is, did the authors have modern notions of historicity in mind when composing this, and thus perceived it to be an accurate and evidence-based accounting of "what happened, in actuality" ('happened-ness' and 'actuality', of course, being based on the assumptions of modern criteria)? Or, as I would suggest, is this a narrative composed that has theological instruction as its main intention?
If the former is assumption, it would stand in remarkable contrast to the other creation narratives that were extant at the time of the writing of Genesis, narratives from which many features were clearly borrowed. Does this, then, mean that all other ANE creation narratives were also attempts at "historical" narrative? And if so, should we not also consider them to be (at least in part) "inspired" as well, given that they contributed to the structure and content of the Genesis narratives?
Do you believe that ancient people of God were more interested in telling a story than getting right the facts of the story?
I don't think it's an issue of one or the other, as if they understood themselves as "not" getting the facts of the story right. This criteria betrays a very modern notion of historicity, a notion which places value in narrative when it corresponds to modern notions about the verifiability and demonstrability of recorded history. If the ancient writers did not share such stark bifurcations in their understanding of "history" and "story-telling", then such a question really becomes inappropriate to ask, as the assumptions necessary for the relevance of the question requires the adoption of philosophical paradigms for which there is no evidence that they existed at the time of the authorship of Scripture.
Keep in mind that the Scriptures only have about forty different writers, at least that we know of.
That is not accurate. A more accurate way of saying it is that Scripture is *attributed* to about this many writers. If you review the scholarship on the subject of biblical authorship, the actual number of probable authors and contributors is significantly greater than that (not even including the editorial contributions that would certainly have been included).
So, is it at all possible that God was able to put together some forty people that felt differently about their story telling and through these some forty people had His Holy Spirit to impress upon them the great importance of getting the facts right?
No one is suggesting that this isn't possible. The issue is that there is no reason, based on the context in which the authorship of the Scriptures occurred (particularly of the most ancient parts), to assume that this would be a relevant feature. Of course it's possible; but an analysis of the text in the greater context of ANE literature suggests a different conclusion.
Could He or couldn't He put together some forty people who didn't practice the 'story telling' of others in those days?
Again, the question of whether or not God "could have done" something is irrelevant. God could have inspired the authors to write nothing but soup recipes as well.
We are talking about taking the full measure of the narratives in light of the greater context of ANE literature/culture/worldview. While the Scriptures certainly *could* be a completely novel and anomalous occurrence within the broader milieu of ancient life, one would have to question why that assumption should be made. After all, the writing of the Scriptures was not made in a vacuum, and was not made just for the sake of unnamed future generations. No, it was written in the life and times of people who had specific worldviews, assumptions about the nature of reality, ideas about God, etc. If the Scriptures do not, in the very first case, present themselves as relevant within the situation of *those* people, then I would suggest we should be quite skeptical about the result of our interpretations. Unless the people of Israel held to drastically divergent worldviews from the cultures by which they were surrounded, I would suggest that we should suspect that the literature of the people of Israel would look a lot like the religious/theological/cultural literature of the surrounding cultures. And as I've already pointed out now several times, an analysis and comparison of the ancient texts of the Scriptures with similar narratives and theological/religious writings in the broader spectrum of ANE literature suggests that this is, in fact, precisely the case.
