[quote=“dscottjorgenson, post:40, topic:35399”]
Well, I’m not quite seeing that. Those exilic redactors felt no need to reconcile the numerous chronological tensions between the two creation accounts; and in the flood narrative they interwove the doublets but otherwise left them intact. Were man and woman created together after the animals, or did the animals come in between them? How long was the flood, and how many pairs of animals were to be taken aboard the ark, and what is a “clean animal” anyway in this context long before the law was given? And so on.[/quote]
You’re talking about a separate issue. I am talking about the exilic writers being “concerned with historicity and facts”, and I’ve given a list of examples. You’re talking about the extent to which they were prepared to tolerate literary tensions. These are not the same subject, and tolerance of literary tension is not a reliable indicator of whether or not a writer has any interest in historicity and facts. That is manifestly obvious from pre-exilic and exilic historical records such as Kings and Chronicles, as well as the entire Greek and Roman historical tradition. Look at Aeschylus, Herodotus, Polybius, and Pliny, for example, especially the accounts of Hannibal’s journey over the Alps in both Polybius and Pliny.
As for the tolerance of literary tensions such as contradictions, we have clear evidence that the exilic and post-exilic redactors actually did care about them, which is precisely why we find evidence of harmonization activity in the historical books especially. The very fact that the exilic writers tried to combine two different flood narratives, instead of leaving them separate (as they did with Genesis 1 and 2), is evidence that they were aiming for some kind of harmonization; they preferred one slightly inconsistent narrative with a consistent chronology, to two completely different narratives with potentially different chronologies.
I’m not confident drawing conclusions about what they thought without solid evidence. In fact I believe there’s evidence to the contrary. A typical view of the exilic redaction activity is that it took earlier traditions and combined them, thus creating contradictions which did not exist in the original sources. If they did not exist originally, this indicates that the earlier writers took care to avoid them. This issue has been raised by several scholars, such as Whybray and Wenham.
Taking the two typically understood flood accounts as an example, both of them stand alone without any of the internal tensions of the final redaction. This does not suggest that the earliest writers really didn’t care much about what they were writing and just threw stuff down without a lot of planning, forethought, or concern for consistency.
However none of this actually affects the point I’ve been making from the start; the reason why certain early Jewish and Christian commentators believed that the Genesis flood narrative was intending to describe a local flood, was not because of any leftover non-Hebrew ANE traditions in the text, and was not because of any inconsistencies introduced by the exilic writers. It was because the exilic writers themselves deliberately introduced the idea that the flood did not destroy all humans outside the Ark, by inserting an explicit reference to the survival of the Nephilim, when they had no literary reason to do so.